Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly . INTERVIEW . Fr. J. Bryan Hehir . September 12, 2003

Read more of Phil Jones's interview with Fr. J. Bryan Hehir, an expert on ethics and international affairs:

Q: For years we've heard people say, "Look, the United States can't be the policeman of the world." Have things changed?

A: I don't think they've changed, in the sense that I think that slogan means you can't do everything by yourself, and you can't be everywhere all the time. On the other hand, that slogan originated during the Cold War, when our attention was overwhelmingly on the relationship with the Soviet Union, which demanded enormous focus.

When that whole relationship or tension collapsed, interestingly enough (whether there was a causal relationship or not, I don't know) a multiplicity of internal situations around the world festered and broke out into terrible human suffering. While the United States still can't be the policeman around the world, I do think it is part of the responsibility of the United States to bear a reasonable -- indeed, proportional -- amount of responsibility for responding to enormous human suffering in civil conflict.

Q: But as you look around, conflict is going on all over the globe. How do you know where to go?
A: Well, I think you know where to go by a set of multiple criteria. The United States can't do it all; therefore, there should be some burden sharing. It was entirely appropriate for the French to go into the Ivory Coast. They were the appropriate party. They knew the background. They knew the region. It was entirely appropriate for the British to put forces on the ground in Sierra Leone when [UN Secretary-General] Kofi Annan said he couldn't find anybody on the globe to go in. The British put a very small force in and really closed down the conflict. And it would be, I think, appropriate for the United States to be a leader in the process in Liberia, given the historical relationship we've had. That's one [criterion] -- historical relationship.

Secondly, there are some crises of such enormous scope that the international community as a whole is responsible for them. Rwanda was [such a] case. At that point in time, whether you've had any relationship in the past or not, there's an obligation for the states that can do things to do things. I think that's a reasonable criterion. Not every little outbreak, not every little civil war, but when you have massive human violence that reaches the level of genocide, there's been a consensus formed since the end of World War II that [genocide] should not happen. It did happen, and that was a moral and political tragedy. That's a good example. You should go when [a crisis] reaches that level.

Q: Say you're a U.S. president, Republican or Democrat. Every morning, your National Security Council office is getting all of these pleas: "Come. Help." What's a president to do?
A: A president has a first obligation to defend the vital interests of the United States. Those are a narrowly based set of considerations of enormous importance: the territorial integrity of this country, the population of this country, and its fundamental interests around the globe. You have to deal with those.

Secondly, however, you should cater to the national interest, which is wider than our vital interests. National interests can move us to do things that are not absolutely essential for our safety and security, because our national interests should be formed by values as well as interests. There are instances in which the president should act not because we have a vital interest; not because we will be threatened if we do not act; but because if we fail to act -- particularly when we are the uniquely capable actor, and vast human damage is done in that situation -- then there is a way in which we bear responsibility.

Q: An example, please?
A: The clearest example was Rwanda, where there was no vital interest. But I would argue there was a national interest, because we were part of forming the consensus after World War II, part of developing the genocide treaty that put in writing the responsibilities of the international community for those kinds of things.

I think Bosnia and Kosovo were examples that we came to see were probably part of both our vital interests and our national interests, because they were so closely situated to the center of European politics. There are different cases, and not every case would rise to the level [of national interests]. I think the Ivory Coast was not something we needed to do, nor were we needed for it, nor was there reason for us to be involved in it.

Somalia, I think, was a good example of the international community, in an early stage of these eruptions within countries, sensing a responsibility. We were right to do what we did. There were mistakes made in the tactical and strategic planning. I do not think it was the massive failure that it often is portrayed as being, because there were hundreds of thousands of lives saved by the initial intervention. And in terms of the human values of world politics, that's not a defeat. But Somalia -- my sense was that it put a chill throughout the Clinton presidency.

Q: How much damage did it do?
A: Well, it did a good deal of damage, and I think one ought to look at how that damage happened. You know, the lessons we draw from the last encounter are always the great problem. And the lessons of Somalia were, among others, "We don't do this." That, I think, had an enormous impact on our unwillingness to address Rwanda. No question about that.

