Humanitarianism creates a responsibility to protect

The argument

A common rebuttal to the doctrine of humanitarian intervention is that sovereignty is absolute, so foreign powers cannot intervene in domestic issues. However, this assertion quickly falls apart once one asks where sovereign authority comes from. The foundation of sovereignty, or supreme authority, is the social contract between the people and the state: the state is owed obedience and non-interference because it protects those it governs. If the state violates this contract by violating the fundamental human rights of its populace, it forfeits the very ground on which its immunity rests, and its conduct necessitates action from onlookers. Sovereignty is a conditional protection for a state's people, not a licence to do as it wishes to them. Crucial to this argument is the lengths to which superpowers have gone in the past to uphold ideological doctrines. The Cold War demonstrated that the US was willing to entrench itself in Korea, Vietnam, and numerous other conflicts to fight communism — protracted, expensive interventions undertaken for the sake of a principle, and undertaken well beyond its own borders. The objection that intervention is impossible, unaffordable, or improperly extraterritorial is therefore not available to states with that record. Why, then, will they not show the same commitment to fighting genocide or war crimes abroad? The capacity plainly exists; only the willingness is missing, and the difference between the two cases is what is being defended rather than whether defending it is feasible. If liberal democracies wish to continue upholding the values of individual liberty, then they cannot justify inaction against atrocities simply because those atrocities occur outside their borders. A commitment to individual rights that stops at a frontier is a commitment to one's own citizens rather than to rights as such. We now live in a globalized world, in which such events are known about as they happen and states are connected to the places where they occur, so there are no more excuses to watch on as cruelty occurs abroad.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Humanitarian intervention doesn't challenge sovereignty through its meddling with domestic politics, but through its misunderstanding of those politics. Hypothetically, the United Nations may have been able to temporarily suppress the genocide in a country like Rwanda. However, it would not even begin to address the ethnopolitical roots of the fractures in that society. A clear example is the Syrian civil war. Despite President Bashir al-Assad using biological weapons against his people, the United States had their hands tied. Among the combatants in the civil war, there was no clear ally for the US to support. The government was corrupt, some of the rebels had ties to terrorist organizations, and many other barriers made an intervention impossible. Most notably, the more than a decade of conflict in the middle-East made many would-be rescuers wary of intervention. As virtuous as an intervention may be, it is often merely a bandaid. Unfortunately, the domestic politics of a foreign country are often too complex for an intervening power to understand.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Sovereignty is still a matter for the individual nation to decide internally. i.e. elections, revolutions, etc. [Rejecting P2] The stakes of a conflict like the Cold War were much greater than the domestic issues of a small nation.