3人道主義幹預的消亡
文章標題： 人道主義幹預的消亡
一、科索沃行動：人道主義幹預的起點與爭議
- 北約1999年對科索沃的轟炸行動，結束塞爾維亞的種族清洗，但未經聯合國安理會授權。
- 柯林頓政府視其為先例，宣稱「若有能力阻止大規模屠殺，就必須行動」。
- 西方國家視為道德勝利，但全球南方（印度、非結盟運動、非洲統一組織、南非等）強烈譴責，認為違反聯合國憲章、主權原則，是單邊侵略。
- 背景對比：盧安達種族屠殺（1994年，80萬人死亡）時西方因索馬利亞事件而袖手旁觀，「永不再犯」口號落空。
二、聯合國的困境與主權原則
- 聯合國成立目的是防止大國間戰爭，而非干預國內人權問題。
- 聯合國憲章強力保護國家主權，僅允許自衛或安理會授權使用武力。
- 人道主義干預面臨法理障礙（俄、中等常任理事國可否決）。
三、保護的責任（Responsibility to Protect, R2P）的誕生
- 為調和西方與全球南方的分歧而提出。
- 2001年國際委員會提出R2P概念：國家有保護本國人民免於大規模暴行的責任。
- 2005年聯合國世界峰會一致通過R2P，限制適用於四種暴行（種族滅絕、戰爭罪、種族清洗、反人類罪）。
- 原則：最後手段、比例原則、個案處理、與區域組織協調。
- 這是對聯合國憲章的重大修訂，被視為國際法的重要進展。
四、R2P的早期應用與希望
- 2004年蘇丹達爾富爾、2008年肯亞選舉暴力等案例中被引用。
- 初期看來R2P逐漸融入國際規範。
五、利比亞：R2P的最高峰與轉折點（2011年）
- 阿拉伯之春期間，卡扎菲鎮壓示威，引發安理會決議（含武器禁運、移交國際刑事法院）。
- 北約以R2P為名進行軍事干預，最初目標是保護平民。
- 但行動迅速超越授權，轉為支持反對派推翻卡扎菲政權，最終導致利比亞陷入長期混亂與內戰。
- 此案例被視為西方「濫用」R2P的證明，嚴重損害其公信力。
六、R2P的衰落：敘利亞與後續影響
- 敘利亞內戰中，俄羅斯與中國否決干預提案，西方無法以R2P名義行動。
- 利比亞先例讓俄、中更加警惕，拒絕任何可能導致政權更迭的人道干預。
- 人道主義幹預從高峰走向消亡，國際社會對主權干預更加謹慎。
七、結論：人道主義幹預的困境與現實
- R2P雖在理念上取得突破，但實踐中因大國政治、干預後果難控而失敗。
- 西方單邊或選擇性干預，破壞了國際規範的信任。
- 在大國競爭加劇的時代，人道主義幹預難以重振，聯合國集體行動機制再次陷入僵局。
整體核心論點：
Chapter Three
The Demise of Humanitarian Intervention
NATO’s Kosovo operation was the final blow to the Clinton administration’s collapsing relations with Boris Yeltsin, but there was a silver lining: It put the subject of humanitarian intervention squarely on the international agenda. Five years earlier, in the most shocking display of organized barbarism at least since Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution and the Khmer Rouge genocide, Rwanda’s Hutu-led government had egged on soldiers and vigilantes to massacre over eight hundred thousand people, mostly members of the Tutsi minority. Harrowing press reports complete with graphic images of the ongoing slaughter prompted widespread demands for intervention. But the Clinton administration, still smarting from the images of dead American soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia, six months earlier, balked. Procrastinating administration officials engaged in disingenuous hair-splitting over whether genocide was in fact underway, a failure for which Clinton would eventually apologize—but neither the US nor any other country intervened. The Guardian published widely reprinted images of UN peacekeepers standing by while armed Hutu militias charged by in search of victims, underscoring the world’s abdication. “Never again!”—the endlessly repeated admonition from Buchenwald inmates liberated in 1945—rang hollow.1
The United Nations was created to prevent war between the major powers, but it was poorly suited to prevent governments from committing genocide or other major human rights abuses within their own borders. The UN grew from its original fifty-one members in 1945 to eventually include all the world’s countries (except for the Vatican and Palestine, which have observer status), but it remains a treaty-based organization of sovereign states. Indeed, its charter supplies a more robust defense of the sanctity of nation-states than had previously existed in international law, prohibiting the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or independence of any member. The only exceptions are for self-defense and with Security Council authorization. And the UN Charter is hard to change, requiring approval from two-thirds of its member states, including all permanent Security Council members. The UN did adopt the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide in 1948, but the convention does not empower the UN to act as an organization. Instead, it imposes duties on member states to adopt relevant legislation and punish perpetrators. Governments that try to hold perpetrators accountable often confront formidable jurisdictional obstacles. The only way the UN as an organization can interfere in a country is with Security Council authorization—a high hurdle because any member can veto, as Russia certainly and China probably would have done had Clinton pursued that route in Kosovo in 1999.2
Yet Clinton left no doubt that he meant NATO’s action in Kosovo to be precedent setting. “Never forget,” he declared in a speech to the American forces who had conducted the operation, “if we can do this here, and if we can then say to the people of the world, whether you live in Africa, or Central Europe, or any other place, if somebody comes after innocent civilians and tries to kill them en masse because of their race, their ethnic background, or their religion, and it’s within our power to stop it, we will stop it.” Clinton could claim at least some moral high ground because, whatever the legal difficulties, NATO’s seventy-six-day, high-altitude bombing campaign worked. True, five hundred civilians were killed by the bombing, but the Serb armies and paramilitaries had withdrawn, ending the bloodshed and ethnic cleansing. Considering the harsh criticism Clinton had endured for his inaction in Rwanda, it is not surprising that he saw the Kosovo outcome as warranting a victory lap.3