But we ought to look at that lesson. I mean, [look at] the numbers of casualties. I always thought the military were refreshing. I've heard military people say, "We did not think we had a massive failure in Somalia. We didn't lose hundreds of troops in Somalia." It was vivid, it was dramatic, it was BLACK HAWK DOWN. Admittedly it was, and we may not have been prepared to do what we needed to do. But if you simply calculate the number of casualties, the argument that we had to pick up and leave immediately seemed, to me, not to be persuasive. It wasn't the absolute military encounter. It was the political spin that was put on the military encounter. That spin was, "We have no interests there."

That's why you have to keep going back to this distinction between vital interest and national interest. I'm arguing that there are cases where we ought to act, in terms of what I will call the national interest, that do not involve vital interests.

Q: What do you think the cost to us was by not getting more involved with Rwanda?
A: Well, the cost was calculated in the way the question was put to us. It was never a strategic question. It was never a vital interest question. It was a moral question, and [the cost of the] failure on a moral question of serious significance to a nation of our capability and our values, I think, was high.

Q: Somalia, Rwanda, Kosovo -- these all have raised questions of humanitarian intervention. Now we have the whole question of preventive war. How do you explain to Americans what's humanitarian intervention, what's preventive war, and when both are justified?
A: The way to frame the discussion is in terms of intervention as a category with two parts. Iraq was an intervention and Kosovo was an intervention. They were two different kinds of interventions. Kosovo fits under humanitarian military intervention. That is to say, the driving reason that moves the policy is the degree of human suffering that is going on that is preventable, and that is preventable in terms that do not produce costs that outweigh the good you can do in preventing the suffering. That's humanitarian military intervention.

Iraq, I think, could not be described as humanitarian military intervention, even though there was significant human suffering going on under Saddam Hussein. If you ask what drove U.S. policy, it was not humanitarian questions. It was questions of weapons of mass destruction, or the perceived threat of weapons of mass destruction. It was, I think, the regional balance in the Middle East and the possibility that there would be linkage between Saddam Hussein and terrorist groups. Now, those are serious strategic questions, but they are not questions of humanitarian military intervention. You can always add Saddam Hussein's human rights record, which is awful, horrendous, and should be confronted. Should it be confronted by going to war? That was another question.

But, clearly, if I'm trying to explain it to Americans, I say there are two different kinds of interventions. There's humanitarian military intervention, and there's what I call "big-power" intervention. You're intervening for classical, big-power reasons. Weapons of mass destruction [are] a big-power reason. Balances of power in a region -- whether it's Korea or Iraq -- are big-power reasons. I think you have to use two different grids to evaluate what you want to do in those situations.

Q: I hear some Americans who are quite supportive of President Bush and his administration and his policy on Iraq saying, "No weapons of mass destruction, but that's okay because what we have now discovered, instead of these weapons, are all the atrocities that were going on." In retrospect, was this a case where we were justified to go in, in a war situation, to stop this, forgetting weapons of mass destruction?
A: If you said to me, "Were there any humanitarian reasons that could move a policy on Iraq?" I would have to say yes. Did the situation rise to the level that would justify intervention as a matter of course? Then I have more hesitation, because there are a lot of situations in the world with authoritarian, totalitarian governments or madmen in government, and if we are going to use that criterion to intervene, we're going to be intervening in a lot of places.

We should be ready to intervene beyond our national security or vital interest arguments, but we ought not to lower the bar on intervention in world politics to the level where multiple parties are going to find lots of reasons for intervention. There's a balance here that has to be struck.

There were humanitarian reasons to try to displace Saddam Hussein. If we had had a debate about going to war on humanitarian reasons against Saddam Hussein, my inclination would be that the answer would have been no. That didn't mean we couldn't do other things to deal with his human rights policy. But I think we went to war with Iraq for other than humanitarian reasons, and the wisdom of the policy ought to be judged by those reasons.

