What are the prerogatives of the sovereign state? This is a question with which international law has wrestled since the Second World War. Generally speaking, international law has assumed that a nation’s sovereignty is limited. Sovereignty doesn’t entail impunity because if state sovereignty were absolute, international law would be impossible. The more pressing question, then, is whether nations are morally obligated to defend basic human rights when egregious sociopolitical evils such as genocide, mass murder, and widespread human rights violations occur.
The war against Ukraine being prosecuted by the imperialist Russian Federation for the last two and a half years is graphic testimony to the persistence of evil and the international community’s inability to decisively respond. Specifically, the luke-warm response by Western nations – so-called “allies” – and the U.S. in particular raises important questions. Should we care about the subjugation or extermination of a nation, acknowledged by the United Nations as possessing “sovereignty,” “independence,” and “territorial integrity,” by an invading terrorist nation, committed to perpetrating crimes against humanity? According to comments by former President Trump and Vice-Presidential candidate Vance on the eve of Ukrainian President Zelensky’s visit to the U.S. and the United Nations General Assembly during the week of September 23, the answer is no.
Human beings living in a moral universe cannot prosecute moral atrocity and socio-political evils if nations, or coalitions of nations, do not take this task seriously. The challenge today, given the mix of moral erosion in the West and the extent of totalitarianism globally, is whether the international community has the ability to hold nations accountable for what are typically called “crimes against humanity.” This term, issuing out of post-World War II criminal tribunals, calls for constant reflection and reiteration. At the Nuremberg trials, three categories of international crime were identified: (1) “crimes against peace” (that is, aggression), (2) “war crimes,” and (3) “crimes against humanity.” Today we encounter all three of these challenges, not infrequently in the form of mass murder, ethnic cleansing, rape, and torture; Ukraine is a perfect illustration. Natural law reasoning binds nations in the form of a ius gentium (law of the nations) toward mutual obligations and duties – obligations that are perpetual in validity, for all times and culture. This means that sovereignty is not absolute; it is negated when and where the intolerable occurs. International law does not need a “world government” for its enactment; what it does need is a federation or coalition of nations that are committed to holding accountable any violators of the most basic of human rights.
The prosecution of the abovementioned three violations of human rights is philosophically and politically non-negotiable. The great challenge to international law and free nations is to find the will toward holding violators accountable through punishment according to international criminal law. Justice, after all, requires an accounting (to each his due), and therefore, punishment where gross injustice occurs.
“Just War” moral conditions can assist us in discerning whether or not to undertake coercive intervention include moral criteria such as just cause, identifying sufficient harm, proportionality, and a just peace, which entails the restoration of basic rights that have been violated. “War crimes” are precisely that – crimes – because they are unchosen expressions of evil that are forced upon the innocent. War or coercive intervention need not be evil or unjust per se. Nor is it the case that interventionary force is uncontrollable. Ius in bello (justice in executing war) moral conditions guide military leaders and soldiers in terms of what may and may not be done.
We react to catastrophic geopolitical events in the world because of natural law reasoning – do good and avoid doing evil – and we treat others as we would wish to be treated ourselves, based on the practical application of a “Golden Rule” ethic. This confronts relatively free nations with the difficult issue of both humanitarian and military intervention. Thirty years ago many were inclined to view the end of the Cold War as the beginning of a new, more peaceful global system. However, the tragic reality is that (a) the Cold War never really ended but rather became dormant, and (b) geopolitical catastrophe after geopolitical disaster has visited the international community in the decades since. How, then, might those who are responsible for policy in relatively free nations deal with situations that may or may not require coercive intervention? Should governments respond and intervene to prevent – or at least retard – the effects of genocide, mass murder, enslavement of peoples or people-groups, and egregious human rights violations?
Addressing such matters five decades ago, Princeton ethicist Paul Ramsey set forth the argument that military intervention for the sake of justice remains both a right and a duty. According to Ramsey, the failure of free nations to intervene, based on a stewardship of responsibilities in the world, would be “tragically to fail to undertake responsibilities that … are not likely to be accomplished by other political actors.” Acknowledging the United Nations’ powerlessness as well as the possibility that intervention can be unwise, Ramsey insisted that a failure to intervene on behalf of the oppressed can itself be unjust. Ramsey’s views were not popular then, just as they would be unpopular today. Nevertheless, Ramsey’s wrestling with the international obligations that attend “neighbor-love” placed him squarely within the mainstream of Just War thinking and the Christian moral tradition.
To intervene or not to intervene? This should always be a difficult question. The use of force in other nations should always induce hesitation and anxiety. At the same time, the mood of Western nations currently is decidedly non-interventionist and non-deterrent. But non-intervention is not an absolute moral principle. In fact, it is becoming increasingly apparent in the third decade of the 21st century that a regime can do things to people either within its own borders or beyond that are so evil that another nation or coalition of nations would be justified in intervening. Justice demands that duty—i.e., moral obligation—comes first, which means that we do to others as we would wish done to ourselves.
It has been said that people will not cherish their own freedom if they are unwilling to intervene on behalf of others. Ancient proverbial wisdom beckons people of principle, irrespective of their location in life and history, to intervene on behalf of the traumatized. Such a call bears repeating in our post-consensus, non-interventionist cultural climate:
If you faint in the day of adversity, how small is your strength.
Rescue those who are being led away toward death,
Hold back those stumbling toward the slaughter.
If you say, “But we knew nothing about this,”
Does not He who weighs the heart consider it?
Does not He who guards your life not know it?
And will He not repay each person According to what that person has done? (Prov. 24:1-12)