Western enthusiasm for NATO’s Kosovo action was not matched in the Global South. India’s government declared it to be “a flagrant violation of all international norms, against the provisions of the United Nations Charter, and seen as direct and unprovoked aggression.” The Non-Aligned Movement and Organisation of African Unity both condemned it in terms echoed by South Africa’s government when it declared that “unilateral intervention, no matter how noble the pretext, is not acceptable.” The recently retired president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela, went further, arguing that it invited chaos into international relations and noting pointedly that the US “did not do this when the secretary-general of the UN was white.”4
The Responsibility to Protect
Faced with the disjunction between the widespread celebration of the Kosovo intervention in much of the West and the widespread condemnation of it across much of the Global South, Western leaders sought to legitimate it. As UN Secretary General Kofi Annan put it in his 2000 Millennium Report, “If humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica, to gross and systematic violation of human rights that offend every precept of our common humanity?” Annan went further in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech the following year, insisting that “the sovereignty of States must no longer be used as a shield for gross violations of human rights.” The question was: How can an organization that is constitutionally bound to respect national sovereignty also insist that it should be violated in the name of humanitarian intervention?5
An early attempt to square this circle came from an ad hoc commission appointed by Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson in 1999. The commission, co-chaired by South African judge Richard Goldstone and Swedish politician Carl Tham, concluded that NATO’s military intervention was “illegal but legitimate.” Fleshing out this seeming oxymoron, they said that although the intervention was illegal because it lacked UN Security Council authorization, it was justified because “all diplomatic avenues had been exhausted and the intervention had the effect of liberating the majority population of Kosovo from a long period of oppression under Serbian rule.”6 This was not strictly true because Security Council authorization had not been sought, but in any case it amounted to a question-begging restatement of the problem. If unilateral intervention was warranted on behalf of the Kosovar Albanians, what of the Kurds in Turkey, Iraq, and Iran, the Rohingya in Myanmar, the Uighurs in China, or the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza? The list goes on. And who is entitled to intervene when there is no adjudicator? Anyone who decides to do so and has enough military heft to succeed? In 2008, Russia went into Georgia on behalf, they said, of the South Ossetians. Ditto when Iran began backing the Houthi in Yemen against the regime in Sanaa. That list goes on too.
If there was a principle behind the commission’s “illegal but legitimate” slogan, it was something like: Sometimes it is better to ask for forgiveness than permission. But that was question begging too, because the Russians would have been just as likely to veto a request for absolution as they would have been to veto a request for permission—which is presumably why no such resolution was ever sought. More dangerously, going down this path has the potential to undermine the UN’s raison d’être: to maintain international peace and security. That risk became evident in 2002 when the African Union responded to the commission’s Kosovo report by asserting its right “to intervene in a Member State pursuant to a decision by the Assembly, in grave circumstances, namely war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.” Tellingly, the AU made no mention of the Security Council, implicitly challenging the UN Charter, which reserves to the council a monopoly on the right to authorize the use of force in nondefensive situations. If NATO can flout this monopoly, the AU was in effect saying, so can the AU. But in that case, so could others. If the right to intervene is triggered when the intervening country, alliance, or organization deems it warranted, there is nothing left of the Security Council’s unique role. Pursuing this approach courts the possibility of prolonging conflicts, especially in failed states and civil wars where different factions are backed by different outside players—as with Iran and Saudi Arabia in Yemen since 2014 and Turkey and Russia in Libya since 2020. The way to head off this parade of horribles was to find a way to institutionalize a mechanism to authorize humanitarian intervention.7
An early, and ultimately influential, attempt to do that came from another ad hoc commission, this one created at the behest of the Canadian government in September 2000. The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, co-chaired by Australian politician Gareth Evans and Algerian diplomat Mohamed Sahnoun, saw itself as responding to Kofi Annan’s challenge to come up with criteria for humanitarian intervention that could be authorized and monitored by the Security Council. Though the commission was not a formal creation of the UN, seven of its twelve members had significant UN connections, and Sahnoun was a special advisor to Secretary General Annan. The commission’s goal was to come up with principles that the UN would adopt and that would prompt the UN to create a mechanism to enforce them.
