In another part of his column today, Brooks wrote:

President Obama took this decision, I’m told, fully aware that there was no political upside while there were enormous political risks. He took it fully aware that we don’t know much about Libya. He took it fully aware that if he took this action he would be partially on the hook for Libya’s future. But he took it as an American must — motivated by this country’s historical role as a champion of freedom and humanity — and with the awareness that we simply could not stand by with Russia and China in opposition.

Greg Scoblete mocks this:

In other words, the president made a momentous strategic decision on matters of war and peace that his own spin doctors admit he knew nothing about but which he understood could potentially hamstring the U.S. for years to come…. just to be different than China and Russia.

It’s actually worse than that. It is how an American must act, except for all those times when we don’t and mustn’t act that way. It is how an American must act, as if Americans have no choice in the matter.

Just replace Russia and China with the names of the rising democratic powers that also abstained on the resolution, and see how silly Brooks’ last sentence becomes. Can anyone imagine saying, “we simply could not stand by with Brazil and India in opposition”? The two largest non-American states in NATO opposed military action in Libya, but Brooks didn’t write, “We simply could not stand by with Turkey and Germany in opposition.” Why not? Why couldn’t the United States just once recognize that its best interests and the views of most governments in the world are actually on the same side?

It’s not as if the allied governments actively involved in the Libyan war are really fighting on behalf of “freedom and humanity.” The freedom and humanity of Libyans or Tunisians were hardly priorities in Paris and London (or Washington) before January. Until about ten weeks ago, Sarkozy was quite content with things as they were in North Africa, and until six weeks ago Saif al-Gaddafi was the “reforming” toast of the British political and business classes. I don’t hold that against them. At the time, those policies made sense for the respective governments and their definitions of national interests, but what I do find preposterous is the claim that they have suddenly discovered the importance of using force to vindicate “freedom and humanity” in Libya.

Qatar and the UAE have managed to spare some jets for supporting the no-fly zone, presumably because they were not needed to suppress Bahraini protesters. They and the Saudis have more than enough forces on the ground to do that. Of course, if they can get the U.S. and other governments to do the heavy lifting to attack a ruler they hate, and we are stupid enough to take the bait, they are simply advancing their goals at minimal cost. Even better, they can position themselves to be on the side of “the people” while doing all that they can to keep their own people in line.

Before rising democracies became confident in asserting their own foreign policy views, it was a bit easier for pro-war advocates to claim to be on the side of “freedom and humanity.” This was based on the rather childish idea that if Russia and China are against something, it almost has to support “freedom and humanity,” but at least there was a certain logic to it. Now that several of the largest democracies in the world are in the same camp with Russia and China, it becomes even harder to take seriously that starting wars against governments that have done nothing to us has much to do with “freedom and humanity.” The rise of influential democracies in other parts of the world that are not automatically inclined to interventionist policies undermines the idea that Americans have some imperative to act based on our political values. Their rise also means that the U.S. and our handful of allies in Libya will find the U.N. path to future interventions blocked. As Gideon Rachman wrote earlier this week, Libya is likely not the beginning of a new era of humanitarian interventionism (thank goodness), but rather its last gasp:

But the reality is that the Libyan war is more likely to mark a last hurrah for liberal interventionism than a new dawn. For the brutal truth is that the western powers that are the keenest promoters of the idea will not have the economic strength or the public backing to sustain many more overseas interventions. And the rising economic powers – China, India, Brazil and others – are deeply sceptical about the whole concept.

Indeed, the opportunistic and over-eager way in which the intervening governments used the “responsibility to protect” doctrine to justify jumping into Libya’s civil war, which is not what R2P was created to address, will almost certainly destroy the nominal international consensus in support of this doctrine and give it the appearance of yet another pretext for Western wars against governments they wish to overthrow.