The two-level politics of support—US foreign policy and the responsibility to protect

Abstract

This article investigates the US foreign and security policy with regard to the responsibility to protect (R2P). Based on the analysis of expert interviews and official documents, it traces the US position on R2P across critical junctures between the principle's 2005 adoption at the UN World Summit and its latest invocations in the Syrian crises of 2013. It discusses the recent atrocity prevention agenda of the US Government as ambitious and as a still evolving operationalisation of R2P. The article reveals several patterns in US attitude and practices towards R2P across recent administrations: the avoidance of new obligations in international law despite a general supportive attitude towards R2P; a deeply-rooted pragmatism that leads to the development of practical tools that follow-up on the principles it commits to, even if R2P language had to be avoided in domestic politics; and a constant balancing act between domestic- and international-level politics.

Introduction

When US ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power was asked during her confirmation hearing how she would define the ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P), she responded that when civilians were murdered by their governments, ‘it's incumbent on us to look’ for ways to halt the bloodshed, and concluded by saying that the principle is ‘less important, I think, than U.S. practice and U.S. policy’.1

This response aptly summarises the ambivalence of US foreign and security policy towards this UN concept: the US certainly subscribes to the main principles of R2P and, as this article demonstrates, has supported it sometimes tacitly, sometimes more forcefully during the critical junctures of the first decade of its existence. However, there is an inherent tension between this generally supportive attitude and the frequently sceptical interpretations of R2P heard in some US public and political discourses.

Large parts of the US public discourse have always been deeply sceptical of R2P and this has translated into a discomfort with including R2P in political rhetoric. As a recent report ‘The United States and R2P—From Words to Action’ by Madeleine K. Albright and Richard Williamson summarises: ‘unfortunately, R2P is better known in many other parts of the world than it is in the United States, and to the extent the phrase is familiar to the U.S. public, it is often misunderstood’.2 This misunderstanding arises from the perception that R2P obliges the US to foreign interventions if mandated by the international community; a mandate, which in turn is created through procedural automaticity at the UN. This interpretation of R2P is not backed by international law, but is nonetheless powerful enough to make US politicians and diplomats tread lightly when discussing R2P domestically and adjust their national and international public rhetoric and efforts of norm entrepreneurship accordingly.

As this article shows, the challenge of coping with a sceptical public has affected the R2P practices of both recent US administrations on domestic and international levels. But while there are continuities between the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, there are also notable differences. First, both were committed to developing pragmatic tools to ensure a coherent set of policies designed to prevent mass atrocities, which by and large corresponds to pillars one and two of R2P. However, it was the Obama administration that finally implemented a large-scale policy change within the US bureaucracy, by introducing the atrocity prevention agenda. With this, it takes on a global leadership role in domestically operationalising the main elements of R2P. But as this article discusses, the success of this agenda has been partly based on the decision not to frame it in R2P terminology and initiate it through a bureaucratic process led by the president rather than the US Congress.

Second, both administrations have tended to avoid language and international agreements that could be domestically perceived as legally binding or limiting its sovereign freedom to act. This concern about decision-making sovereignty, as Luck calls it, differentiates the US from the emerging powers being analysed in this special issue,3 who instead closely guard their territorial sovereignty.4 These powers’ scepticism towards R2P is partially rooted in a wary attitude towards being the target of foreign interventions—not in retaining the freedom to intervene themselves. Although both US administrations have catered to this latter frame of defending sovereignty, they have done so for different reasons. The Bush administration was inherently sceptical towards new international obligations and multilateral decisions: scepticism of large parts of the public and the governing political elite coincided. Inside the Obama administration, there has been less scepticism (though it still exists) towards R2P, but rather a careful avoidance of becoming a target for those voicing this scepticism within Congress5 or being perceived as weak on matters of national security.

Third, US diplomats from both administrations have frequently invoked R2P in UN debates on severe humanitarian crises, genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, and have helped to shape international responses accordingly. The foreign policy of the Bush administration was based in large part on neoconservative interventionism, and R2P as a frame was occasionally consistent with that pattern. During Bush's second term, the administration was far more reticent in using R2P: the loss of credibility over the Iraq intervention and the ‘war on terror’ worked against effective R2P framing, while, at the same time, the administration took pains to avoid further obligations to international law.

The Obama administration, despite having ardent and influential supporters of R2P on its foreign policy team, has also been reluctant to embrace R2P wholeheartedly. While the concept is consistent with its more multilateralist impulses and the aforementioned atrocity prevention agenda, the Obama foreign policy is still restrained, carefully weighing its options between national security interests and values.6 Again, the reasons for this are a sceptical interpretation of R2P in parts of the public and the US Congress—where key players are wary of multilateral engagement and allocating corresponding budget items—and widely shared war fatigue after the experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Obama administration has thus attempted to convince a sceptical public on a case-by-case basis, while the Bush administration tended to voice its scepticism. Despite the fact that reasons for the reluctance to invoke R2P vary between the two administrations, the result is a single nearly-consistent interpretation of the concept: it is viewed as a moral principle that should guide—not bind—the international community, while binding those governments under whose jurisdiction atrocities are committed.

Thus, US R2P practices should be understood as a balancing act between domestic and international deeds and words. This article traces the complex interdependencies and ambivalences of these two-level politics.7 Based on the analysis of expert interviews8 and official documents, this article scrutinises the handling of both the explicit references to R2P in US foreign and security policy and the concrete measures congruent with the objectives of R2P.9 After introducing continuities of and constraints on US foreign policy, it focuses on critical junctures that occurred between R2P's 2005 adoption at the UN World Summit and its latest invocations in the Syrian crises of 2013.10 The last section discusses the atrocity prevention agenda as a partial, but ambitious operationalisation of R2P.

Intervening abroad: continuities of and constraints on US foreign policy

At the heart of R2P as defined by world leaders at the UN World Summit in 2005 lies the dual responsibility of a state to protect its own population from grave human rights violations and, in case another state fails to do so, to support the international community in its efforts to protect populations at risk. The latter requires both the capacity and willingness to monitor developments and to interfere abroad—be it via diplomatic, developmental or military measures. The status of the US as a superpower11 has always been linked to such a capacity and willingness. While the term and the combination of principles enshrined in R2P is a recent development, the US has a long history of response and non-response to grave atrocities abroad. This section provides a brief overview of the developments of the last two decades and how they fit into continuities in US foreign and security policy-making.