A year later, following an intensive series of roundtables held in major cities across the globe, the commission issued a report entitled The Responsibility to Protect, quickly immortalized as R2P. It imposed a responsibility on all governments to protect populations in their countries. The commission reasoned that its recommendations had the best chance of adoption if they were limited to the most egregious abuses: “Large scale loss of life, actual or apprehended, with genocidal intent or not,” and “large scale ‘ethnic cleansing,’ actual or apprehended, whether carried out by killing, forced expulsion, acts of terror or rape.” Military intervention to stop these abuses would be warranted regardless of whether they resulted from deliberate state action, neglect, inability to act, or in failed states. Intervention was warranted only as a last resort, however, and the force deployed should not exceed what was needed to secure the “defined human protection objective.”8
The report had its desired effect. At its 2005 World Summit, the UN General Assembly unanimously adopted the R2P framework, restricting it to four types of mass atrocity: genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. The World Summit Outcome document declared that every government has a responsibility to protect its populations from those crimes. If a government fails to do so and other efforts at peaceful resolution fail, then the Security Council may authorize military intervention. The commitment, affirmed by the Security Council the following year, was hedged in by requirements that decisions to intervene be made on a case-by-case basis, that military action be a last resort, that the force deployed be proportionate, and that intervention be coordinated with relevant regional organizations.9
In view of R2P’s subsequent fate, it is worth pausing to underscore what a remarkable development this was. It amounted to a fundamental revision of the UN Charter, unanimously adopted at a summit meeting attended by more than 170 heads of government. By adopting the Summit Outcome document, they were accepting that the General Assembly had taken on a role akin to a quasi-international legislature. Their decision imposed an enforceable responsibility on all governments to protect all people in their countries (not just citizens) from mass atrocities, and it created new powers for the Security Council to authorize military intervention if governments failed to live up to that responsibility. This represented a substantial evolution in the UN, transforming it into an organization that went well beyond the treaty that had created it—one that could impose new responsibilities on governments whether or not they recognized them. If it could be sensibly implemented, R2P had the potential to remake international law as it affected humanitarian intervention—giving it both legitimacy and teeth. This opportunity had not occurred before, and it would be unlikely to occur again if those charged with implementing it made a mess of it.
Initial developments were promising. In 2004, even before the Summit Outcome document was adopted, the Security Council referred to R2P when threatening Sudan with sanctions if it failed to disarm the Janjaweed militia in Darfur and hold perpetrators of major human rights violations there to account. In 2008, France cited R2P when calling for intervention in Kenya in the wake of major postelection violence that killed over a thousand people and displaced over six hundred thousand. A mediating team led by Kofi Annan resolved the conflict, but it was plausible that the prospect of intervention had helped, and the occasion became celebrated as the first case of R2P in action. In 2009, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon published a report spelling out strategies to prevent R2P violations and detailing a framework for UN intervention when that failed. He also floated the possibility of intervening in Cameroon when troops loyal to coup leader Dadis Camara began attacking opponents, a possibility that was short-circuited when Camara fled the country.10 These early intimations of the UN’s willingness to deploy R2P suggested that it had begun working its way into the fabric of international law, but it did not face a real test until 2011 in Libya.
R2P in Libya
In December 2010, a fruit vendor in Tunisia’s regional capital, Sidi Bouzid, set himself on fire following a conflict with local authorities, sparking what would soon become known as the Arab Spring. Demonstrations erupted across the country, forcing Tunisia’s longtime dictator, Ben Ali, to flee to Saudi Arabia and precipitating the regime’s collapse. Protests spread like wildfire across the Middle East, from Algeria to Yemen, Jordan, Egypt, and Morocco. King Abdullah II of Jordan was forced to dismiss his government and initiate constitutional reforms. Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika had to rescind his emergency powers. The Egyptian regime, widely regarded as one of the most stable in the region, began collapsing in February 2011 when President Hosni Mubarak resigned following weeks of mass protests centered in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. In the next few weeks, protests spread to Iraq, Bahrain, Oman, and Syria. The one part of the world that had been stubbornly immune to the waves of democratic reform that had swept away so many authoritarian systems since the 1980s finally seemed to be succumbing. Triumphalist expectations ran rife among Western commentators, summed up in Thomas Friedman’s breathless declaration in The New York Times: “We’re just at the start of something huge.”11
Libya became embroiled in the turmoil early. In mid-February, protests broke out in Benghazi, quickly spreading to other major cities in a “day of revolt” that protestors hoped would replicate the outcomes in Tunisia and Egypt and enable them to topple the corrupt autocrat Muammar Gaddafi, who had been in power since the 1970s. But rather than accommodate the opposition or negotiate with its leaders, Gaddafi cracked down. His forces fired live ammunition at crowds, killing more than a dozen protestors. He even began releasing convicts from prison and paying them to attack demonstrators. Gaddafi’s use of lethal force provoked a unanimous Security Council resolution imposing sanctions, including an arms embargo, and referring Gaddafi to the International Criminal Court.12
