I wanted to say something pithy or insightfully intriguing
tonight, but I decided to scrap those thoughts and let words speak for
themselves. Over the weekend, I had an incredible opportunity to listen to a
very distinguished elder statesman and foreign diplomat talk about his
experiences practicing diplomacy and international relations. Lakhdar Brahimi spoke
at my wife’s graduation. He is the one for whom we now refer to the landmark UN
report about peace operations in the 1990s as simply, the Brahimi
Report. Certainly, it was a very interesting and engaging speech as he
shared his diplomatic experiences dealing with critical global challenges in
Afghanistan and South Africa.
Something struck me during his talk about the consequent
doctrine that follows the UN report later in the 2000s — that is the Responsibility
to Protect (R2P) doctrine. We may talk more about the R2P doctrine, in
particular, but I want to juxtapose the thinking behind the foundation for R2P
with another set of thinking. In the early 1950s, the U.S. was entering the
Cold War and positioning itself for a long struggle against an ideological foe.
Both the U.S. and the Soviet Union tried to describe their respective responsibilities
to pursue objectives that would secure national interests on behalf of those
for whom those interests mattered most. Secretary of State,
John Foster Dulles, delivered a similar
landmark speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in which he details a
justification for a doctrine of “massive retaliation” based on a responsibility
to protect against aggression to ideals of freedom.
We should therefore wonder, for what are states responsible,
and actually for whom are they responsible? These might seem like simple
questions, but after reading the Brahimi report and the 1950s speech by
Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, consider, what is it we, the U.S.,
should be responsible for; for whom?
