UN Security Council voting on a resolution draft endorsing the Syria cease-fire arrangement brokered by Russia and Turkey as well as the new peace talks plan among Syrian conflict parties at the UN headquarters in New York. Picture by Xinhua SIPA USA/PA Images. All rights reserved.The record of western support of terrible regimes is well known, less so the attempts to break with this policy. Then, the strategic interests were seen to be better protected by an alliance with the emerging political forces. President Eisenhower chose to support Gamal Abdel Nasser during the Suez Crisis in 1956 against the old colonial masters, France and the UK, who aligned with Israel, set out to topple him by war. More recently, we have President Barrack Obama’s decision not to support Mubarak at the onset of the Arab Spring.
Humanitarian interventions turned into humanitarian catastrophes
The end of the Cold War in 1989 gave rise to visions of a new world order in the image of what the German historian Heinrich August Winkler has termed the “normative project of the West”. Winkler’s theory is that democracy, human rights and the separation of powers in government work as political ideals that drive improvements by demonstrating how the actual policies fall short of these standards. The political tool of this western normative project became Kofi Annan’s proposal as UN Secretary General for humanitarian interventions. Sadly, this did not work. The idea of humanitarian intervention turned into humanitarian catastrophes. The series of Western military interventions from Afghanistan to Iraq and Libya have caused failed states and intractable conflicts with destruction, death and suffering on a grand scale.
States disintegrated instead of improving