In some ways, Gaddafi’s response was surprising. Since the early 2000s, he had been evolving into a less repressive autocrat and had taken significant steps to end his global pariah status. As early as 1996, the US State Department had noted a sharp reduction in Libyan sponsorship of terrorism. Three years later, Gaddafi agreed to extradite the Pan Am flight 103 hijackers for trial in The Hague and to compensate victims of that and other terrorist attacks in which Libya was implicated. He was one of the first Arab leaders to condemn the 9/11 attacks, lambasting the Taliban as “Godless promoters of political Islam.” In 2002, he signed conventions to suppress financing for terrorism by marking plastic explosives for detection. The following year, he agreed to dismantle his nuclear weapons program. This led to the lifting of sanctions, after which he moved quickly to normalize relations with the Western countries. He increased oil exports to Europe and began consorting with French President Nicholas Sarkozy, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, among others. He bought a share in Juventus, Italy’s most successful football team, and sent his son to the London School of Economics. Gaddafi also became distinctly less repressive at home. All the major human rights abuses described in Amnesty International’s 2010 report on Libya had taken place before the turn of the century. By that year, Gaddafi had morphed into a run-of-the-mill autocrat—not notably worse than others in the Middle East—who had greatly improved his relations with the West.13
Gaddafi’s decision to fight the opposition in 2011 set Libya on a different course from the other Arab Spring countries. It wasn’t so much that its prospects for democracy were dimmer. That mirage soon vanished in almost all of them, so that by April 2013, even Thomas Friedman was conceding that the term “Arab Spring” should be abandoned. Certainly, Libya, a classic oil-curse country with no democratic history or traditions, had never been a good prospect. That was obvious from the start, because the leaders of the so-called democratic opposition had long been senior figures in the Gaddafi regime, and none of them had ever displayed an interest in democracy. They included his former justice minister Abdul Jalil, his former ambassador to India Ali Aziz, and one of his top economic advisors, Mahmoud Jibril. Among the leaders of the “rebel” military council were Omar El-Hariri, an architect of the coup that brought Gaddafi to power in 1969, who had been imprisoned for participating in a failed coup to overthrow him six years later, and former Interior Ministry head General Abdul Fattah Younis. Both had long histories of repressing democratic movements. The February demonstrations gave them a pretext to try to seize power. When Gaddafi fought back, the country descended into civil war.14
Initially, the rebels made rapid gains. They seized the entire coastline from the oil-exporting port at Ras Lanuf to the Egyptian border. Then they took control of Misurata on the central coast, Zawiya and Zuwara just west of Tripoli, and major towns in the mountains to the southwest. By early March, they controlled at least half of Libya’s populated areas and six of the nine largest cities. Many observers believed that Gaddafi’s regime was collapsing. On March 5, the rebel forces in Benghazi, by then styling themselves Libya’s National Transitional Council (NTC), declared themselves to be the country’s sole representatives. Five days later, the French government recognized the NTC as the “legitimate representative” of the Libyan people. Italy would follow in April, the UK in May, and the US in June.15
But the epitaphs on the Gaddafi regime turned out to be premature. The early rebel successes had depended mainly on surprise, and the insurgency soon faltered in the face of a major counteroffensive by Gaddafi’s forces. It took less than two weeks for him to regain control of almost all populated areas west of the rebel stronghold in Benghazi. When the rebels were on the verge of total defeat there, they began trumpeting claims—later revealed as somewhere between wildly exaggerated and flat-out false—of the actual and imminent slaughter of unarmed civilians in Benghazi by Gaddafi’s forces. Western governments affirmed these claims, as did the media, almost without exception. This triggered calls across the region to impose no-fly zones against the Libyan air force and the adoption of SC 1973 by the Security Council, authorizing foreign intervention “to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack.”16
Political scientist Alan Kuperman points out that the justification for intervention in Libya was based on reports that exaggerated the death toll by a factor of ten. Claims that Gaddafi was targeting civilians came from less than credible sources: principally an opposition that was hoping to get external support in a civil war that it was losing. In fact, there was no indiscriminate targeting of civilians, and—also contrary to contemporaneous claims by rebel groups—Gaddafi’s forces did not engage in reprisals in cities as they retook them. Even in Misrata, a city of 400,000 where the fighting was most intense, a total of 257 were killed and 949 wounded on all sides of the conflict, of whom 22 were women and 8 were children. The story in Tripoli was comparable. Of the 200 corpses seen in the city’s morgue by Human Rights Watch, all were adults and only two were women—hardly evidence of indiscriminate civilian slaughter. Some of the exaggerated press accounts of killing during the uprising can be traced to a French physician in Benghazi who extrapolated from a tiny sample in one hospital to claim that more than 2,000 deaths had occurred there by February 21, when in reality Human Rights Watch could identify only 233 deaths in the entire country by that date. But for the most part, the deceptive claims and numbers were taken largely on trust from rebel sources when there were good reasons to be skeptical of them.17
The West’s rush to judgment is best understood in light of what happened subsequently. SC 1973, adopted on March 17, was the first time the Security Council had invoked R2P to authorize external intervention in a country, so it was a major precedent in the making. The resolution restricted intervening forces to enforcing no-fly zones and doing what was needed to protect endangered civilians. In conformity with the proportionality requirements of the 2005 Summit Outcome document, it prohibited the introduction of foreign ground troops. It created an exception to the arms embargo that had been imposed three weeks earlier to limit Gaddafi’s ability to resupply his forces, but only for the purpose of protecting civilians. It said nothing about regime change, or even about taking sides in the civil war. Instead, it demanded a ceasefire. These limitations were vital not only to avoiding a veto on the Security Council (Russia and China abstained, along with Brazil, India, and Germany), but also to securing support from the African Union and the Arab League. This conformed with the Summit Outcome document’s call for cooperation with relevant regional organizations. The limitations were in any case vital for the legitimacy of an intervention that would be enforced by NATO in a conflict that had nothing to do with the national security of its members.
