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"[President] Trump inadvertently made an important point: the emperor—the prevailing diplomatic approach—has no clothes. ... Those norms are inextricably linked to the liberal world order that emerged after World War II. The ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) doctrine—the world’s commitment, adopted unanimously by the UN General Assembly in 2005, to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity—exemplifies this liberal diplomacy. ... But, in the past couple of decades, it has been all downhill for this vision. In Libya—the first case where the UN Security Council authorised a military intervention based on R2P—UN envoys come and go, but the country’s future is decided by foreign powers acting unilaterally. And, with the Security Council deadlocked, R2P hasn’t been invoked to justify military intervention since, despite several notable mass atrocities perpetrated by people’s own governments.
The repeated failure of the UN’s collective security system can be partly attributed to the decline of the liberal world order itself. Long before Trump, America had become increasingly reluctant to act as the order’s guarantor (in Libya, President Barack Obama vowed that the US would ‘lead from behind’). Add to this Russia’s aggressive revisionism, China’s abandonment of its ‘peaceful rise’ and the European Union’s preoccupation with its own survival. ...
But many of the world’s biggest diplomatic challenges—from the Israeli–Palestinian conflict to the dispute over Western Sahara—predate these factors. Even at its peak, liberal diplomacy could not resolve them, not least because it too often treated statecraft as an expressive art, detached from an ever-changing reality.
Consider the fight over Western Sahara—Africa’s longest-running territorial dispute. In 1975, with Spain poised to cede control of the territory, the International Court of Justice rejected Morocco’s claim to it, and ruled that the local people, the Sahrawis, were entitled to self-determination. But Morocco quickly invaded and annexed the territory. ...
For example, the recent eruption of the decades-old conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh ended with a Russia-brokered deal that legitimised Azerbaijan’s annexation of a significant amount of territory. Russian peacekeeping forces were dispatched to enforce the deal. The UN was nowhere to be found. ..."
The end of liberal diplomacy? | The Strategist
