Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is official UN doctrine. Its application in Libya in 2011 must be regarded as a complete failure. What actually occurred in that case was that several states (France, Great Britain and the U.S.) overthrew the Libyan government on the pretext of an impending “genocide” for which there was never evidence even until this day; and there were no judicial-like procedures undertaken to make the case for or against such a “genocide” being factual. In America, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton made major public statements justifying intervention on the basis of a Libyan genocide or mass killing of its own citizens; these statements were fabrications with no factual basis. This is how R2P played out in an important early application.

In fact, the conflict didn’t even meet the definition of a genocide; that was how much the truth was trampled by these states in order to extract a cover of legitimacy for subverting the Libyan government. These three states obtained a Security Council Resolution (1973) and then exceeded it. These states and others (Saudi Arabia and Qatar) were already in the process of feeding and developing the Libyan conflict by infusions of arms and aiding Islamic insurgents. These were violations of the UN Charter. The Arab Spring manifested in Libya was not peaceful demonstrations; it was rebellion that aimed at securing heavy weapons and arming insurgents, many of whom were radical jihadists, and in this it succeeded in its early stages.

The UN presumes that “The State carries the primary responsibility for protecting populations from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing, and their incitement.” However, the State is the institutional means by which these crimes are typically committed. In addition, States more than frequently suppress, kill, undermine and destroy the rights of their own citizens. The UN recognizes the failings of the State, saying “If a State is manifestly failing to protect its populations, the international community must be prepared to take collective action to protect populations, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.”

This assertion of “collective action to protect populations” assumes that there are States that will act for the “good” against States that are acting for “evil”. This is a form of world government in which the good States are empowered or empower themselves to act against the evil States (the ones doing the evil actions or crimes).

Because States are the culprit organizations that facilitate genocides, wars and mass crimes, one might expect that the obvious remedy is to reduce their powers. But since the UN is constructed by States, and no State wants to limit its own powers, this is not the remedy that the UN suggests. This is not what R2P entails. The UN doesn’t identify the root causes of genocides and war crimes and then attempt to influence the world’s States or people accordingly. Instead, the UN appeals to a new entity called “the international community”. This does not exist. It is invoked as a combined legislative-executive-judicial body to define and execute a moral idea, which is the control of State failures to protect populations.

There are major problems with this doctrine. The major one is that the UN or a subset of its States are acting as self-appointed judges and juries. They claim a monopoly on these matters and a jurisdiction. They create a new power themselves for themselves. This is not government of the people, by the people and for the people. These States are not chosen or selected by people throughout the world who can say “Yes, do this. Be our protectors”, or “No, we prefer other means of protection.” The peoples of the world are not choosing the judges. The self-appointed judges are setting themselves up over the world’s peoples.

The danger of this kind of concentration and accumulation of power by means of a self-declaration of power and jurisdiction is self-evident. It may be done in the name of good or anti-crime but it is easily turned to evil means and ends in any number of ways. The powerful States can use it to intervene in the weaker States. A coalition of powerful States can use its self-declared powers to intervene against their own domestic populations or segments thereof. A subset of States can develop and extend R2P to any number of other “evils” that it defines, such as those positive rights already in the UN Charter. It could be argued in the future that failing to provide every person in a country with health care of a certain standard is a crime, or that failing to control the drug trade is a crime, or that failing to jail enough criminals is a crime. R2P is infinitely extendible and expansible, once the precedent is established that the UN has the right or legitimacy to make R2P into international “law”.

Now, it may be argued that the peoples have chosen their State and its representatives, and that these representatives have in turn chosen the UN as their government and now the UN is legislating or instituting an anti-crime law and an enforcement mechanism for it. However, this argument is in all important respects full of holes. The world’s peoples are all under States but they are not all satisfied with their particular arrangements. They are not all satisfied with having their States make treaties that give up their own personal sovereignty to the UN. If the people are the source of any government’s sovereignty and powers, as the democratic theory of States calls for, then there cannot be situations where either these States by themselves or joined together in the UN act as sovereigns, creating their own powers and enforcing them as they will. Yet this is exactly how most political arrangements work today. The States usurp power from their peoples, and now we contemplate the UN usurping powers from the member States, so that a subset of them can implement R2P and legitimize interventions in the affairs of others. The agency theory of government is filled with practical failings; it is basically inapplicable because the government has monopoly power to react on its citizens as opposed to reacting to its people, the latter invariably containing objecting minorities anyway. One can not realistically say that the UN is a legitimate new layer of agency that’s sanctioned by the people. One cannot say that this body has been empowered by the people as a world government to make international law such as R2P.

There are no “good” States. All of them have suspect motivations and intentions. All of them are through and through permeated with a variety of evils, no matter how much good they may or may not be accomplishing. The evil application of R2P in Libya in 2011 is a case in point.

Because the world is filled with evils, many of them perpetrated by using the powers of States, who are in many ways not protecting but harming their citizens or the citizens of other States, R2P could be expanded and applied anywhere and everywhere constantly. The drive to do moral good and eliminate moral evil by use of the law, force and power in ways thought to be legitimate, itself easily results in evil. The law and its application cannot eliminate evil. Extending law into R2P and then logically extending R2P to further reaches of human and State failings will not succeed in accomplishing its goal. It will produce new evils, as it has in its application to Libya.

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