It rapidly became obvious that the intervening powers were committed to the different agenda of toppling the Gaddafi regime. The day the resolution passed was the same day France recognized the NTC as the legitimate government of Libya. US, French, and British forces immediately imposed a naval blockade and began attacking Gaddafi’s forces with Tomahawk missiles and bombing sorties across the country. Gaddafi’s air force was destroyed in the first three days without the loss of a single Western aircraft, effectively completing the no-fly-zone part of the mission. At that point, in talks brokered by retired US Navy Rear Admiral Charles Kubic, Gaddafi’s government proposed a plan calling for a ceasefire in which they would stop combat operations, withdraw from major cities, assume a defensive posture, and perhaps even negotiate a transitional government that would involve Gaddafi stepping down. The Obama administration unilaterally ended the negotiations, instead ramping up attacks on Gaddafi’s forces with the clear intention of toppling him. The African Union denounced this operation two days after it began and tried to negotiate a ceasefire between Gaddafi and the NTC. The next day, the Arab League’s secretary general, Amr Moussa, condemned the wide scope of the bombing campaign as going well beyond SC 1973’s authority to enforce a no-fly zone to protect civilians, contending that if anything, it would increase civilian fatalities.18
These complaints fell on deaf ears. The following week, asked by a reporter how long British forces would remain involved, the Royal Air Force’s Air Vice-Marshal Greg Bagwell replied, “You’ll have to ask Colonel Gaddafi how long he wants to go on for but we’re here for the long term.” For the next eight months, NATO flew thousands of bombing sorties against Gaddafi’s forces and supplied the rebels with weapons, training, logistical support, and supplies. Obama repeatedly denied that his agenda was regime change, but the evidence is overwhelming that NATO forces intended that result from the start, in flagrant disregard of the express limitations imposed by SC 1973. Obama himself had demanded that Gaddafi leave office two weeks before SC 1973 was adopted. When Gaddafi accepted the African Union’s April ceasefire proposal, Obama supported the rebels’ refusal to discuss any truce that did not require regime change. The same happened the following month when Gaddafi proposed a deal that included paying compensation to victims and negotiating a new constitution.19
By insisting on regime change, Obama was reflecting what was becoming bipartisan opinion on Capitol Hill. As Senators Joseph Lieberman and Marco Rubio put it with unusual candor in The Wall Street Journal in June 2011, regardless of the wisdom of the original intervention, NATO countries now faced an overwhelming imperative to get rid of Gaddafi because he would exact revenge against them if he remained in power. NATO acted accordingly, refusing to end its operation until Gaddafi was killed in October in his native Sirte—provoking Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s smug comment “We came, we saw, he died.” There was never any doubt that NATO’s goal was to enable the rebels to topple Gaddafi. They achieved it at the cost of prolonging the war by eight months and increasing the death toll by seven to ten times. That did not stop Western commentators from celebrating the operation as a success and declaring it a triumph for R2P.20
It soon became obvious that it was neither. The Western powers made minimal investments to help rebuild the country. Unsurprisingly, the NTC never became a functioning government or even succeeded in disarming hostile militias once NATO withdrew. The secular moderate coalition government elected in July of 2012 quickly fell apart in acrimonious regional rivalries. The central government was unable to reestablish anything remotely resembling the monopoly of coercive force that is essential to a functioning national state, let alone the pro-American one that Senators John McCain and Marco Rubio, among others, had confidently predicted. The result was continuing militia battles over control of the major cities, airports, and government buildings, and new footholds for jihadist militias in Libya and its neighbors. By late 2014, ISIS had moved into Libya, seizing control of Derna near the Egyptian border. Both Obama and Hillary Clinton gloss over the debacle in their memoirs, begging the question why they, the French, and the British were so determined to topple Gaddafi in the first place. For Obama, who had opposed the Iraq invasion and was trying to extricate the US from the Middle East to pivot to Asia, it was a case of one step backward followed by another two.21
Much of the momentum to topple Gaddafi came from Europeans with major oil investments in Libya. They acted on the early predictions that his regime was finished to protect their interests in what they believed would be the new Libyan order. The NTC’s Ali Aziz had close links to the oil multinationals dating back to his time in Gaddafi’s government when British Petroleum had committed to spending more than $1 billion in Libyan oil exploration. The Italian company Eni was producing over a quarter million barrels of oil daily and operated a 310-kilometer pipeline between Libya and Sicily that was shut down by the civil war. Britain’s Shell and the French multinational Total had also made commitments to invest in Libyan oil when the civil war broke out, which they were keen to pursue. The rebels promised favorable treatment once the dust settled, even if they and the Sarkozy government denied reports in the French media that the NTC had promised them 35 percent of future crude oil “in exchange for the total and permanent support for our council.” The rebels also made it clear that Russia, China, and Brazil, who had abstained from SC 1973 and equivocated about regime change, would fare less well.22
Having backed what was turning out to be the wrong horse, the Europeans found themselves in a bind. Gaddafi had suspended diplomatic relations with France as soon as Sarkozy recognized the NTC. He was not going to be any more favorably inclined to the other countries that had jumped on the bandwagon when it looked as though he was finished. Rather than have to deal with a victorious Gaddafi who believed he had been burned by his erstwhile allies, they decided to get behind the NTC and help it topple him—which is what they did. Claims that they were protecting civilians were not remotely credible once that threat disappeared after the first few days of the bombing campaign. In fact, the insurgents, not Gaddafi’s forces, were perpetrating the bulk of the violence. Yet in April, Britain, France, and the US declared that they would not end the war until Gaddafi left office. This wasn’t mission creep. It was a mission leap. Unsurprisingly, Russia and China expressed outrage at the subterfuge, a charge that would later be validated in a report commissioned by Britain’s House of Commons.23
