Corridors of Power: Should America Police the World?

In 2012, unarmed protests in Syria turned into a civil war with more than 100,000 deaths and 1.5 million refugees. President Obama does not want to get involved in the fighting and decides to train and arm Syrian rebels. But when President Assad uses chemical weapons against civilians and 1,500 defenseless men, women and children die, Obama has no choice but to intervene militarily.

If Obama is elected president, the American people will expect him to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not start a new one. But when Libyan dictator Gaddafi marches on Benghazi with genocidal intent in 2011, Obama is confronted with the choice he most wants to avoid. The president hesitates, he is against military intervention, but European pressure and the influence of his younger advisors are great. Obama opts for a new strategy: America does not take the lead, the responsibility is shared with other countries.

In 2003, the government of Sudan begins a murderous campaign of cleansing against the ethnic minority in Darfur, a vast area in the west of the country. In the US, many citizens and politicians are committed to Darfur. One of the prominent speakers at the largest meeting of this movement is Senator Barack Obama, the new candidate for president at the time. His closest campaign members, such as John Kerry and Samantha Power, are among the most outspoken and militant advocates of humanitarian intervention in Darfur. But the republican government is also not closing its eyes to the drama.

Less than three years have passed since the war against Bosnia, but the world has changed completely. Madeleine Albright is now the first female Secretary of State and in Britain the young and dynamic Tony Blair shares the American vision of the world. President Clinton himself has complete control over the international arena. If there is a threat of a new genocide in Kosovo, he is prepared to take a tougher stance.

Why does the world allow the genocide in Rwanda to take place in the spring of 1994? Nothing stands in the way of an intervention and yet 800,000 people are slaughtered in a short time, while the world watches. The explanation seems to lie in another part of Africa, where eighteen American soldiers died during a humanitarian mission a few months earlier. Their bodies are dragged through the streets and shown on national television. The incident led to a hasty withdrawal of American troops from Somalia, and to the Clinton administration's inexplicable decision not to intervene again in Africa.

The fall of the Berlin Wall offers a new opportunity to finally fulfill the promise of 'Never Again'. For a new generation of leaders, the triumph of the West brings with it an obligation to use their power to make the world a better, safer place for all humanity, and especially for the most vulnerable and defenseless communities. The collapse of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, which quickly escalated into a bloodbath, becomes their first test.

At the end of WWII, world leaders pledge that such man-made atrocities will never happen again. But during the Cold War, such promises were regularly overlooked in the name of geopolitical wisdom. An example of this is the relationship between the US and Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Hussein's war with revolutionary Iran, a US sworn enemy, leads Washington to ignore reports of Saddam's atrocities against his own people. America continues to provide him with military and economic aid even as Hussein uses chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers.