The Foreign Service Journal, October 2009

64 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / O C T O B E R 2 0 0 9 Even the more internationalist course that Secretary of State Con- doleezza Rice set during Bush’s sec- ond term was largely vitiated by the performance of John Bolton as am- bassador to the U.N. Several un- named political appointees in the White House and the Pentagon went so far as to tell Talbott that the Iraq intervention and the tensions it caused with the United Nations had been “an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.” In conclusion, Talbott acknowl- edges that the path toward the goal of global governance must be incremen- tal. The first step is stemming the erosion of international institutions of the Bush 43 years. In parallel, world leaders must focus on stabilizing mar- kets and eliminating poverty in order to avert recurring economic crises. To advance arms control, we must seek further reductions to American and Russian nuclear stockpiles, revive the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, pursue a multilateral cutoff of fissile material production and ratify the Compre- hensive Test Ban Treaty. And to combat climate change, we must heed the warnings of the scien- tific community and take measures that go beyond what may (or may not) be agreed at the Copenhagen summit in December. If we can meet these challenges, Talbot contends, “we will be giving ourselves time and useful experience for lifting global gover- nance in general to a higher level.” The Great Experiment is a great read, both for history buffs and for students of international organiza- tions. Talbott’s policy prescriptions are less detailed than his analysis of precedents. But he points out that a more detailed roadmap for the future is to be found in Power and Responsi- bility: International Order in an Era of Transnational Threat , published by the Brookings Institution (of which he is president) earlier this year. Ted Wilkinson, a Foreign Service offi- cer from 1961 to 1996, is the chair- man of the FSJ Editorial Board. Effective Intervention The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and for All Gareth Evans, Brookings Institution Press, 2008, $19.95, paperback, 349 pages. R EVIEWED BY L EON W EINTRAUB We have heard “never again” in re- sponse to mass atrocities so often that it is now almost impossible to take that pledge at face value. Even as les- sons from the Holocaust recede from memory, the horrors of Cambodia in the mid-1970s, Rwanda in 1994, Sre- brenica in 1995, Kosovo in 1998 and Darfur since 2003 have all fueled calls for “humanitarian intervention”: in- ternational efforts to save endangered innocent lives by means of a robust military response. Despite abundant lip service, how- ever, that approach has had only lim- ited success as a rallying cry for effective action. The likely recipients of such intervention — small, weak countries caught in a spiral of civil conflict — tend to see the movement as justification for neocolonialist for- eign meddling in local affairs. And those nations likely to carry out the ac- tions — significant powers capable of launching expeditionary forces — have been none too pleased with what they viewed as manpower and budg- etary drains. Finally, many of the nongovernmental organizations al- ready providing humanitarian relief under challenging, if not horrifying, conditions, do not want their role to be compromised by an implicit al- liance with an invading military force. The person who, more than any other, pushed the policy world to move from that earlier concept to the new intellectual construct of “respon- sibility to protect” is the author of this book, Gareth Evans. A former Aus- tralian foreign minister, he is a previ- ous president of the widely respected International Crisis Group, and was co-chair of the International Com- mission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. It was ICISS that, in 2001, published its report, “The Re- sponsibility to Protect,” and Evans has become the leading proponent of “R2P” since that time. This response to genocide turns humanitarian intervention on its head. Rather than the international com- munity having primary responsibility, it is now each sovereign state that has the duty — as an essential part of its B O O K S Talbott recalls that the concept of world federalism was widely endorsed in the immediate aftermath of World War II.