Sarkozy was pivotal in pressing the other Western powers to support military action. Apart from his concerns about French oil interests, he seems to have been trying to bolster his low popularity at home, respond to criticism for having sat on the sidelines when events in Tunisia erupted, and distance himself from Gaddafi when the latter appeared to be losing the war and had become unpopular with other Middle Eastern leaders. Sarkozy’s long association with the dictator, which reportedly included Gaddafi illegally funding his 2007 presidential campaign (for which Sarkozy would eventually be convicted and sentenced to five years in prison), had become an embarrassment he sought to shed. He was also strongly influenced by the sometime public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy. Lévy had a comic history of gullibility, coupled with enthusiasm for deploying Western military force to “liberate” Muslim peoples, so it is unsurprising that he convinced himself that Libya’s opposition forces would be harbingers of democracy. But it is remarkable that he not only insinuated himself into the NTC’s leadership ranks but also brokered the meetings between them and Sarkozy in early March, which led to Sarkozy’s decision to recognize the NTC—bypassing the French minister of foreign affairs, Alain Juppé, in the process.24
Even more remarkably, Lévy brokered a meeting between Libyan opposition leader Mahmoud Jibril and Hillary Clinton on March 14 during her visit to Paris for the G8. Jibril reportedly won Clinton over because he seemed “impressive and reasonable” and he “said all the right things about how a future Libya would be governed.” This conversation led her to overcome her skepticism and support those in the administration who were pushing for armed intervention in Libya. This meant ignoring the Germans, who opposed intervention in what they saw clearly was an ongoing civil war. Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle worried that intervention would escalate the conflict, with unpredictable consequences for European interests in the region. The Italians, who had signed a Treaty of Friendship with Gaddafi in 2008, cementing their status as Libya’s largest trading partner, were also equivocal. Foreign Minister Franco Frattini, who worried about reports of a Muslim Brotherhood presence among the insurgents, was reluctant to act on uncorroborated reports of the use of violence against civilians in support of an unfathomable alternative. Frattini climbed aboard only when it became clear that the momentum for regime change was unstoppable.25
As with Europe’s leaders, the Obama administration was divided. Special Assistant for Human Rights Samantha Power, who was a strong R2P advocate, pushed hard for US military intervention, as did UN Ambassador Susan Rice and Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, but the senior figures in Obama’s military and national security teams were all opposed. Most vocal were Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike Mullen, but Vice President Joe Biden, White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley, National Security Advisors John Brennan and Tom Donilon, and Deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough were all opposed to military action. Gates, who told aides that he would likely have resigned over Libya had his retirement not been imminent, was surprised that Obama—who had campaigned against the Iraq invasion—would go looking for a new war in the Middle East while the US was struggling so badly in the other two. Gates was even skeptical of the no-fly zone proposal, partly because there was no evidence that Gaddafi was using his air force against the rebels and partly because enforcing it would be an act of war that might provoke escalation and make Americans targets in the region. Once Obama had decided on intervention and Gates found himself defending administration policy, he had no answers for the obvious questions from journalists and senators. Why was toppling Gaddafi in America’s interest? Might it not empower terrorists rather than usher in a democratic regime? Wasn’t this committing the US to another open-ended conflict? Wouldn’t it involve costly nation-building? If not, what was the endgame?26
Whether Obama said he was “leading from behind” in Libya or it was a description by one of his staffers, he was uncharacteristically passive. Gates, to whom Obama said that it was a 51–49 decision, doubted that he would have gone forward without Clinton’s advocacy. Obama was determined to turn the intervention into a NATO operation as quickly as possible to diffuse responsibility onto Sarkozy and the other European leaders who were so keen to intervene, even though there is no NATO operation in which the US is not centrally implicated. Obama subsequently conceded in an interview that “failing to plan for the day after” in Libya was probably the biggest mistake of his presidency, while continuing nonetheless to insist that intervening had been “the right thing to do.” But that begs the question of what that planning could plausibly have entailed.27
The United States had learned the hard way in Afghanistan and Iraq that creating failed states is a lot easier than transforming them into viable ones. David Petraeus established in Iraq that fledgling governments facing insurgencies will be able to defeat them only if the civilians among whom the insurgents operate can be confident of their security from reprisal. This insight led to his major revision of US counterinsurgency doctrine, detailed in the 2006 Counterinsurgency Field Manual, built around the idea that it is vital not only to drive insurgents out of the areas they occupy but also to build enduring security for populations that would otherwise be vulnerable to their return. Because the government cannot provide that security on its own, the responsibility falls to the outside players on which the government depends to supply the wherewithal: substantial military capability and investments in building up and training domestic security forces. By the time of the Libyan intervention, experience in Iraq and Afghanistan had made clear that successful counterinsurgency requires vastly larger and longer troop commitments than American presidents are willing to contemplate. In this case, the ratio of one security force member for every fifty civilians called for in the Field Manual would have meant providing a force of 126,000 security personnel.28
Even if American presidents were willing to make commitments of this order, success is not guaranteed. Among others, Karl Eikenberry, a former US military chief and later an ambassador in Afghanistan, has pointed out that governments that rely on foreign forces and resources to defeat insurgents might never succeed. They are stuck with the Hobson’s choice that was Hamid Karzai’s undoing: They cannot win without external support, but the population might never trust in security that depends on external support. After all, the security that was achieved by the US surge that General Petraeus led in Iraq’s Anbar Province in 2007 collapsed when the US withdrew four years later. Ditto for the surge in Afghanistan’s Helmand and Kandahār Provinces in 2009–2010. The Taliban forces were never completely driven out, and they seized both provinces as soon as the US left a decade later. Setting aside both the improbable proposition that underwriting the rebels could have brought democracy to Libya and the inevitable legitimacy deficit any NATO-backed government would have faced, the US and its allies would still have confronted enormous challenges in creating a viable state there.29
