How humanitarian concern became perverted into a justification for war [Trump in Iran]

Amanda Taub, How Good Intentions Helped Pave Trump’s Road to Iran, NYTimes, March 7, 20226.

If Iran “violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue,” President Trump wrote on Truth Social in January as protesters flooded the streets of Iran in the largest anti-government demonstrations in the country’s history. “We are locked and loaded and ready to go.”

As it turned out, Iran did kill thousands of protesters. But the United States was not as ready as it claimed. It was not until Feb. 28 that the U.S. and Israel launched an attack on Iran’s government.

That's how Taub begins her article. She then goes on to list Trump's shifting justifications for the war before circling back to humanitarian concern:

Few believe that Mr. Trump is driven by a concern for human rights. He has also made clear his lack of interest in international law. And the war has already been catastrophic for many Iranian civilians, including dozens killed at an elementary school in an apparent U.S. missile strike on a nearby naval base. Yet the invocation of humanitarianism to help justify the war taps into — whether the president intends it or not — a powerful argument that has reshaped the global order since the end of the Cold War.

Under international law, force is permitted only in self-defense against an armed attack, or with authorization from the U.N. Security Council. There is no right to invade another country to protect civilians, even if their own government is the one harming them. That can often lead to governments or armed militias getting away with massacring protesters, torturing prisoners, committing ethnic cleansing or other atrocities. These rules of international law and the institutions that apply them have long been a source of anger.

The doctrine known as the “Responsibility to Protect,” often abbreviated as R2P by foreign-policy wonks, sought to change that. It emerged out of an era of liberal triumphalism, when the United States, its allies and some international institutions started to believe that sometimes, might could be a force for right — perhaps even if that meant violating international law.

But the effort to carve out a humanitarian exception, experts say, has left a weak spot in legal norms around the use of force — one that can now be exploited by leaders seeking to justify invasions of other sovereign states.

Nor is Trump the only leader to invoke "humanitarian logic" to justify war. Putin did so for Russia's 2014 invasion of Crimea and 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

“It’s more effective to pick up a tool that already exists than to create a new one,” said Kate Cronin-Furman, a professor at University College London and the author of “Hypocrisy and Human Rights: Resisting Accountability for Mass Atrocities.”

“There’s an academic conception of zombie norms, which are norms of international law that get sort of hollowed out, but still hang around with rhetorical relevance, even though they don’t seem to really constrain anyone’s behavior,” Professor Cronin-Furman said.

The fact that Responsibility to Protect once had considerable legitimacy, she said, means that Mr. Trump, or Mr. Putin, can still draw on it now.

The rest of the article goes on to discuss the origins of the Responsibility to Protect and how Putin and Trump have been able to exploit it for their own somewhat different ends and further harm is likely to follow.

International law is a funny thing. With no real means of enforcement, it’s essentially a set of reciprocal expectations. It only works if states believe others will follow the rules, too. Anything that departs from those expectations weakens that system. [...]

Another tragedy of the current situation is that civilians remain in urgent need of protection from mass violence — and solutions to that problem seem more remote than ever.

There's more at the link.