wars.38
These deaths primarily occur today in failed states. While scholars disagree about the precise definition of a failed state, the concept first described the successor states of the former Yugoslavia and African nations beset by civil wars after the end of the Cold War. Superpower competition had kept some of these nations afloat, thanks to aid from the U.S. or the U.S.S.R., while autocratic governments had kept others from breaking out into ethnic conflict. Failed states arise where government institutions no longer exercise effective authority, the economy has collapsed, and private groups control resources and population and rival the government.39 States without an effective government may provide terrorists or criminal groups with a safe haven from which to recruit and train fighters, organize their arms and finances, and ship money, personnel, and weapons. Somalia’s collapse, for example, not only allowed tribal warlords to divide the country, but it also became a breeding ground for the al-Shabaab terrorist group and other militant extremists. Afghanistan allowed al-Qaeda to operate freely and to plan and launch the 9/11 attacks.
Western interventions often sought to end ethnic strife and create stable governments in areas of little strategic importance. In Somalia and Haiti, for example, the United States sent troops to stop mass suffering and to establish stable governments. From a realist perspective, these actions delivered little benefit to the United States. Somalia had little strategic importance, few resources, and had already suffered through years of civil war. A poor country with few economic resources, Haiti had greater significance because of the potential refugee flows to American shores. Unlike Somalia and more like Haiti, Kosovo involved some security interests, but those of America’s NATO allies rather than those of the United States. The United States certainly faced no threat of attack from Serbia, nor did it have any important strategic or economic interests in the Balkans at the time. In these cases, war served as a tool to combat threats to regional stability rather than as a means for unchallenged control.
The 2011 Libyan conflict provides another example of the challenge posed by failed states. Libya posed little threat to the United States or its forces abroad. Dictator Muammar Gaddafi kept his military deliberately small, limited to about 50,000 troops despite Libya’s large oil revenues, to avoid a military coup. After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Libya had voluntarily given up its nuclear weapons program, compensated victims of its terrorism, and normalized relations with the West. In February 2011, the Arab spring movement reached Libya. Gaddafi ordered the Libyan military and security services to fire on demonstrators, sparking a civil war. Rebels quickly freed the eastern half of the country and established their headquarters in Benghazi, but suffered a turnabout in their fortunes. After several weeks of indecision, the United States and its allies intervened when Gaddafi’s forces threatened to snuff out the rebellion. The West had no desire to seize Libya’s oil or territory. Instead, as President Obama said in March 2010, “Gaddafi must go” for wantonly killing Libyan civilians.40 The West resorted to force not because Libya posed any imminent threat to its neighbors, but because of a civil war against Gaddafi’s rule.
There may have been more at stake in Libya than just humanitarian considerations. Before the conflict broke out, Libya pumped 1.6 million barrels of oil per day—2 percent of global consumption—making it the seventeenth largest oil producer in the world.41 Libya exported 85 percent of its daily production to Europe. Notably, NATO did not send its troops to other conflicts, such as those raging in Africa where the loss of life was as high or higher than in Libya but where there is little oil. However, if securing Libya’s oil were the only goal, the United States and its allies intervened at precisely the wrong moment. It is more likely that European nations were concerned about instability so close to their shores, which might generate a flood of refugees headed for the European Union. However, by waiting so long to intervene, and acting so ineffectively, European nations ended up setting off the very stream of refugees that they feared.
Instead, the Libyan war bears similarities in motive to earlier postwar interventions. Haiti, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and even the former Yugoslavia did not raise the prospect of nation-state war of the kind that characterized the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Aside from Iraq in 1991, which posed a threat to Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and perhaps Israel, these countries did not menace their neighbors with aggression. Instead, they threatened the international system because of the internal conduct of their regimes.
Quite a few legal commentators argued, in the wake of the Kosovo intervention, that international law does not authorize resorting to war, even for humanitarian purposes.42 The U.N. Charter allows military force in “self-defense,” which can include aiding another state under attack.43 But, according to many commentators, the Charter does not authorize outside states to deploy force to protect a threatened minority population against its own government. That reading of international law will be less compelling, however, if intervention becomes less costly, both for the intervening power and the targeted state. Drones might identify and disable the military units, either on the side of the government or rebels, in a civil war. They could destroy transportation used to carry prisoners and their detention camps too. They could compile detailed views of relevant sites, which might then come under scrutiny by international inspections. Cyber attacks might be used to disable broadcasting and social media, such as the radio broadcasts that incited the massacres in Rwanda.
New technology will make it easier to intervene to stop humanitarian disasters, but these options will not always render intervention effective or wise. What is stopped at one point may resume at a later time. What does not happen may not have happened. Outside states cannot intervene every time civilians are at risk of terrible violence. Premature or ill-judged intervention may even trigger hostile responses from local populations or goad outside powers to intervene. Technology won’t supplant the need for judgment, but it will make it much harder to claim an inability to use force.
Technology will also erode rules that seek to limit the focus of interventions. In the 1990s, some critics questioned why Britain or the United States had not bombed rail lines leading to Nazi death camps during the Second World War. A considerable debate ensued on whether such action was feasible and whether it would actually have saved many lives.44 Yet, as a contemporary European scholar has noted, AP I would now prohibit such action, because interfering with the operations of a concentration camp would not offer a “definite military advantage” to the attacker (as required by AP I’s definition of legitimate “military objectives”).45 When there is a chance to save lives by ignoring the AP I rules, responsible governments will find it easy to bend those rules.
A cramped view of the right of nations to intervene for humanitarian purposes will likely fail if new weapon systems prove their value in preventing catastrophes. Their primary value may not be physically disabling the instruments of mass persecution but in making clear that leading nations may intervene to prevent such horrors. Using force can be as important for its political or psychological impact as its immediate physical effects. If new weapons can act as a warning or a marker, nations will not limit their use to extreme humanitarian crises.
Terrorism
Terrorist groups unconnected with any one nation-state, but nurtured in the ungoverned territories of failed states, present yet another security threat. The defining characteristic of terrorists is their lack of allegiance to any nation. The September 11, 2001 hijackers, for example, launched their attacks as part of the al-Qaeda network of Islamic radicals. Several were from Saudi Arabia, one of the U.S.’s oldest allies in the Middle East. Though they operated from a safe haven in Afghanistan, the hijackers had no defined territory, cities, or people to defend. They received funds from private and religious charities and drew manpower from a pool of disaffected, alienated, or unemployed young men bitter over the Arab world’s decline.
Instead of common ethnic or local origins, al-Qaeda members are unified by an Islamist-inspired desire to engineer fundamental political and social change in the Middle East. They seethe at the rise of the Christian West, the collapse of the historic caliphate, the presence of American troops in the region,
