Anthony Lake spoke before
a capacity MHC crowd February 10. His talk kicked off the Weissman
Center's spring series, U.S. Foreign Interventions: Human Rights and
National Interest. By Kathryn Palmer '00 Lake illustrated the failures
of humanitarian intervention with statistics of casualties among
children. Aware that the sheer numbers might be daunting, Lake
appealed to his audience to "put faces on these children whose faces
are disfigured as their fortunes and futures are disfigured." The
focus of his address was the clash between pragmatism and idealism.
This, he says, is the question of humanitarian intervention. According to Lake,
humanitarian intervention is not always successful because it is
debated in the wrong way. Such intervention is thought of as a
doctrine, yet it is not a doctrine, nor should it be, he says. "It
implies that we will always intervene in any case of humanitarian
catastrophe around the world and that because we have such
overwhelming power, we are not only, it seems, omnipotent, but we are
omni-responsible for everything that happens around the world.
Therefore, a failure to act in any situation is a failure of American
responsibility," Lake said. He argued that we need to discard this
misleading approach and to address three questions instead: When to
intervene? How to intervene? and most importantly, Why should we
intervene and what are the purposes of peacekeeping? "Any doctrinal answer is
going to lead to rigidity, unreality, and dangerous miscalculation,"
Lake said. Referring back to the theme of pragmatism and idealism, he
stated that we should make an attempt to balance interests and the
gravity of the humanitarian crisis and should do so on a case-by-case
basis. The most striking and appalling pieces of information included
in his lecture were the statistics on Kosovo and Southern Sudan. Lake
compared the 15,000 killed in Kosovo last year to the 2 million
killed in the last decade in southern Sudan. This approach is part and
parcel, according to Lake, of performing peacekeeping duties
adequately." "It does nobody any good to intervene when it won't
work," according to Lake. It damages that society and "damages our
ability to do peacekeeping elsewhere." He cited Kosovo as an example
of a situation in which we had the right to intervene, but did so "to
put stop to a slaughter" rather than to solve it. Lake further stressed the
importance of doing peacekeeping properly by saying, "To do
peacekeeping right involves asking what are our purposes, how do we
define success, and how do we get out again. We must use our head,
but in the end this is an issue that must engage our hearts as well."
While members of the audience
may have been looking for a how-to approach to foreign policy or
predictions of how humanitarian intervention will work, Anthony Lake
told us instead that we must change our approach to foreign policy
and how humanitarian intervention ought to work. Whether or not one
agreed with him, the synthesis of his pragmatism and idealism, his
hard logic and compassionate thinking, his head and heart, are enough
to make us all proud to call him "one of our own."
"W hen I woke up in
the morning I wanted to save every child and I wanted to use American
power to heal every wound around the world--but we can't. We have to
make choices," Anthony Lake said, beginning his lecture February 10
at Gamble Auditorium before an audience of about 300 people. Alluding
to his former position as an MHC professor, Eva Paus, codirector of
the Weissman Center, introduced Lake by noting, "We still consider
him one of our own." Lake's talk, "Foreign Humanitarian Intervention:
Which Children to Save," was the first event in the Weissman Center's
spring series, U.S. Foreign Interventions: Human Rights and
National Interest.
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