David Reiff: A New Age of Liberal Imperialism 1999

Located here. Some excerpts:

However, the fact that while the NATO powers are often willing to intervene they have also shown themselves almost never willing to take casualties suggests that this commitment is as much about having fallen into a rhetorical trap as about being guided by a new moralizing principle. The means employed simply do not match the high-flown rhetoric about ends. There have been times during the Kosovo crisis, as there were during the Bosnian war and the Rwandan emergency, when it has appeared that Western involvement came about because the leaders of the Western countries no longer found it politically possible to get up at a press conference before a television audience and say, in effect, "Sorry about the starving X's or the ethnically cleansed Y's. It's just awful what's happening to them, but frankly they don't have any oil, nor are those that oppress them a threat to us. So you, Mr. and Ms. Voter, will have to continue to watch the slaughter on the evening news until it burns itself out."

Of course, that is precisely what members of the policy elites in Washington, Brussels, Paris, London, or Berlin say in private to one another all the time. But public language, along with public pressure, is often what drives policy. By now, commonplace expressions of realism in international affairs have become, to borrow the Early Christian theological distinction between elite and mass Christianity, an esoteric language restricted by and large to policymakers when they are out of public view. It is the language of human rights and humanitarianism that now stands as the exoteric language of public discourse about such questions. What this demonstrates is the degree to which there really has been a human rights revolution in the attitudes, though not to nearly the same degree in the practices, of the Western public and its poll-addicted, pandering governments [...]

Time and time again, our moral ambitions have been revealed as being far larger than our political, military, or even cognitive means [...]

The human rights activist seeks, first and foremost, to halt abuses. Usually, this involves denouncing the states or movements who are violating the laws of war or the rights of their citizens. In contrast, the humanitarian aid worker usually finds that he or she must deal with the abusive government or rampaging militia if the aid is to get through safely and be distributed.
So far at least, there is more confusion than any new synthesis between human rights and humanitarianism [...]

But it is by insisting that there is no intellectual or moral problem with demanding that international law should be upheld as strenuously as the domestic laws of democratic states that human rights activists, and the governments that are influenced by them, however intermittently, are engaged in a project that almost certainly seems doomed to failure. Starkly put, its presuppositions do not withstand scrutiny. It is all very well to talk about these laws, or courts, or imperatives, as expressing the will of the "international community." In practice, however, the definition of this "community" is highly if not exclusively legalistic and consists of the states that sign various treaties and conventions and the activist non-governmental organizations that lobby them to do so.

In finessing this fundamental problem of legitimacy-the ICC, as one of its American defenders once conceded, was largely the concern of "hobbyists and specialists"-and in asserting that a body of law that is the product of a treaty has the same authority as a body of law that is the result of long historical processes that involve parliaments, elections, and popular debate, the activists have in effect constructed a legal system for a political and social system that neither exists nor is likely to exist any time in the foreseeable future. Presented as the product of some new global consensus, it is in fact the legal code of a world government.
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But there is no world government [...]

The new language of rights, so prevalent in Western capitals, has been revealed to be at least as misleading about what is and is not possible, what it did and did not commit Western states to, as it is a departure from the old language of state sovereignty [...]

But war, even war undertaken on human rights grounds, is not like jazz singing. Improvisation is fatal-as the Kosovars have learned [...] And yet it continues to be the implicit assumption of the NATO powers that they can confront the crisis of failed states by making it up as they go along. In Somalia, in Rwanda, and in Congo, the Western powers chose to respond with disaster relief, which both guaranteed that the political crises in those countries would continue and represented a terrible misuse of humanitarian aid [...]

It is to be hoped that in the wake of Kosovo, the realization that this kind of geo-strategic frivolity and ad hoc-ism, this resolve to act out of moral paradigms that now command the sympathy but do not yet command the deep allegiance of Western public opinion-at least not to the extent that people are willing to sacrifice in order to see that they are upheld-will no longer do [...]

The conclusion is inescapable. At the present time, only the West has both the power and, however intermittently, the readiness to act. And by the West, one really means the United States. Obviously, to say that America could act effectively if it chose to do so as, yes, the world's policeman of last resort, is not the same thing as saying that it should. Those who argue, as George Kennan has done, that we overestimate ourselves when we believe we can right the wrongs of the world, must be listened to seriously. So should the views of principled isolationists. And those on what remains of the left who insist that the result of such a broad licensing of American power will be a further entrenchment of America's hegemony over the rest of the world are also unquestionably correct.

But the implications of not doing anything are equally clear. Those who fear American power are-this is absolutely certain-condemning other people to death [...]

However controversial it may be to say this, our choice at the millennium seems to boil down to imperialism or barbarism. Half-measures of the type we have seen in various humanitarian interventions and in Kosovo represent the worst of both worlds. Better to grasp the nettle and accept that liberal imperialism may be the best we are going to do in these callous and sentimental times.

Indeed, the real task for people who reject both realism and the utopian nihilism of a left that would prefer to see genocide in Bosnia and the mass deportation of the Kosovars rather than strengthen, however marginally, the hegemony of the United States, is to try to humanize this new imperial order-assuming it can come into being-and to curb the excesses that it will doubtless produce.