Publicly denouncing war and liberals was a regular part of Donald Trump’s communication in his 2024 presidential campaign. Yet, as president, Trump has been relying on the responsibility to protect idea associated with liberals he would normally ridicule as a basis for the US engaging in wars abroad.

In October of 2016, the month before Donald Trump won the race to succeed Barack Obama as president, David Stockman wrote about an example of the terrible damage the US following a responsibility to protect standard in foreign policy can yield. In particular, Stockman wrote about Syria being “a lawless, bombed-out, economically decimated failed state today owing to Washington’s heavy-handed intervention at the behest of the War Party’s bloody twin sisters.” Those “twin sisters,” continued Stockman, are “the neocons — led by the contemptible Kagan clan — and the R2P liberal interventionist claque around Hillary Clinton, including UN Ambassador Samantha Powers and National Security Council head Susan Rice.”

Stockman here used the term “R2P” to reference responsibility to protect.

For some more details on what responsibility to protect entails, consider this excerpt from “Humanitarian Intervention: Destroying Nations to Save Them” by Ibrahim Kazerooni and Rob Prince from 2013:

What distinguishes the more recent forms of humanitarian intervention is that thanks to the writings of the likes of Samantha Powers and Susan Rice, humanitarian intervention now has a more comprehensive theoretical justification, i.e., the pretexts for military intervention have become more refined, coated with phony concern for “the people.” It was used to justify the military intervention in Libya, and until less than a month ago was the emotional cutting edge for greater military intervention in Syria.

As........

© Eurasia Review