Q: We seem to be in an era when there are no moral absolutes. You have the faceless enemies. You have terrorists with nuclear weapons [and] the threat of all that. Is the United States the only country in the world to deal with this?
A: No. I think it would be a huge mistake to believe that. First of all, other people are as concerned about the moral significance of world politics as the United States is. They may disagree with us on policy, but as you watched the UN Security Council debate Iraq, there were people who were concerned about weapons of mass destruction, about terrorism, and about the humanitarian reasons. They disagreed about whether the cumulative effect should have been that the United States went to war. But they didn't disagree on the moral argument.

Secondly, you don't want to put the United States in the position of being the only one -- first -- because we're not prepared to deal with every serious moral question in the world where forces are needed, and I think that's understandable. There are other people who have capabilities to address these questions, and we ought to strengthen those capabilities rather than reduce them.

Thirdly, it is very important in this kind of problem, where you are going to mix moral and strategic reasons to decide when you go to war, that we try to cultivate a broad multilateral discussion about this question, because war has a special significance in world politics. Having individual nations decide when they're going to go to war when it isn't absolutely necessary for self-defense is the abiding question in international affairs. We shouldn't be determining that.

Q: That raises a question. When is it morally justified for a nation to go in and take over and interfere in the internal affairs of another country?
A: Well, let's get the easy one out of the way first. What both the moral argument and international law tell you is that you have a right to use force when you've been attacked -- Article 51 of the United Nations Charter -- or to go to the aid of an ally. Those are clear-cut cases, but that's [in response to] aggression. That's why the war against Iraq in 1991 was so easy to justify, so easy to mobilize support for. That was open, naked aggression. The international system should not allow that to happen.

When you get beyond the self-defense argument, then it is more complicated. The argument about humanitarian military intervention is most clearly exemplified in genocide. The international community has said when there's genocide going on inside a country, sovereign boundaries no longer count. Everybody in the system has both a duty and a right to do something about genocide.

When it's less than genocide, who should do what? When it is ethnic cleansing, when it is serious human rights violations that rise to a really significant level but not genocide, should we respond? The answer of the nineties -- in Bosnia, in Kosovo, and in Somalia -- is that there are cases that are less than genocide that should, and can, justify war.

Finally, does every human rights violation justify war? The answer to that, I think, is no, because if you're going to say "ordinary human rights violations" -- an awful term, but I mean a regime that imprisons its opponents, shuts down the press and the labor union, harasses religion -- are a reason for war, then with Amnesty International's human rights evaluation of the world you can have 50, 60 wars a year, and that's got to be a mistake. I think you can move down from self-defense through genocide to ethnic cleansing -- and I would [include] failed states, Liberia and Somalia, in that case. But I would not say every human rights situation in the world justifies the use of force. That's a mistake.

Q: But it's such a fine line, isn't it, and who is going to be the moral judge?
A: You ask a series of questions. When you're on the fine line, what do you do? You put the case out there, first of all. In Rwanda, we wouldn't call it genocide because genocide meant we had to do something. You lift the case up for evaluation. You take a proactive position of demonstrating how bad the situation is.

Secondly, you test the water. Is this the kind of case that, if you use it to go to war, you're going to be perceived as either eroding the UN restraint on war or enforcing better, higher standards of international affairs? You have to test it that way. People on Iraq said, "Terrible things are going on," and the people who disagreed with us on Iraq said, "War is not justified, because there are other ways to deal with them." So you put the situation out there and say, "This is bad. We ought to do something. Is war the answer?" I think very often you're going to get: "War is not the answer."

But if you get the answer that this rises to the level of when you should act, the next step is, who's going to do it? And, on the whole, I think it is better not to have individual nations doing this on their own. An Australian political scientist, Hedley Bull, once put it very well. He said, "Large nations don't worry about intervention because large nations are not intervened upon. It is little nations that worry about intervention as a normal occurrence."

