Moreover, what is one to do when peaceful means really are unavailing? Humanitarian groups called loudly for intervention in Rwanda; and in that case, with Somalia fresh in memory, no one listened. Foley presumably wishes that the interventionists had succeeded, for he tells the familiar story of the United Nations’ failure to heed the desperate calls from Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian general who headed the small peacekeeping force there. But Foley doesn’t actually say that an intervention would have been justified—nor that “Rwanda never again” is a rallying cry worth raising.

Despite claims from the “anti-imperialist” left—which Foley does not countenance—states do not lightly send soldiers into battle to halt atrocities across the globe. Humanitarian interventions are waged in countries so far gone that all alternatives look bad and almost all consequences ugly. And yet we must choose. Foley’s suggestion that humanitarian organizations in Somalia should have sought to “re-empower traditional community leaders through dialogue,” rather than beat the drums for military action, does not sound all that persuasive. And even that feckless engagement saved several hundred thousand lives. Foley also argues that both Kosovo and Bosnia remain ethnically riven and enfeebled states. That’s true; but it’s also true that the Balkans are no longer a war zone and that Serbia is a democracy, if a tenuous one. Is that so very bad an outcome?

In later chapters of The Thin Blue Line, Foley wrestles with the difficult question of how, or whether, humanitarian aid can be used to force political change. He offers hard wisdom distilled from years of experience. Humanitarians, he argues, should worry less about conformity to the supposedly universal principles and inalienable rights that preoccupy Westerners than they should about “building trust” among donors, the general public, and beneficiaries. And the best way to gain the trust of host countries, he notes, is to show respect for their sovereignty and their domestic capacity. Foley would not have us help less, but he would have us impose less. One of the few encouraging stories he tells concerns Mozambique, which weaned itself from dependence on foreign aid and inscribed in its disaster-preparedness report a determination to stop “running to international donors without first exhausting national capacities.”

But we should ask ourselves whether international relations are now plagued by too little respect for sovereignty, or too much. Certainly if you were to ask the leaders of the Group of 77 at the United Nations or regional bodies such as the African Union (AU), the answer would be “too little,” as it is for Foley. That’s why, for example, efforts to penalize Khartoum for unleashing a campaign of murder and ethnic cleansing in Darfur have largely come to naught; that’s why the AU is seeking to postpone by a year the war crimes indictment of Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir by the International Criminal Court. These largely Western-inspired efforts are said to constitute an assault on Sudan’s sovereignty—as if the prerogatives and protections that belong to Sudan and its citizens had been transferred to Bashir and his regime. Are the sovereign rights of the peaceful Mozambiques of this world really so threatened that we should mount a campaign of deference that will serve as protective cover for the likes of Sudan, Zimbabwe, or Burma?

In 2005, the world’s heads of state, gathered at the U.N. General Assembly, adopted the doctrine of “the responsibility to protect,” which stipulates that states have an obligation to protect their citizens from crimes against humanity and other mass atrocities, and that, should they be unable or unwilling to do so, other states incur that obligation. That responsibility, in the most extreme cases, includes military action. R2P, as the norm has come to be known, formalizes the principle, which lies at the heart of humanitarian intervention, that the right of people to be free from the worst forms of mistreatment supersedes the right of states to be free from external intervention. It is scarcely possible in the aftermath of Rwanda to argue otherwise, and so no one does directly. But the principle is under attack from the absolutists of sovereignty, a group that includes not just Iran and Venezuela but India and Egypt. And the war in Iraq has made it all too easy for the absolutists to claim that the United States and other Western countries will cite the moral imperative of R2P to intervene when and where they wish. Perhaps that’s a real danger, but what seems far likelier is that Iraq has poisoned the logic of humanitarian intervention for years to come. Anti-interventionists like Foley may take comfort in that thought; others, however, will rightly view it as a tragedy.