At the very least, it would have taken massive investments not only in the military and security services, but also in Libya’s devastated economy. But Obama had phased out of Iraq and put a strict time limit on the military surge in Afghanistan because he did not believe American voters had any appetite to continue funding expensive foreign ventures that were not vital to US national security. His refusal to countenance US ground troops in Libya and his eagerness to shift the military costs to the Europeans reflected that understanding. US financial aid to Libya had never been substantial, and—aside from releasing $25 million in frozen funds to the rebels a month after the civil war erupted—Obama never showed any interest in investing in the country. His administration gave between $70 million and $80 million a year until 2014, after which aid to Libya fell substantially. Despite modest increases in the early years of the first Trump administration, neither Obama nor Biden—whose opposition to the Libya operation as vice president centered on the lack of a credible plan for the aftermath—was willing to give significant aid to Libya, a country that no US administration has deemed vital to America’s interests. Of the $600 billion spent on US foreign aid between 2013 and 2022, $787 million—or 0.13 percent—went to Libya. Any suggestion that Obama could have sold a substantial peace-building endeavor in Libya to Congress or American voters would be disingenuous, a fantasy, or both.30
Apart from those with R2P motivations, enthusiasm for the Libya mission was helped along by the belief, which had fast become orthodox in some circles, that the Arab Spring revolutions would sideline al-Qaeda. The empirical basis for this conviction remains puzzlingly elusive, not least because jihadist leaders saw the Arab Spring revolutions, and especially the prospect of Gaddafi’s fall, as an opportunity to expand their influence in Libya and the region. Bin Laden, who had predicted that when Gaddafi fell he could open a beachhead into North Africa that would turn Libya into “the Somalia of the Mediterranean,” welcomed the uprising. As he said in the journal that he dictated to his daughter shortly before his death, “This chaos and the absence of leadership in the revolutions is the best environment to spread al-Qaeda’s thoughts and ideas.” Gaddafi had been at the forefront of the fight against al-Qaeda for a decade, both in Libya and the region, and al-Qaeda militants were quick to sign up, along with other fundamentalist clerics, with the “rebels” fighting him. They were all happy to play along with the fiction of a popular uprising for their own purposes. This turned out to be a good bet for them, as they have thrived in the failed state that Libya has become.31
Obama’s passive obtuseness in the face of these realities was a surprising lapse of judgment from a president who was usually clear-eyed and assertive. He had no trouble standing up to the defense establishment and the generals when they wanted to extend and expand American commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan.32 Yet here they were arguing vehemently against the operation in Libya that he supported. He should at least have demanded serious fact-checking of the extravagant claims about imminent civilian slaughter and pushed the advocates of toppling Gaddafi to supply credible arguments about the desirability of what would come next. His capitulation to the European—and especially Sarkozy’s—agenda to create unstoppable momentum for regime change calls to mind a comparable event fifty-five years earlier, when France, Britain, and Israel attacked Egypt after its president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had nationalized the Suez Canal. President Eisenhower, who did not agree to the operation in advance and judged it reckless and unjustified, led the worldwide condemnation of the attack at the UN General Assembly and brought substantial diplomatic and economic pressure on the belligerents to abandon the venture—which they grudgingly did. That was the kind of American leadership that was sorely needed but notably missing in Libya in 2011.
The full costs of the Libyan intervention in lives, dollars, discredited NATO leadership, and regional fallout will not be known for decades, but there is no doubt that they have been enormous. A decade and a half after Gaddafi’s fall, the so-called Government of National Unity in Tripoli controlled about a third of the northern (populated) part of the country with the backing of loosely allied militias. A competing Tobruk-based government in the east controlled the remaining two-thirds, backed by a militia loyal to the self-appointed Field Marshall Khalifa Haftar. Libya had joined Iraq and Afghanistan as one more failed state in the Middle East for which the West bore substantial responsibility. We cannot know what Libya would look like today had Gaddafi’s regime not been toppled in 2011, but we do know that the US, France, and Britain engaged in a reckless gambit, despite strong opposition from sober voices within American and NATO leadership, with predictably damaging results. Some of the most ardent cheerleaders for the intervention would eventually be forced to admit this.33
Libya’s Legacy
The legacy across the region was disastrous. Radical Islamists, long suppressed by Gaddafi, refused to disarm after the war and prospered as they had anticipated they would. Ironically, in view of French and American enthusiasm for toppling Gaddafi, these radicals mounted successful attacks on the French embassy in Tripoli and the US embassy in Benghazi, killing the US ambassador and three other embassy staff. Even more ironically, Hillary Clinton was relentlessly—and unfairly—attacked during her 2016 presidential campaign over lax security at the embassy, while the much more consequential failure in Libya, where she had played a pivotal role in persuading Obama, was hiding in plain sight.34
The most damaging regional by-product of Gaddafi’s fall was in Mali, hitherto one of West Africa’s few stable democracies. Malian ethnic Tuareg fighters in Gaddafi’s security forces fled home with their weapons and launched a rebellion, triggering a military coup. The Tuareg rebellion was then hijacked by local Ansar Dine Islamists. They quickly gained control of large swaths of northern Mali, imposed Sharia law, and displaced hundreds of thousands of people, generating a humanitarian catastrophe. France intervened, sending four thousand troops when the rebels were advancing on the capital city, Bamako. Paris planned for a brief operation, after which UN peacekeepers from Chad and elsewhere were supposed to take over. But the peacekeepers failed to materialize, and although the French drove the rebels deep into the mountains on the Algerian border, they were not defeated before France pulled out most of its troops. The result has been a grinding conflict punctuated by a series of failed peace agreements between the government and the rebels, who continue pressing for an Islamic state in the north of the country.35
Nor was the regional fallout limited to Mali. A 2013 UN Security Council report documented extensive weapons flows from the remnants of Gaddafi’s arsenals to Islamist rebels across North Africa. Fifteen thousand man-portable surface-to-air missiles, capable of shooting down civilian airliners, were never recovered. Some fell into the hands of al-Qaeda’s North African affiliates, some went to Boko Haram in Niger and Northern Nigeria, and some ended up with Hamas in Gaza. Even more soberingly, political scientists Alan Kuperman and Marc Lynch have both identified evidence of fallout in Syria, where the so-called moral hazard of intervention kicked in. Comparatively peaceful protesters against Bashar al-Assad’s regime saw the NATO intervention in Libya turn the tide against Gaddafi and then turned to violence themselves, anticipating that the predictable crackdown from Assad would bring NATO into Syria as well.36
Whether or not these commentators are right about the cause of Assad’s escalation, NATO’s action in Libya left Obama and other Western leaders toothless to do much about it. China and Russia, whose abstentions had facilitated the adoption of SC 1973, quickly condemned the Libya regime change agenda as unauthorized. Having been played for suckers there, they remained intransigent in resisting the imposition of significant costs on Syria despite the regime’s escalating human rights abuses. In August 2011, Obama started insisting publicly that “Assad must go.” He and British Prime Minister David Cameron then warned that Assad would cross a red line if he deployed chemical weapons, only to be humiliated when Assad called their bluff and it became clear that neither could muster the domestic political support needed to respond. Ironically, it was Putin who seized the diplomatic high ground by negotiating the decommissioning of Syria’s chemical weapons, ensuring Russia’s reemergence as an influential player in the Middle East.37
The Libyan debacle highlighted challenges to institutionalizing R2P that had not been evident after the relatively straightforward Kosovo operation. By the time of NATO’s intervention there in 1999, the former Yugoslavia was already a failed state that had been in a condition of more or less continuous civil war for the better part of a decade. The evidence of ongoing ethnic cleansing and other major human rights abuses had been widely documented. The US and the other NATO powers had no significant interests in Kosovo, giving them plausible claims to having clean hands. The intervention took place before the 2003 Iraq invasion that so sullied America’s international image. It helped, too, that the goal in Kosovo was to protect a Muslim population. This muted the—nonetheless significant—criticism that the operation provoked in the Muslim world and the Global South. Moreover, the operation was brief and evidently successful, fostering what would turn out to be unwarranted confidence in the effectiveness of “surgical” uses of air power. And the conflict ended in an agreement that led Yugoslav forces to withdraw from Kosovo. As foreign interventions go, it had a happy ending.
In Libya, by contrast, the intervention took place at the start of the conflict, when its trajectory and likely outcome were still unclear. The claims and counterclaims about human rights atrocities were debatable and debated, and anyway they became moot after the first few days of the operation. The intervening powers had manifest interests at stake in Libya, belying any pretense of disinterest. The intervention took place after a decade of stalemated NATO presence in Afghanistan and the Iraq invasion, both of which had taken their toll on Western—and especially American—credibility. Whatever might have been left of that credibility was shattered in Libya once it became obvious that the agenda had been regime change from the start. The final nail in the coffin was Western leaders’ brushing aside of multiple overtures to negotiate a settlement—from Gaddafi and from regional third parties alike—rubbishing any pretense that they were acting as agents of the Security Council, whose arms embargo they were violating in any case. On top of all that, the intervention was a spectacular failure that eliminated any hope of gaining legitimacy from a felicitous outcome.
Beyond the damage in Libya and across the region, the operation’s destructive consequences for the fledgling doctrine of R2P would be hard to overstate. Embedding the “illegal but legitimate” impulse behind R2P in international practice was always going to be a heavy lift considering the strong UN presumptions against interference and the domestic political constraints that operate on leaders in international politics. Getting the UN to adopt the World Summit Outcome document had been a major achievement by its proponents, but it was obviously a precarious one that depended heavily on judicious deployment of force by intervening powers if it was to gain any meaningful prospect of achieving traction as an enforceable norm. The challenge is built into the doctrine by the discretion that it confers on the Security Council and enforcing countries. R2P empowers the council to authorize intervention when governments fail to protect their populations from genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, or ethnic cleansing, but it does not oblige the council to authorize intervention. Nor does it oblige members to enforce an R2P resolution once the Security Council adopts it. Entrenching R2P into international law and practice would have required countries that can exploit this discretion for national benefit to resist the temptation, which they signally failed to do in Libya.
There would have been no chance of weaving something like R2P into the fabric of international law during the Cold War, underscoring how much the NATO powers squandered when they abused it so cavalierly in Libya. Despite misgivings, Russia and China had agreed not to veto SC 1973, even though the resolution contained no oversight provisions, simply requesting that the intervening powers keep the council informed of their activities. For R2P to have had a fighting chance, the intervening powers would have needed to exemplify the sagacious restraint George H. W. Bush showed in resisting the pressure to topple Saddam Hussein in 1991. Whereas his son trashed that possibility twelve years later, it was Obama, Sarkozy, and Cameron whose actions ensured that R2P would be stillborn. They blew a rare opportunity to nurture and strengthen unprecedented limits on what barbarous governments can do with impunity. Instead, they indulged mercenary interests by co-opting the fledgling doctrine and abusing it for their own purposes. This undermined their credibility as plausible agents of R2P enforcement, ceding the moral high ground to adversaries and critics. Had they shown the requisite restraint in Libya, better options might have been available in Syria—not to mention in subsequent conflicts in Myanmar, Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, and elsewhere.38
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