LIBYA AND THE SOROS DOCTRINE
This was published yesterday at FrontPage.com. It’s my take on the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine (R2P) and how it may become a threat to national sovereignty.
A sample:
The ICISS was chaired by Gareth Evans, former foreign minister for Australia, whose thoughts about the report and sovereignty in particular bear looking at in detail. Mr. Evans sought to turn the debate on sovereignty “on its head” by “characteriz[ing] it not as an argument about the ‘right’ of states to anything, but rather about their ‘responsibility’ — one to protect people at grave risk.”
That “responsibility” is to be defined by the United Nations. Mr. Evans envisions a world where sovereign nations are hardly “sovereign” as we understand the term. Indeed, Evans is seeking nothing less than a brand new definition of sovereignty — what he calls “a new way of talking about sovereignty itself.” The starting point, he says, is that sovereignty “should now be seen not as ‘control,’ as in the centuries-old Westphalian tradition, but, again, as ‘responsibility.’”
No “rights.” No “control.” At least Mr. Evans is willing to let nations keep their borders — for now — although that may also be under threat from R2P. One can imagine the United Nations taking the US to task for trying to keep millions of illegals from crossing our border: We have no “right” to keep hungry, desperate people from seeking a better life. Might our border policies also violate the R2P doctrine? Indeed, such an argument is already being made.
In 2004, the Secretary General Kofi Annan set up a blue ribbon committee to examine the ICISS findings and issue a report to the United Nations. The Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change swallowed the “new” definition of sovereignty while recommending R2P be adopted as a matter of policy and law. Their report, “A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility,” recommended that it be the responsibility “of every State when it comes to people suffering from avoidable catastrophe, mass murder and rape, ethnic cleansing by forcible expulsion and terror, and deliberate starvation and exposure to disease.”
In other words, “responsibility” has morphed from the 1990s concept–which entailed that it is up to the world community or voluntary coalitions to intervene where necessary to protect innocents–to a set of rules that sovereign nations themselves must satisfy the United Nations or the hammer will fall.