When you have several [nations] going in, it means you've got a debate and a decision; you don't have a single nation acting maybe for multiple reasons, going in and leading the charge. I think humanitarian intervention ought to be a multilateral institution.

Q: What impact, if any, do you think the Iraq situation and how it's turning out will have on Americans urging their government to get involved in these other matters?
A: It depends on how this is discussed or evaluated -- the "lessons learned." Once again, take Liberia and Iraq. The idea that these are the same just is self-evidently not the case. I don't think we ought to use the Iraqi case as an example for judging Liberia. It's complicated, but not nearly as complicated as Iraq. It doesn't take the kind of forces we've got in Iraq, and it has to be done for an entirely different reason.

The debate about Iraq is interesting. Are we going to draw the lesson that, in a world in which weapons of mass destruction are available as they have not been in the past, and terrorism does exist -- we are settled on the notion that we are going to head into war "preemptively" or "preventively"? That's the real debate on the Iraqi case. It's not humanitarian military intervention. It's the debate about preventive war, which is different than preemption. Preemption is a tactic; when you are certain you're going to be attacked, you move first. Hardly anybody argues with that. Preventive war is when you move to war when you have much less than certainty; you have a long-term danger, and you decide you'll get it out of the way first.

If we decide that is normal, good, [and] necessary for the world, I think that will be an erosion of international order rather than an enhancement of it. I would distinguish the two cases [Iraq and Liberia] and then debate each of them on their own grounds.

Q: We hear people using the term "thinking out of the box" and then trying to figure out what the terrorists are up to next. In that same spirit, thinking out of the box here, where are the terrorists in this whole intervention debate? How are they viewing this? Do they feel this is cover? Do they feel they have us over the barrel?
A: Well, notice that we have spent the whole discussion we've had so far on humanitarian intervention and the Iraq case. Both of them are examples of intervention. [In] both of them, states figure significantly. Can you enter Iraq because of its external policy? Can you enter Somalia because of its internal policy?

Terrorists don't fit in either of those categories. Terrorists are transnational actors; they're not state actors. They are not limited to a geographical territory, so they pose a very different case.

I have significant difficulty with large parts of the national security statement of the Bush administration on preventive war. They are right on the notion that deterrence doesn't work against terrorists; to deter someone, they have to have tangible, identifiable, valuable assets that you can guarantee they will lose. Terrorists don't have that. They don't have home addresses. The first thing about them is they don't fit [our] model of world politics.

The second thing is they are private groups. Joe Nye at Harvard says that terrorism is the privatization of war. We talk about privatizing other things in globalization; this is the privatization of war. What September 11th showed was that, as opposed to terrorist groups that threaten a regime, this was a private group of individuals who could do massive damage halfway around the world. They don't fit into the state model, but they do fit into the model of ability to do international damage.

I don't think deterrence works, so you have to have an ongoing policy. I would prefer not to call it "war" -- not that there's no military dimension to it, but calling it a "war on terrorism" creates the expectation that explicit, overt military action is the most important thing you do. I think the most important thing you do on terrorism is intelligence, police work, networking among governments, creating transnational networks of information; and then there may be some military intervention. But that's how you have to deal with terrorism.

Fr. J. Bryan Hehir

Q: If you don't call it a "war on terrorism," what's the more appropriate term?
A: Michael Howard, the British political scientist and historian, treats it as ongoing problem solving. It is problem solving at an international level of great urgency and criticality. But the point is it just doesn't go away in five minutes or one year. The war idea has a beginning [and] end, and military [action] is the most important thing you do. That's what wars look like. This doesn't look like war, it seems to me.

Q: Do the countries that have these problems -- that are in chaos right now, that we're looking at and asking, "Do we need to go in? Do we need to intervene for humanitarian reasons?" -- do they care about sovereignty?
A: Sure, they care about sovereignty, because you've got to care about sovereignty if you want to live in a world of sovereign states. It's kind of like a family. A family values its privacy, but if something really falls apart in the family and somebody's doing harm to kids, then you want some outside force in there because you're unable to deal with it yourself. Liberia doesn't want to lose its place in the world of states. It wants to get to a point where it can function as a responsible state. Right now that's an almost irrelevant question. They have no capability to satisfy minimum levels of personal security. And when that happens, you really are what the political scientists call a "failed state." So they've got a long-term concern for sovereignty and a very short-term concern for reestablishing personal and national security.

Q: But you hear these cries, these pleas: "We want Americans to come." Do they really want Americans to come?
A: I think it will vary. In Liberia there is a historic connection. I mean, people probably feel it. The United States is going to be called on -- and we have to be really conscious of this and grateful for it -- because this is the most successful, best trained, highly motivated, most professional military force in the world. I don't think anybody doubts that. You just have to encounter the American military, and you know that they are highly skilled, very efficient, and have all the resources that anybody could want. If you're in trouble and you're going to call 9-1-1, you're going to reach for that kind of force.

That doesn't necessarily mean we should answer that call every time. There are multiple cases with different people to do the responding. But the call for Americans is based on, in the one instance, efficiency; they'll get it done. There may be other qualifying characteristics, like for Liberia.

Q: Does the fact that our military is, generally speaking, so good now, so surgical in war, make it easier to go in on these borderline humanitarian cases?
A: To some degree, it does. There's no question that airlift capacity, tactical capacity to put troops on the ground in a hurry -- there's a comparative advantage in the American military. I don't think there's any doubt about that. The French are pretty good in given situations, but in the first instance, it's not the surgical nature of the American military. It is the tactical superiority of airlift, sealift -- the ability to put troops in quickly.

I think there has been an enormous effort in the military to try to distinguish between combatants and noncombatants. In the heat of battle, and in the carrying out of things, sometimes that slips, frankly. I've had long-term, personal experiences in sessions with senior military people where they're trying to work out ethics and the use of force. It's a very ancient question. I go to the National War College and lecture. I do seminars on this stuff at Harvard, and that's what they want you to talk about -- ethics and the use of force, and they are serious about it.

It gets tricky in the implementation. There are choices of targets that are not clearly civilian targets but that run a high risk of civilian casualties and that you might want to argue about. But the fact is that when countries ask for Americans first, it's because of tactical and strategic superiority. Targeting ability does play into it, but I think that's a secondary consideration.

Q: Looking at the situation in North Korea now -- that's almost a humanitarian catastrophe. People are dying by the thousands, tens of thousands. How do we approach that -- as humanitarian? As preventive war? Do we intervene?
A: The North Korea case is primarily a big-power case with humanitarian dimensions of great significance. But the lens, if you will, for the North Korea case at the present time is not primarily humanitarian. Four or five years ago, when starvation set in, you could argue that was the lens. But now, with the nuclear weapons threat at the level at which it exists, I think inevitably, in international politics, that is going to be the primary lens.

There are internal, humanitarian problems of major significance. If you take the nuclear weapons out, would we displace the North Korean government because of humanitarian regime change? I don't think you'd get a lot of support for that; because in trying to do it, you could create a major war for South Korea and North Korea. I don't think we'd do that.

Add the weapons of mass destruction, and you open up a whole range of possibilities. Clearly, there needs to be coercive pressure exercised on North Korea to deal with this nuclear question. I like the mix of diplomacy and coercive force that we've used on Korea better than I like the mix we used on Iraq. My argument always was, "If we could do it with North Korea, why couldn't we do it with Iraq?" You had an unstable leader psychologically; you had potential trouble, and, indeed, you can argue the Koreans may have already shared [weapons] materials in a way that the Iraqis might not have.

The policy the Bush administration is following is that North Korea is a big-power question, not primarily a humanitarian question. Humanitarian reasons feed in. That's good. The mix of diplomacy, coercion, and strategy that's being used is, in fact, a good mix, although perhaps it needs added urgency in how we pursue it.

Q: Take the nuclear weapons out of the North Korean situation. With what we know about the humanitarian disaster, why wouldn't we intervene?
A: I said before I wouldn't go in for ordinary human rights violations. This is one of those ones where you run into your fine line. There's a lot of humanitarian suffering. But my hesitation is when you say, "We are now going to resort to war." Go into Liberia and there will be some killing and some shooting. But we are not, I think, in any reasonable sense of the term, talking about a major conflagration. If you go to war on the Korean peninsula -- we've been there before, and we know what that means. We know what it means for the south as well as the north. I think at that point you say, "There ought to be regime change, but going to war to change the regime for humanitarian reasons is outweighed by other characteristics. So let's work on other ways to deal with this."

Q: At the UN, Kofi Annan has said, "Who's going to make the rules?" It's a good question.
A: Yes. One of the interesting things -- and part of our larger discussion, which has been about intervention and sovereignty -- is that the UN has been the great place to protect national sovereignty and to hold to almost an absolute sense of nonintervention. That's the historic role of the UN. Both his predecessors, but particularly Annan, have challenged those two terms again and again, saying, "We're in a different era." In 1999, in his address to the General Assembly at the UN, Annan said, "We now have two cases on record, neither of which can be our future." Rwanda was the case where we did nothing and genocide occurred; and Kosovo was the case where necessary action was taken but there was no authorization for it. Then you get into the question of individual states deciding when they would go to war. [Kofi Annan's] argument was that both of those cases were unsatisfactory, so how do you get to a place where you have a stabilized policy for when you would intervene with authorization and you wouldn't be paralyzed?

I think that is still the framework for the question. Since 1999, what has been added is the intensity of the weapons-of-mass-destruction debate (it has taken on new intensity) and terrorism, which makes it even more complicated. But I think there are ways to sort out the question. Humanitarian military intervention is one set of questions with one set of criteria. Big-power intervention regarding weapons of mass destruction and rogue states is a second set of questions; and a third set of questions is how you deal with private, transnational groups with a capacity to wreak massive damage that must be brought under control. What policy needs to be pursued to do that? I would sort out the debate that way.

Q: And in those three areas, there is no way you can write the handbook --
A: At the present time, there is no way. My feeling over 10 years on this is that, on the intervention question, we have had a crisis of law, politics, and morality.

Q: What do you mean?
A: You have had cases like Rwanda, again, and Kosovo and Somalia, where there was a clear moral reason to intervene. The law said nonintervention is the rule, and policy was left adrift between the legal argument and the moral argument. There is a need to put together a coherent strategy where we have defined cases, using moral criteria, that are approved of legally as legitimate interventions and, therefore, political argument can take place within a settled framework of law and morality -- which we don't have.

Q: But as I hear you talk about it, and I hear all these debates and discussions going on, I look at America and get the sense that we're so polarized we can never really make a decision on any of this.
A: It is partly that we're asked to make so many decisions. We're asked to constantly deal with different kinds of cases. The second reason is that we have this preeminent position in terms of military power, which draws all the questions in our direction; [it] can be a mistake to take that as the basis on which we make these decisions. Thirdly, we have never quite settled on what role we are to play 13 years after the end of the Cold War; we had a very clear sense, when the world was divided between Moscow and Washington and we led NATO and they led the Warsaw Pact, of what we needed to do. I think the collapse of that framework has never produced a consensus of support for a posture for the United States.

If you take the most recent national security statement, it begins with the notion that we are a preeminent, unique, unipolar world and, therefore, we have a whole set of responsibilities and rights that basically no one else has. I think the first proposition is true; we are preeminent. The second proposition --that that makes us unique in duties and responsibilities -- is, I think, too simple. We do have some special duties, but we don't have unique rights that no one else in the globe ought to have.

Q: What's next on our radar, where we're going to have to face these big questions of humanitarian intervention and preventive war?
A: The big-power, strategic debate questions will be the lessons we draw from Iraq. Did we do it correctly or not? Should we have gone to war or not? What does it mean to go into a situation like this? That's going to come up in a select few other cases. But those are cases of enormous importance.

