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increasingly determined to hold their governments to account. This
value-based argument was inextricable from the interest-based
argument. So enough with the accusations of bleeding heart liberals
seeking to intervene for strictly moral reasons.
We also now know how different intervention looks when we help
forces who want to be helped. East Timor, Bosnia-Herzegovina,
Kosovo, Libya – all cases where force evened out odds between a
brutal government and a widespread and legitimate social or national
movement. It is difficult to know when a state has failed in its
responsibility to protect its people, particularly when secession is
involved. This is why international authorisation is both required and
difficult to obtain. But the contrast with Iraq and Afghanistan, where
external invasion saw the US often labelled as an enemy, is
enormous.
Another clear lesson: the depiction of America as “leading from
behind” makes no sense. In a multi-power world with problems that
are too great for any state to take on alone, effective leadership must
come from the centre. Central players mobilise others and create the
conditions and coalitions for action – just as President Barack Obama
described America’s role in this conflict. In truth, US diplomacy has
been adroit in enabling action from other powers in the region, and
then knowing when to step out of the way.
That said, we must not focus just on states, because Libya also shows
that social forces are increasingly powerful drivers of foreign policy.
Those forces have now pushed both the west and Arab governments
into taking a much harder line than simply geostrategic logic would
dictate against Bashar al-Assad’s brutality in Syria, and even (albeit
timidly) against torture and killings by the Bahraini government.
Social movements are also beginning to reshape politics in Israel and
India.

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