In terms of humanitarian military intervention, unfortunately, Africa is the place that has the greatest potential to produce those kinds of cases. We've had all the cases we've talked about; we haven't even talked about the Congo, which has had rather massive loss of life. There is now a UN force in there. Whether it's capable or not, I don't know. In Africa, they call Congo the "world war." The Sudan has never found any rational, reasonable, effective policy from the wider world to deal with a brutal civil war that's gone on. So Africa is probably the geographical location that could produce the humanitarian military intervention question more so than any other single area of the world.

We've got a big-time strategic debate, we've got the humanitarian debate, and then we've got terrorism. We know that this is a fact of life in a way that it hasn't been in the past; and, therefore, we need coherent policy, both domestic and international, on terrorism. If I tried to put it into a 10-minute speech to the American public, those are the three cases. I'd say, "How are we going to think about the large strategic reality, post-Cold War? [There are] weapons of mass destruction available [and] a multiplicity of states that may try to get them. How do we think about that? How do we think about these cases of humanitarian military intervention -- discrete, complicated, messy; terrible moral dimensions; not high priority in strategic interest. How do we think about that? And, thirdly, what does it mean to deal with terrorism over time, effectively?" War on terrorism is probably the wrong way to frame it; the idea that we've got an ongoing policy challenge of a multidimensional kind is the right way to frame it.

Q: The countries of the UN all have their own self-interest. How do you bring them together?
A: That's why I keep trying to use this distinction between vital interest and national interest. People will say, "There's no vital interest in Liberia; there's no vital interest in Somalia." And the conclusion some draw from that is we ought not to go near it. My point is that the national interest is more than the materiality of your vital interests. It has something to do with the values that you think make up your life as a country, as a state. And therefore, that may bring you to act in a way that vital interests wouldn't.

Getting a common ground of perceived national interests among multiple actors -- that's a big problem. But we've made some progress. There's nobody out there saying that nobody should have done anything about Rwanda. People may say, "Who should have done something?" But nobody's out there saying that's just okay.

If you look at the last 20, 25 years, the emergence of human rights discussions in world politics and human rights as a factor (not the determining factor, but a factor) in foreign policy -- that is an extraordinary shift from the 70 preceding years.

Q: You honestly believe that most Americans are really interested in human rights?
A: I don't think they get up in the morning and talk about it at breakfast. But I think if you want to, [you can] make a case -- and this always takes leadership -- and put it to people, because foreign policy, even more than domestic policy, is something people think they elect people to do for them. There have been cases that have made a difference, where the human rights argument is part of the argument about whether we should do X, Y, and Z. I think that has some salience today that it didn't have before. Go back to the seventies. Remember how Henry Kissinger first treated the human rights claims in the Congress? Basically, he was going to freeze them out of the discussion, and he found out he couldn't do it. It was a complex grid. He got hit from the right and the left. He couldn't do it from the right, because people said he was willing to negotiate anything with the Soviet Union and not pay any attention to human rights in the Soviet Union. And he got it from the left, because people said the role he played in Chile was a good example of why human rights had to restrain U.S. foreign policy, or else we'd do things that we were ashamed of. He's an example of someone who found it mystifying, I think, that you would interject human rights into American foreign policy debate. Eventually, he came to write pieces that said you had to do it; but he was dragged kicking and screaming.

I use that as an example. There have been, over the last 30 years, a series of cases in which I think you can argue that human rights claims have been part of the motivating force in either restraining certain policies or propelling certain policies into action: The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Policy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and vis-à-vis China; people have had to take human rights into consideration in both cases. In the Carter administration, there were cases that had to do with developing countries -- Argentina, Chile, Central America. The Central America debate could not have happened if you put it only in the terms in which the White House was putting it in those days -- namely, that what happens inside those countries is a strategic threat to us. That basically gives you the leeway to do anything you want. If you say, "What's happening in those countries is an enormous struggle about human rights, and we have got to make sure that our strategic interest is also correlated with a belief that we ought to stand for something on human rights," it makes for a different kind of policy.

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