In August 2011, President Obama initiated a national security policy review devoted to the creation of an interagency Atrocities Prevention Board (APB) by issuing the so-called Presidential Study Directive 10 (PSD-10). He declared that, ‘[p]reventing mass atrocities and genocide is a core national security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States’.12 This was the final step of a journey that started with the experience of genocide in Rwanda and Srebrenica.13 The well-documented failure to act decisively in both instances triggered the development of R2P within the UN context,14 and provoked institutional changes within the Clinton administration such as the creation of the Office for War Crime Issues in the State Department and an Atrocity Prevention Interagency Working Group.15

The subsequent administration of President George W. Bush left many of these Clinton-era structures in place, and helped to shape the emergence of R2P on the international scene. It even showed a willingness to engage in conflicts on the African continent, most notably in Liberia and Sudan, including Darfur, as will be discussed below. However priorities shifted following 11 September 2001. The ‘war on terror’ and the Iraq intervention were expressions of a more unilateral approach, with a focus on using military means in defence of national security. In fact, the new interventionism heralded during the last years of the Clinton presidency had never met with enough domestic or international support to be effective. The presidential campaign of George W. Bush found its opposition to Clintonian interventionism to be a very powerful campaign theme.16

Historically, this fits the pattern of a constant shift between isolationism and interventionism in US foreign and security policy. While the presidency of George W. Bush, particularly post-11 September, has often been portrayed as an aberration in recent American foreign and security policy, in fact, many of its characteristics are a continuation of the normal variance between isolationist and interventionist tendencies and between idealistic and realistic motivations.17

One component of US foreign and security policy has always been to emphasise a hegemonic, moralising exceptionalism for its own actions,18 and to reserve the right of unilateral military intervention into another state's affairs if it feels its national security has been gravely violated.19 What exactly encompasses ‘national security’ has been subject to great variance over time. Interest-based realistic and value-based idealistic foreign policy approaches have often gone hand in hand.20 While in some cases, US administrations have used humanitarian reasoning as a mere tactical tool to garner domestic or international support (as in Iraq in 2003),21 there were many instances in which there was less instrumentalisation or cynicism, and rather a real ambition to take action when basic human rights were being systematically violated (as in Kosovo in 1999).22 That those ambitions have often failed when confronted with genocide is described in detail by Power: despite being self-aware of its leadership role in shaping international politics in the last century, as well as its history as a country of immigrants and refugees, active interventions by the United States have often been prevented by narrow definitions of national security, the intricacies of a political system based on checks and balances and a tradition of polarised debate in politics and media.23

The various checks and balances between the departments of the executive branch (most notably between the State Department/USAID, the Pentagon, the National Security Staff, the Intelligence Community and the Department of Treasury, each of whom set different priorities on foreign and security policy issues) as well as between the executive and the legislative branches provide ample room for deliberation and control. When they are united, they can act swiftly in matters of foreign and security policy. Cohesion within the administration is ensured by the fact that large numbers of key positions are filled anew with each new president. In particular in foreign and security policy, the position of the president remains strong and his personality matters a great deal.24

When it comes to R2P, the Obama administration included some officials who have been at the forefront of those who see the US as having both a moral and a legal obligation to act when faced with large-scale atrocities. This results in frequent disputes within the administration with more restrained players who adhere to more traditional notions of national security interest, like former Defence Secretary Robert Gates.25 As the discussion of the cases of Libya and Syria will show, Obama himself is often sceptical of interfering more forcefully abroad. The most prominent advocates for intervention were Samantha Power, at first Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights on the National Security Council, then Permanent Representative to the UN, and Susan Rice, first Permanent Representative to the United Nations, then National Security Advisor. The Bush administration also gave posts to ardent supporters of a more engaged US such as John Danforth, special envoy to Sudan and later US ambassador to the UN.

With the exception of posts within the National Security Council staff at the White House, the US Senate needs to confirm all nominations made by the president. In general, the US Congress can influence and constrain the president via legislation, control (hearings and committee investigations) and public comments designed to change public opinion.26 However, the most important tools are its budgetary power and its right to declare war.27 It matters whether a president can count on his own party to be in the majority or whether the presidency and the majority in the chambers of the US Congress are held by different parties: partisan support gives the president much more flexibility, which tends to lead to longer and more robust military actions.28

In the US, any implementation of R2P policies—whether in pillars one and two, the ‘preventive’ pillars, or three, its ‘interventionist’ pillar—is subject to the checks and balances of the government branches and agencies, which means that there are many audiences an administration must cater to and many veto points it must reckon with. However, R2P principles fall on fertile ground, as they are increasingly congruent with parts of US foreign policy objectives and institutional capacities.

The US and R2P along critical junctures

The following section will examine the R2P-related interpretations, attitudes and practices in international fora as well as the US bureaucracy during critical junctures that provoked an international debate on R2P between 2005 and 2013. As the most powerful player in world politics in the last decades, the US was certainly involved in all these instances, not least through their UN Security Council veto power. While some critical junctures have received more attention in US foreign and security policy deliberations than others, most US policy responses were shaped by the interdependencies and ambivalences between domestic and international politics as described above.

World Summit 2005

The UN General Assembly adopted R2P in resolution 60/1 in 2005. The Bush administration supported the main idea of R2P: that state sovereignty carries the dual responsibility of each sovereign state to protect its own population as well as that of the international community to protect populations if a state fails to do so itself. Nevertheless, the engagement of the US during the World Summit negotiations of 2005 was ‘ambivalent’.29 While US diplomats agreed that each sovereign state was obliged to protect its own citizens, they argued that the international community's responsibility should be decided upon a case-by-case basis and be enacted within the existing institutional framework. There was to be neither legal obligation nor any kind of automaticity for international humanitarian interventions.

As the other studies in this special issue show, the fear of limiting national sovereignty that was voiced during preparations for the 2005 World Summit remains within the global mainstream (with the exception of some European positions).30 However, there is an interesting twist that differentiates the US case from that of the emerging powers discussed in this issue: while the latter tend to fear interventions into their territory or sphere of influence by an international system still dominated by the West,31 US discourse has centred around the notion of protecting itself from the obligation to take part in such interventions.32 US diplomats worked hard to retain the US's freedom to act of its own accord—a position widely criticised by the Non-Aligned Movement, who were concerned about the potential abuse of R2P after the experience of the Iraq intervention.33

The ambition of preserving US sovereignty was a leitmotif of R2P-related policy for the George W. Bush presidency and the US foreign and security policy of the last decades.34 In the final stages of negotiations before the 2005 World Summit, then-US ambassador to the UN John Bolton sent letters proposing amendments to the wording of the outcome document to various UN delegates—all with the intent to avoid legally binding language. R2P, in his view, was of a moral character: the UN Security Council already possessed enough legal authority to enforce humanitarian interventions and US troops should not be subject to any international criminal justice system.35 Even though this campaign provoked criticism,36 it was successful to the extent that the final text avoided new legal obligations for the UN institutions, instead allocating a softer responsibility to initiate debate and to leave decision-making on intervention squarely within the existing framework of the UN Security Council.37

While the deliberations over the legal aspects of R2P were indeed prominent in the US engagement at that time, interviewees pointed out that the US supported all other aspects of R2P, viewing them as being in line with ‘its own moral compass and its own efforts after Rwanda and Srebrenica’38 to react more efficiently when faced with mass atrocities. Once the wording of the dual responsibility was set, the US fostered the further normative development of R2P, not least by elevating its status internationally. It supported Britain and France in their effort to include a reference to the non-binding General Assembly resolution 60/139 into the binding resolution 1674 of the UN Security Council on the protection of civilians in armed conflict adopted on 28 April 2006.40

Darfur

The Darfur case showed the power of US grassroots movements and serves as an example for norm entrepreneurship within the US government. It also triggered a debate on the term genocide and the legal obligations to act under international law. This debate—together with many experiences unrelated to R2P like the ‘war on terror’ and the 2003 Iraq intervention—ultimately led to a more cautious approach to the use of the term R2P by both the second Bush administration and the Obama administration. Both used less legally-defined terms like ‘atrocity prevention’. Darfur not only serves as a clear critical juncture in the US discourse on R2P, as interviewees have confirmed.41 It has also been framed as the first test case of R2P.42 The US support of UN Security Council resolutions on a concrete case of grave human rights violations43 and its tolerance of the case's referral to the International Criminal Court (ICC) despite a long-standing aversion to the court itself underline the significance of this critical juncture. In addition, US diplomats used R2P as a frame internationally to garner attention and support for a more robust multinational intervention in Darfur.44

From the beginning of the crisis Darfur was on the US radar, not as a deadly conflict but as a looming humanitarian catastrophe caused by severe droughts and subsequent food crises. As early as 2001, the then administrator of USAID Andrew Natsios visited Darfur and started to shift the narrow focus of USAID involvement in relief operations in the North–South conflict to this other conflict area in Sudan. But it took until 2003 for USAID to send its first humanitarian mission, thanks to the personal involvement of Roger Winter, then head of USAID'S emergency relief bureau and the first high-ranked official to deliver eyewitness reports of the horrors of the Darfur conflict to US Congress.45 Following this, the US administration slowly started to engage, financially through emergency and relief funds and diplomatically through internal cables on ethnic cleansing. Natsios and Winter warned the Government of Sudan that if there was peace in Southern Sudan, but none in Darfur, US-Sudanese relations would not be normalised. US diplomats were the driving force behind brokering one of the first peace agreements, the N'djamena Agreement.46

However, while the crisis in Darfur was unfolding, US policy often suffered from competing priorities, with at times three different policy objectives towards Sudan. First, ending the decades-long North–South civil war by providing essential good offices for the negotiation and preservation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA). The strong US involvement in the negotiations of the CPA and its implementation until the independence of South Sudan in 2012 has been called one of ‘Washington's most effective campaigns of the past 20 years’.47 Second, cooperating with the government in Khartoum on anti-terrorism policy since Sudan was a not-so-secret haven for Al-Qaeda and, third, containing the humanitarian tragedy unfolding in Darfur.

While the first two objectives seemed to have been prioritised in the first years of the Darfur crisis, the last was pushed to the fore48 in 2004 as pressure from civil society and media grew,49 and the first two stabilised somewhat. In a rare display of bipartisanship, in 2004, the US Senate unanimously declared ‘that the atrocities unfolding in Darfur, Sudan, are genocide’.50 Shortly afterwards, on 9 September 2004, then Secretary of State Colin Powell testified before the US Senate Foreign Relation Committee after a trip to Khartoum and an internal review of the situation in Darfur.51 He called the situation a genocide committed by the Government of Sudan and its proxy, the militia Janjaweed, against the inhabitants of Darfur though he wordily denied that there was any obligation for military action.52

Indeed, the US avoided military engagement in Darfur at any cost for several reasons, most important of which was the complexity and risk of a large-scale operation at a time of military overstretch due to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But there were also concerns about the legitimacy of a Western force—which explains US lobbying for strong AU involvement.53 However, armed with a cheque book and by instituting sanction and divestment regimes,54 the US went beyond the usual routine.55 This unusual activism is exemplified by the divergence from the long-standing US foreign policy pattern of ignoring or even undermining the ICC. Reacting to social activism that started with Amnesty International USA's call for the UN Security Council to refer Darfur to the Court, both Congress and the Bush administration re-evaluated their stance on the ICC in this case.56

On 17 March 2005, Congress called to support the accountability of war criminals by the UN Security Council. On 31 March 2005, the US Government abstained from UN Security Council Resolution 1593, thus allowing the referral of the situation in Darfur to the ICC.57 Indeed, for some in the US administration this was a major shift, not least for John Bolton, then US ambassador to the UN, who had led US government opposition against the ICC and would have preferred to veto the referral.58 Since then, the US has supported the ICC on Darfur, for example, when the ICC chief prosecutor Moreno-Ocampo and the Judicial Chamber of the ICC issued warrants against high-ranking Sudanese government officials in February 2007,59 and when Sudanese president Bashir, one of the indicted, was refused a visa to visit the UN General Assembly in 2013 by the Obama administration.60

However, aside from Darfur, the general pattern of ambivalence towards the ICC has continued also with the Obama administration. And although the latter may be more supportive of the ICC than the Bush administration on a case-by-case basis and is predisposed to sign the Rome Statute as Clinton did,61 the Government of Barack Obama ensures that citizens of non-signatory states beyond the state in question are exempt from the ICC's jurisdiction. Meanwhile, it negotiates bilateral immunity agreements for US soldiers abroad, thus effectively undermining the ICC's statute.62 This shows that support for the ICC in the critical junctures analysed here are deviations from the norm, and can be read as support of the implementation of R2P.

On Darfur, the Obama administration has largely continued the politics of its predecessor not only with regard to the support of the ICC referral. Reacting to long-standing civil society pressure, Obama—in line with his earlier rhetoric as a US senator—made campaign promises to make Darfur a priority on ‘day one’ of his presidency.63 While visible policy practice has hardly changed, there has occasionally been a different, more offensive tone. In reaction to first criticisms of the handling of the Darfur crisis, Secretary of State Clinton issued a harsh statement, when Sudanese president Bashir threatened the expulsion of humanitarian agencies from Darfur (an obvious link to his indictment by the ICC). Obama finally appointed a special envoy for Sudan, Scott Gration;64 and his administration was very involved in supporting the referendum in South Sudan, which led to the country's independence.65 In addition to these examples, the administration claimed to be pursuing behind-the-scenes diplomacy in order to avoid ‘a lot of bluster and public threats’, as Susan Rice put it66—an argument she would reiterate in the case of Kenya, when R2P was only invoked by US diplomats after the fact.

Kenya, Myanmar and Georgia

During and after the general elections in Kenya in 2007 and 2008, violence erupted along tribal lines among the supporters of the main contenders in the elections, Kibaki and Odinga. The US supported both the mediation efforts led by former Secretary-General Annan and the ICC indictments against high-ranking members of the governing Party of National Unity, but was reluctant to invoke the R2P during the crisis.

The UN Security Council was only marginally involved in the post-election crisis in Kenya. According to Weiss, this was a conscious decision due to difficulties in reaching a consensus: ‘[t]aking the Kenyan case to the UN undoubtedly would have delayed action’.67 Therefore, the UN Security Council, with the support of the US, only issued a presidential statement supporting the AU efforts as well as the UN Secretariat's logistical support for Annan's mediation efforts.68 R2P was not used as a direct reference in this statement. Susan Rice later recalled:

It's worth noting that the Responsibility to Protect was explicitly not part of the debate in the Council […] It was difficult even to build support for a Council vote of confidence in Annan's mission. Raising the R2P flag may be morally satisfying, but it can be politically fraught.69

US officials viewed R2P as an ineffective frame for the case of Kenya due to its international contestation: ‘at no time [did] we use the language of R2P in our deliberations at the White House’, one observer remembers.70

However, it played an indirect role: Weiss described R2P as ‘background music that contributed a sense of urgency, motivating Africans, the U.S. and the EU to enter the fray with seriousness and due speed’.71 It was thus diplomatically influential.72 And indeed, the US practised diplomacy not only through the Security Council but bilaterally, and with some effect on the warring parties:73 Bush, on tour through Africa, consciously avoided visiting Kenya and publicly voiced his concern. He sent Condoleezza Rice to Nairobi in February of 2008, where she pushed the warring parties to participate in Annan's mediation efforts and warned Kenyan policy-makers of a cooling in US-Kenyan bilateral relations.74

Furthermore, the crisis around the 2007 Kenyan elections, though not a prime example of the US Government's active involvement,75 proved important for both the US and the international R2P discourse in two ways: first, it strengthened the case for the systematic inclusion of criminal justice in the R2P toolbox;76 and second, it paved the way for a renewed focus on preventive strategies.77 The international efforts during the Kenya crisis were described as both the ‘first case of successful R2P prevention’ and a case that shed light on the post-conflict dimension of R2P78—within the UN context, but as well for the US atrocity prevention efforts that took conceptual shape in 2008.79 Later, the 2010 referendum on the new Kenyan constitution and the 2013 general elections in Kenya became test cases for the atrocity prevention agenda and US Ambassador Robert Godec led the efforts of a coherent US support of the elections.80

The cases of Myanmar in May 2008 and Georgia in August 2008 are important for understanding what the US sees as the limits of R2P:81 in its view, the concept does not apply to the withholding of humanitarian assistance in the aftermath of a natural catastrophe, and cannot be used as alleged cover for an inter-state war or territorial annexation. Georgia exemplifies the latter circumstance. The US and a vast majority of UN member states rejected Russia's view that Russian minorities in parts of Georgia were at risk and that this constituted a case for R2P.82 US diplomats instead condemned the Russian attacks on Georgian civilians and accused Russia of regime change and attempting to annex the separatist enclaves.83

In the Myanmar case, tropical storm Nargis affected marginalised ethnic groups most, and when the military Government of Myanmar refused to let international humanitarian assistance into the region, the US swiftly offered humanitarian aid and, together with France, put pressure on the government.84 While both France and the US considered delivering the aid without the consent of the Myanmar Government, their reasoning differed. Whereas the French Foreign Minister Kouchner was quick to invoke R2P,85 stretching the original criteria for R2P beyond the agreed catalogue,86 the US Government condemned the Myanmar Government's inaction, but did not invoke R2P. US diplomats did not need to voice this scepticism forcefully, for China, Russia and South Africa had expressed their rejection of Kouchner's rhetoric already.87

Within the UN context, US diplomats rather expressed their outrage at the slowness of the Myanmar Government's response, avoiding any reference to the French push to include humanitarian crises brought about by natural disasters under the R2P umbrella.88 Zalmay Khalizad, then US Permanent Representative at the UN, came close to mentioning R2P by stating that ‘a government has responsibility to protect its own people, to provide for its people. And since it's not able to, you would expect the government to welcome assistance from others’.89 However, most officials resorted instead to the tactic of criminalising Myanmar's behaviour rhetorically without specifying a legal basis. US Defence Secretary Robert Gates, for instance, condemned Myanmar's behaviour as ‘criminal neglect’.90 After Asian criticism, Washington avoided language that could be perceived as taking advantage of the situation to finally achieve a regime change in Myanmar91 and that might lead to a politicisation of the crisis: ‘[i]t is not a matter of politics. This is a humanitarian crisis’, Condoleezza Rice argued at the time.92 However, Myanmar has since become one of the priorities of the Obama administration's atrocity prevention agenda, and the administration monitors the situation of the Rohingyas and the Karen closely.93

General Assembly debate 2009

When the UN General Assembly passed a resolution operationalising R2P on 14 September 2009, it did so with the support of the Obama presidency. The administration signalled its support for the UN Secretary-General's recommendations, including the now well-established three-pillar approach, early on.94

In the run-up to the UN General Assembly, Ambassador Susan Rice outlined the US position towards R2P in a well-staged speech on 15 June 2009 in Vienna—reiterating and substantiating the support outlined in her first statement to the UN Security Council on 29 January 2009.95 She emphasised the personal duty she feels when it comes to R2P which stems in no small part from her own experiences with the failure to respond to the Rwandan genocide while working for the Clinton administration. Rice focused on pillar one- and two-related efforts of the Obama presidency, which Obama himself again emphasised some weeks later96 and led to the creation of the atrocity prevention agenda (see section on the agenda).

Yet with regard to pillar three, she still emphasised the moral, not legal, obligation that R2P carried.97 Rice mentioned the political risk that comes with the explicit use of the term R2P when forging international coalitions: given the contestation of R2P in some parts of the world, it might be better to rhetorically avoid direct references and instead act accordingly—as was done in Kenya.98 While Rice emphasised international contestation, she could have also pointed out—in line with the classical constraint of two-level politics—the unease with the UN terminology felt by some parts of the American public and Congress, which explains the reluctance of many US officials to directly reference R2P in the domestic arena.99

Even though US support for R2P was publicly voiced by Rice and Obama in the run-up to the General Assembly debate, US diplomats deliberately decided on a more restrained public strategy in order to make it easier for member states usually critical of the US to sign up to the process.100 US support was present, but not overwhelming. In comparison to the World Summit of 2005, the US interpretation of R2P had not shifted, but the support was more forceful.

Libya

During the Libya crisis, the Obama administration shifted at the last minute from reluctant to active support of the British- and French-led efforts to forge a coalition for an intervention to stop and prevent atrocities in the country. It then went above and beyond by not only supporting a no-fly zone, but a full-scale military intervention.101 That the administration was still reluctant to sell yet another military intervention to the war-fatigued American public102 was shown by Obama's announcement to shift the main burden of the military operation to NATO allies as soon as possible.103 This attitude formed the basis for the now-infamous characterisation of the Obama foreign policy as ‘leading from behind’.104

Three factors pushed the US towards advocating for an intervention: first, broad international support, which included many African states and the Arab League; second, the ‘unusual clarity’ of the situation in Libya, in which Qaddafi had clearly indicated his willingness to massacre the insurgent parts of the population; and third, an internal push by Clinton, Rice and Power.105

When justifying the US role in the intervention, Obama made clear that Libya was to be seen as an individual case that did not constitute any shift in the US policy of military intervention on humanitarian grounds. His only reference to R2P was directly linked to NATO (‘[l]ast night, NATO decided to take on the additional responsibility of protecting Libyan civilians’).106 He justified the intervention through broader notions of ‘interests and values’ and ‘responsibilities to our fellow human beings under such circumstances’.107 His rhetoric confirmed the pattern of the case-by-case support of R2P.108 Additionally, the Libya case again displayed the US willingness to refer cases to the ICC via a UN Security Council resolution109—this time by explicitly voting in favour of referring the case to the ICC (and not abstaining, as was the case for Darfur). Libya followed the UN's R2P procedural script closely (Obama even made a UN mandate a condition of US involvement) and some argue that R2P was an important part of the Obama administration's internal deliberations.110 In general, Libya reveals two characteristics in US policy-making during that time: the aforementioned deeply-embedded reluctance to push actively and publicly for military interventions; and the significant influence of R2P-friendly voices within the Obama administration such as Power, Rice and Clinton.111

The aftermath of Libya was important for R2P in yet another dimension. Emerging powers had been widely critical of the regime change rhetoric after UN Security Council resolutions 1970 and 1973 were passed.112 In the wake of this, Brazil outlined the contours of a ‘responsibility while protecting’ (RwP), which included the suggestion to chronologically sequence the three pillars of R2P and integrate a monitoring mechanism to oversee interventions.113 The US reaction to this new proposition was reluctant. Reflecting the multilateralist impulse of the Obama administration, it was open to considering the proposal seriously, but retained a certain degree of scepticism.114 US diplomats in New York stated they realised soon the RwP was important for the Brazilians, but even more they wondered where the new aspects were beyond already established procedures and whether a change of procedures would be necessary at all.115 This episode shows again that the US is open to further developments of R2P within the UN context, but tends to guard current institutional procedures.

Syria

The example of Syria reveals the constraints the US faces when organising global coalitions: in cases with a high international profile but conflicting agendas,116 there are limits to US multilateral influence and the use of the R2P frame. Anticipating this, R2P was not emphasised by US diplomats at the UN or by US officials in the domestic discourse—the Obama administration was instead occupied with weighing the risks of a military intervention.117 Thus, the case of Syria is another example of the Obama administration's reluctance to engage in international military intervention and R2P's low priority as a public frame in situations of administration–internal deliberation.

At the start of the Syrian protests in 2011, the US sponsored two UN Security Council resolutions, both of which were vetoed by Russia and China. Aside from these expected voting defeats in the Security Council, early demands for Assad to step down and continuous engagement in multilateral fora to stop the flow of arms to Assad (like within a UN group of friends),118 the Obama administration seemed to be hesitant to engage. This could be traced to two reasons: first, the situation in Syria seemed to be clear-cut on the aggressor side, but more complex on the opposition side. Second, the experiences of Iraq—another complex political landscape—were still very present in the Washington discourse, and there was a general reluctance to once again become militarily involved in the Middle East.

In light of this reasoning, the White House had been against arming the rebels or taking military action since early 2011. The non-lethal aid it supplied to opposition forces was so tightly controlled that its impact was minimal. Even after intelligence presented proof of small-scale chemical weapons attacks by Assad in April 2013, violating Obama's self-imposed ‘red line’ for a more robust American engagement, there were only minor efforts to train and arm rebel groups.119 It was only after the widely-televised large-scale chemical attack on 21 August 2013 that the dynamic inside the White House changed and Obama favoured air strikes (but without directly referencing R2P).120

In a potentially crucial twist, Obama, faced with a sceptical public, asked Congress to authorise the use of force—counter to the well-established pattern of the presidential exercise of war powers—a move which could have tipped the balance towards parliamentarising these decisions. But despite an intensive public effort to convince a sceptical public and Congress, the Obama administration failed to garner enough support. It was only a seemingly offhand remark by Secretary of State John Kerry, that Assad could hand over all chemical weapons within the next week, that allowed Obama to save face and avoid military action.121 This led to an agreement between Russia and Assad for the removal of chemical weapons, a move that did not end the conflict or change Assad's momentum.122 However, since then, the UN Security Council has included R2P language in one presidential statement and one resolution, reminding the Assad regime of a ‘primary responsibility to protect its population’.123

In sum, in the case of Syria there has been a long-term lack of political will to act decisively. References to the R2P were never used to sell policies nor did they have impact when voiced from the outside. The Obama administration avoided these references ‘studiously’,124 even though there were voices within and outside the administration that warned of the potential for genocide125 and critical humanitarian developments.126

The case of Syria and the other critical junctures investigated above show the limits the US R2P discourse in two ways. First, if the administration is carefully avoiding being drawn into a conflict—like in Syria—R2P does not function as an outside frame to put pressure on an administration. Second, if R2P is not useful as a frame to sell policy (either because there is no clear-cut policy or another frame, like the chemical weapons ban, might suffice), R2P is not invoked. R2P remains for the US a moral principle, subject to the interdependencies of two-level politics, and not an obligation.

Atrocity prevention agenda—the domestic operationalisation of global responsibilities

As frequently mentioned above, in the past decade US governments have focused on sharpening their policies and procedures for preventing mass atrocities. This process culminated in April 2012, when Obama, following up on his national security strategy of 2010127 and the Presidential Study Directive on Mass Atrocities (PSD-10),128 announced the creation of an interagency Atrocities Prevention Board (APB).129 This atrocity prevention agenda crystallises important characteristics of US R2P policy. First, R2P has slowly but steadily taken hold in key US foreign and security policy documents—be it in the form of a direct reference, as in the national security strategy, or the implicit operationalisation of its first and second pillar. Second, it reveals the decision to cater to domestic sceptics by avoiding using the term R2P to frame key policies. Third, the toolbox implemented as a central part of the atrocity prevention agenda places the US in a global leadership position with regard to operationalising pillars one and two, and there are attempts to spread the R2P gospel internationally. Fourth, even though the agenda seems to have been successfully implemented within the Obama administration, the decision to implement it through a bureaucratic, not legislative, process has made it dependent on election cycles. In the following section, these four aspects will be analysed in greater depth.

First, advancing the principles of R2P in the domestic context: Obama's 2010 national security strategy was the first to directly reference R2P and the responsibilities that come with it for the United States130—neither of the two national security strategies of the Bush administration did so.131 Other departments echoed this to various degrees. The State Department included a direct reference to R2P in its first Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review.132 The Pentagon stated its preparedness to confront mass atrocities in the Quadrennial Defense Review Report of February 2010133 and the US Senate followed with a bipartisan resolution ‘recognizing the United States’ national interest in helping to prevent mass atrocities’.134 While the Obama administration commits itself to R2P with an emphasis on a prevention strategy with adequate internal capabilities, R2P is not directly mentioned by the Pentagon or the US Senate, both of which instead referred solely to the notion of atrocity prevention. Nevertheless, this atrocity agenda puts the US at the forefront of operationalisation and institutionalisation of R2P.135

With this emphasis on atrocity prevention, the Obama administration implicitly continued patterns established and discussed in the Bush administration136 and explicitly built upon findings and recommendations of the Genocide Prevention Task Force Report of 2008.137 The report highlighted the systematic nature of genocides: they are rarely ad hoc, requiring long-running tensions, conflicts and even preparatory measures.138 According to the report, mass atrocities can be prevented, but one has to monitor indicators closely and implement ‘long-term strategic planning on cases which are not yet cases’,139 those which have so far flown under the radar of international policy-making. This finding forms the basis for the mass atrocity prevention agenda. With introducing the atrocity prevention agenda, the administration can be credited for, as Jentleson puts it:

shifting the US R2P debate from “if” to “how” and “which”: i.e., no longer if the United States should adopt R2P as an international norm and genocide and mass atrocities prevention as a priority US policy objective but how best to do so and in which cases to do so.140

The task force explicitly recommended presidential involvement to cope with bureaucratic inertia, in particular when it comes to inter-departmental co-ordination.141

Second, on the unease of using the term ‘Responsibility to Protect’: when Obama’s PSD-10 read ‘preventing mass atrocities and genocide is a core national security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States’.142 This is repeated in all key documents related to the atrocity prevention agenda. ‘Responsibility’ is mentioned rather abstractly as the ‘responsibility of the United States’ or as a ‘global responsibility’143—not as a ‘responsibility to protect’. The key term is ‘mass atrocity prevention’. All interviewees for this study, be they in the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon, the Treasury or from outside think tanks, were asked whether this was a conscious decision and, if so, why it was made. All agreed that it was a conscious decision, and that it was made to avoid not only R2P, but other terms, such as ‘genocide prevention’. They highlighted two reasons for this: emphasising the innovation that comes with the agenda, and avoiding controversies with those sceptical of terms associated with national or international legal obligations. According to some interviewees, this latter decision decisively contributed to the agenda's until-now successful implementation within the current administration—as was the presidential involvement in the process and the decision to not involve Congress by resorting to a purely bureaucratic process (see below).144 But, as one interviewee put it, ‘one of the biggest challenges of the agenda is, in essence, a public relations challenge’.145

Third, a toolbox to operationalise pillars one and two of R2P: the atrocity prevention agenda enlists many concrete measures which aim to allow the administration to harvest early warning information, to be appropriately alerted, to react coherently across all branches of government with co-ordinated preventive measures and to provide strategies for the sustainability of its measures. In regard to the intelligence agencies, this means implementing a new focus on information about potential mass atrocities,146 enhancing intelligence co-ordination and making relevant intelligence available to all government agencies.

The State Department took concrete institutional steps to meet the tasks assigned by the agenda: it developed procedures to better co-ordinate the US government actors on the ground. It also upgraded the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization to a Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations (CSO) and tasked it with developing cross-cutting preventive measures147 and organising a standby group of personnel and experts. Similarly, the Office of War Crimes was renamed and upgraded to the Office of Global Criminal Justice, putting special emphasis on post-conflict settings to ensure sustainability of the stabilised situation, support the ICC wherever possible148 and review national measures in co-ordination with the Justice Department. Official alert mechanisms were built into the State Department (as in other agencies) to ensure that early warning signs could be immediately brought to the attention of the Atrocity Prevention Board on all staff levels, without being delayed by hierarchies. In the Pentagon, the previously-developed Mass Atrocity Response Operations (MARO) gained new traction when they were incorporated into the army operation concept.149 The Treasury, for its part, developed further smart sanction tools.150

These and further concrete measures are being increasingly discussed by US diplomats within the UN context as well, for instance during the third meeting of the Global Network of R2P Focal Points that took place on 11 and 12 June 2013 in Accra, Ghana, where prevention strategies were highlighted.151 However, additional co-ordination with other states on early warning mechanisms and intelligence is still being developed beyond the usual routines of sharing intelligence with allies and co-ordinating with other embassies in given countries.152 The agenda remains primarily a project of creating capacities and routines in US foreign and security policies and only secondarily one of ensuring those capacities are at hand in international institutions.

Fourth, the sustainability of the agenda beyond the Obama administration: since the atrocity prevention agenda is based on executive action and has no designated budget, the main challenge for its proponents is sustaining it beyond changes of administration. Some interviewees expressed hope that the agenda is already well-suited to endure due to a variety of factors: first, its objectives are in essence of bipartisan nature; second, it will be difficult to justify abolishing instruments backed by many civil society groups;153 and third, at the end of Obama's second term its ideas and tools will have so deeply penetrated into the routines of the agencies and into interagency processes that they will continue to be pursued.

However, most interviewees were a bit more sceptical and pointed to the fact that the APB was very much driven by individual commitments like that of Power—thus its influence might wane once this founding generation leaves the political stage.154 Furthermore, they highlighted its contingent budget and the scepticism among the Republican ranks in Congress in particular. They emphasised the necessity of the APB and corresponding entities in the various agencies having some budget titles at their disposal. This would not only speed up the application of atrocity prevention measures, it would also ensure that Congress is on board through the budgetary process—as would a law institutionalising the APB.155 In fact, the recommendations of the report ‘The United States and R2P—From Words to Action’ by Albright and Cohen reflect these concerns.156

Hence, the sustainability of the atrocity prevention agenda is not yet assured. However, the pragmatism of operationalising the prevention aspects of R2P will likely survive any change of administration, as will the reluctance to directly reference R2P in the domestic discourse. At the same time, the US will likely continue to highlight internationally its efforts in regard to pillars one and two.

Conclusion

This article has traced the ambivalences and selectivity of US foreign and security policy when it comes to implementing R2P—in particular related to its pillar three, while on pillars one and two the US has been in the front seat of operationalising R2P-related measures further. The patterns revealed continue to shape responses to humanitarian crises, as the examples of Syria and the Central African Republic (CAR) show. While both crises have been dealt with frequently within the established institutions of national security and the newly created Atrocity Prevention Board, only the crisis in CAR has been met with the whole toolbox of mass atrocity prevention and response, and all means just short of robust intervention have been employed.157 This crisis—not in the full geopolitical limelight and not yet requiring massive investment of resources, but meeting the conditions outlined in the National Security Strategy of 2010 and subsequent documents—serves as a further example of the supportive attitude the US generally displays towards R2P on the international level. The case of Syria, however, shows once more that the threshold for using references to R2P to sell an intervention is high when a sceptical public needs to be convinced of a large-scale and high-risk military undertaking.

The article has shown that while the US has been by and large supportive of R2P on the international level and has even taken a global leadership role in implementing its first two pillars, the US public and US Congress, being in large parts sceptical of international obligations and tired of sending troops abroad after Iraq and Afghanistan, serve as a counterweight. Administrations who are themselves sceptical of international interventions are pushed to voice their concerns openly at the international level, and administrations that might be more supportive are constrained. We thereby witness the classical interdependencies of two-level politics. However, there are larger continuities in US attitude and practices towards the R2P: the avoidance of new obligations in international law; a deeply-rooted pragmatism that leads to the development of practical tools that follow up on the principles it commits to and that brings it into a global leadership position; and a constant balance between domestic and international deeds and words.

Acknowledgements

The author is immensely grateful to all interviewees for providing valuable input for this article, to the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and to colleagues in the ‘global norm evolution’ research team who commented on earlier versions of this article, among them in particular Sarah Brockmeier, Christopher Daase, Philipp Rotmann and Liu Tiewa. This article is part of a collaborative research project on Global Norm Evolution and the Responsibility to Protect (www.globalnorms.net), generously funded by the Volkswagen Foundation through its Europe and Global Challenges programme.

Notes

^1. The question was asked by Republican Senator Bob Corker during Power's confirmation hearing in July 2013. Quote from Mark Landler, ‘U.S. Urged to Adopt Policy Justifying Intervention’. The New York Times, 23 July 2013.

^2.Albright and Williamson, The United States and R2P, 10. The high-level, bipartisan report aims at ‘explaining the concept to the U.S. audience and to show how it is connected to our country's best interests and traditions’ and as such attempts to counter this predominant but wrong interpretation of R2P. As for the level of public knowledge about R2P: according to a PBS poll of 2012, only 21 per cent responded yes, when being asked whether they were familiar with the R2P initiative, while 77 per cent answered no (Penn Schoen Berland, ‘Phone Poll’).

^3. See articles by Stuenkel and Tourinho, Tiewa and Haibin, Mohan and Kurtz as well as Verhoeven, Murthy and Soares de Oliveira in this issue.

^4.Luck, ‘Sovereignty’.

^5. As Abramowitz put it, ‘there is a bipartisan reluctance to sign on to anything that smacks of the United Nations’: Michael Abramowitz, ‘Does the United States have a “responsibility to protect” the Syrian people?’. Washington Post, 6 September 2013.

^6. At a press conference in Manila on 28 April 2014, Obama defended his incremental style of foreign policy-making forcefully and asked in disbelief ‘why is it that everybody is so eager to use military force’: Juiet Eilperin, ‘Obama Lays Out his Foreign Policy Doctrine’. Washington Post, 29 April 2014.

^7. Two-level politics is not operationalised in the strict sense of Putnam with its domestically shaped win-sets determining the leeway for agents in international negotiations (Putnam, ‘Diplomacy and Domestic Politics’). This article instead relies on Putnam's basic logic that there are interdependencies, but that they can go in both directions: bottom-up (domestic interpretations and attitudes—be they public or elitist) and top-down (international advances of R2P)—the latter aspect is mentioned but not equally emphasised in Putnam's logic.

^8. The 21 semi-structured expert interviews were conducted in Washington DC and New York in May and June 2013 with follow-up phone interviews in summer 2013. All interview quotes and references used in this article are authorised by the interviewees.

^9. Much has been written about the US and its R2P related policy: Reinold describes the Bush administration's reaction to this new norm in detail, but she focuses primarily on military intervention and thus on pillar three of R2P: Reinold, ‘The United States and the Responsibility to Protect’. Chesterman comments primarily on the US Libya policy: Chesterman, ‘Leading from Behind’. Jentleson, as well as Farer and Fuentes Julio, but most meticulously Brockmeier, Kurtz and Rotmann analyse the Obama administration's agenda on atrocity prevention: Jentleson, ‘The Obama Administration and R2P’; Farer and Fuentes Julio, ‘Flesh on Doctrinal Bones’; Brockmeier et al., Schutz und Verantwortung.

^10. For the framework of the special issue and particular the notions of critical junctures, norm development and norm entrepreneurship, see the introductory article by Rotmann, Kurtz and Brockmeier in this issue.

^11. As Jones argues in his recent book, the US will stay the most influential actor for the foreseeable future and there is no serious contestation by emerging powers: Jones, Still Ours to Lead.

^12.The White House, ‘Presidential Study Directive on Mass Atrocities’.

^13. The genocide in Rwanda was never a formal issue of an official meeting in the White House. The State Department focused instead on the Arusha Peace Process between the Rwandan Government and rebel groups and consciously avoided using the word ‘genocide’ for the tragedy unfolding (Power, ‘Bystanders to Genocide’). Traumatised by the experiences in Somalia, the Clinton administration sought to avoid any military entanglement.

^14. As for the process within the UN, the legal debate over the NATO intervention in Kosovo certainly was an equally important, if not more immediate, trigger.

^15. See, for instance, Power, ‘Bystanders to Genocide’; Power, A Problem from Hell.

^16. See Saunders, Leaders at War.

^17.Western, ‘From Wars of Choice’; see as well Kriner, After the Rubicon; Mitchell, Democracy's Blameless Leaders; Saunders, Leaders at War; Walker and Malici, U.S. Presidents.

^18.Lockhart, The Roots of American Exceptionalism; Foot et al., US Hegemony and International Organizations; Kennedy, ‘The Manichean Temptation’. This exceptionalism and moralising foreign policy has been subject to many criticisms by other actors in global politics, as the other contributions in this issue vividly demonstrate.

^19.Roth, Bending the Law.

^20. In fact, the oscillation between those poles and, in general, room for change and doubt are, as some argue, an inherent strength of the US foreign policy, because trial and error and the ability for renewal go hand in hand—and conflicts within an administration and divisive decision-making throughout the political system are a key ingredient for that. See, for instance, Sestanovich, Maximalist.

^21. The damage done to the credibility of US foreign and security policy by this intervention has haunted many US efforts to build international support for R2P until today: Jentleson, ‘The Obama Administration and R2P’, 402. See as well Farer and Fuentes Julio, ‘Flesh on Doctrinal Bones’. 209.

^22. This was the first war of NATO's 50-year history. US Defence Secretary William Cohen said: ‘the haunting sight and the sound of women and children herded onto rail cars for deportation, fathers and brothers last seen kneeling in rows, whole villages turned into ash heaps by the searing flames of hatred; suffering we thought modern man was incapable of contemplating and surely not disposed to inflicting’ (US Department of Defense, ‘Remarks to the Atlantic Council’). After the war, Clinton remarked: ‘whether you live in Africa, or Central Europe, or any other place, if somebody comes after innocent civilians and tries to kill them en masse because of their race, their ethnic background or their religion, and it's within our power to stop it, we will stop it’ (The White House, ‘Remarks by the President to the KFOR Troops’).

^23.Power, A Problem from Hell.

^24.Gallagher and Allen, ‘Presidential Personality’. See as well Walker and Malici, U.S. Presidents.

^25. Manuel Roig-Franzia, ‘Samantha Power: Learning to Play the Diplomat's Game’. The Washington Post, 3 April 2014.

^26.Kriner, After the Rubicon.

^27. Constitutionally, the US president is commander in chief, but the US Congress is given the power to fund those endeavours and to declare war. This remains one of the great unresolved tensions of the US constitution. Despite attempts by the US Congress (for instance, with its War Powers Resolution of 1973) to constrain the president, the reality of a rather passive Congress allows the president to be by far the most central figure. Wittkopf et al., American Foreign Policy, 430; Auerswald and Cowhey, ‘Ballotbox Diplomacy’.

^28. See Kriner, After the Rubicon.

^29.Reinold, ‘The United States and the Responsibility to Protect’, 66.

^30. See Brockmeier, Kurtz and Junk in this issue.

^31. See, for instance, Verhoeven, Murthy and Soares de Oliveira in this issue.

^32. For a discussion of this world summit dispute between territorial and decision-making sovereignty, see Luck, ‘Sovereignty’.

^33.Vlasic, ‘Europe and North America’, 9.

^34. See the careful analysis of the wording used by State Department policy planning staff in these years by Reinold ‘The United States and the Responsibility to Protect’, 66–68.

^35. ‘Bolton Voices Opposition to U.N. Proposals’. The Washington Post, 1 September 2005. For a careful analysis of the wording, timing and impact of Bolton's proposals, see Pollentine, ‘Constructing the Responsibility to Protect’, 273–342.

^36. See, for instance, the criticism by Jeffrey Sachs quoted in: ‘Bolton Voices Opposition to U.N. Proposals’. The Washington Post, 1 September 2005.

^37.Orford, International Authority; Chesterman, ‘Leading from Behind’, 282.

^38. Interview with current member of the National Security Staff, Washington DC, 22 May 2013.

^39. ‘Reaffirms the provisions of paragraphs 138 and 139 of the 2005 World Summit Outcome Document regarding the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity’ (UNSC, ‘Resolution 1674’).

^40. US diplomats highlighted their view on the dual responsibility throughout the long process of drafting this resolution. As the US representative at the open debate of the resolution stated: ‘[w]e would like to stress, however, that the primary responsibility for protecting civilians lies with States and their Governments and that international efforts should complement Government efforts rather than assume responsibility for them’ (UNSC, ‘Transcript of the Open Debate’, 8). As for the protection of civilians, interviewees at the UN often referred to it together with R2P as the ‘protection siblings’. While both concepts have been by and large developed simultaneously within the UN, the protection of civilians is rather the operative concept and R2P has been shaped on the strategic state level (interviews in New York, 28–29 May 2013).

^41. Interviews with, amongst others, Cameron Hudson, 22 May 2013 and with members of the National Security Staff, 22 and 24 May 2013.

^42.Beardsley, ‘Lessons Learned or Not Learned’.

^43. In this case, the resolutions 1706, 1755, 1769 and 1778.

^44. Interviews with diplomats at the United States Mission to the United Nations (USUN), New York, 28–29 May 2013.

^45.Flint and de Waal, Darfur: A New History, 167–170.

^46. Ibid., 167–169.

^47.Boswell, ‘The Failed State Lobby’. In fact, Boswell goes on to criticise the almost unconditional support the US governments provided to the main military and political faction in Southern Sudan, citing it as a potential source for future conflicts between North and South as well within South Sudan. Sadly, both predictions came true in the last one and a half years, providing the grounds for renewed attention of the atrocity prevention team within the Obama administration and both were predicted early on. Abramowitz and Lawrence, ‘How Genocide Became a National Security Threat’.

^48.Junk, ‘Humanitäre Appelle’.

^49.Flint and de Waal, Darfur: A New History, xi; Brockmeier et al., Schutz und Verantwortung, 28.

^50.US Senate, ‘A Concurrent Resolution’.

^51. Together with USAID and the Coalition for International Justice, the State Department undertook its first large-scale victimisation survey, the atrocities documentation survey, in Chad refugee camps to substantiate the claim of genocide: Hagan and Rymond-Richmond, Darfur and the Crime of Genocide, 58. See for the testimony of Powell: Powell, ‘The Crisis in Darfur’.

^52.Flint and de Waal, Darfur: A New History, 182.

^53. Interviews with Cameron Hudson, Washington DC, 22 May 2013, and with Jean-Marie Guéhenno, New York, 28 May 2013. See as well Brockmeier, Kurtz and Junk in this issue.

^54. For instance, Bush signed the Sudan Divestment and Accountability Act into law at the end of 2007: Patey, ‘Against the Asian Tide’.

^55. Interviews in Washington DC and by phone, among them Cameron Hudson, 22 May 2013, with members of the CSO at the State Department, 22 May 2013, and Michael Abramowitz, 17 July 2013.

^56.Stedjan and Thomas-Jensen, ‘The United States’.

^57. Ibid. The US abstained along with Algeria, Brazil and China.

^58.Hagan and Rymond-Richmond, Darfur and the Crime of Genocide, 32.

^59. Ibid., 105–106.

^60.Western, ‘ICC Victory’.

^61. Phone interview with Beth van Schaack, 10 June 2013.

^62.Kersten, ‘Unfortunate but Unsurprising?’.

^63. CNN, ‘Obama is Asked to Focus on Darfur’, 13 November 2008. See as well Obama, ‘Renewing American Leadership’.

^64.Reinold, ‘The United States and the Responsibility to Protect’, 84. Scott Gration was followed by Princeton Lyman in this position (2011–2013), who in turn was followed by Donald Booth in 2013. Gration was frequently criticised as being diplomatically lenient with the Bashir regime—and he even dropped the use of the word genocide to describe the situation in Darfur, receiving praise from Khartoum for his ‘even-handed’ approach: ‘Obama Aides Clash over Sudan Policy’. The Washington Times, 31 July 2009; ‘U.S. Envoy's Outreach to Sudan Is Criticized as Naive’. The Washington Post, 29 September 2009. There were indeed controversies within the Obama administration about whether to apply positive or negative incentives to the Bashir regime: Jentleson, ‘The Obama Administration and R2P’, 405.

^65.Jentleson, ‘The Obama Administration and R2P’, 415.

^66. ‘Adding Pressure to Sudan, Obama Will Tap Retired General as Special Envoy’. The New York Times, 17 March 2009. Indeed, even some from the activism side were deeply sceptical about the role of celebrity presence and political rhetoric, as those might divert attention from negotiating a political settlement: de Waal, ‘The Humanitarian Carnival’; Flint, ‘Darfur: Stop!’.

^67.Weiss, ‘Halting Atrocities’, 28.

^68.UNSC, ‘Presidential Statement—S/PRST/2008/4’.

^69.Rice, ‘Remarks on the UN Security Council’.

^70. Interview with Cameron Hudson, Washington DC, 22 May 2013.

^71.Weiss, ‘Halting Atrocities’, 24.

^72.Badescu and Weiss, ‘Misrepresenting R2P’, 17; Steinberg, ‘Responsibility to Protect’.

^73.Luck, ‘Preface’; Juma, ‘African Mediation’.

^74. ‘Rice, in Nairobi, Offers Incentives to End Violence’. The New York Times, 19 February 2008.

^75. In fact, one of the most publicly visible rhetorical interventions came when then presidential candidate Obama taped a video message to the Kenyan people before the elections.

^76. Phone interview with Beth van Schaack, 10 June 2013.

^77. Interviews with Kenya Team at State Department CSO, Washington DC, 22 May 2013.

^78.Weiss, ‘Halting Atrocities’, 29.

^79. Interviews with Kenya Team at State Department CSO, Washington DC, 22 May 2013.

^80. Interview with Gideon Maltz, National Security Staff, Washington DC, 21 May 2013; interviews with Kenya Team at State Department CSO, Washington DC, 22 May 2013. In fact, the CSO took a lead role in these efforts: Smiddy et al., Final Evaluation of CSO's Kenya Engagement.

^81. As Badescu and Weiss argue, even in cases in which there are misuses or contestation of R2P, R2P is used as a relevant frame. They thus contribute to conceptual clarification and to the liveliness of an potentially emerging norm: Badescu and Weiss, ‘Misrepresenting R2P’.

^82.Luchterhandt, ‘Völkerrechtliche Aspekte des Georgien-Krieges’, 470–471; Evans, ‘The Responsibility to Protect’, 11–12. See Kurowska in this issue.

^83.Vlasic, ‘Europe and North America’, 12.

^84. ‘Bypass Junta's Permission for Aid, US and France Urge’. The Guardian, 9 May 2008.

^85. See Brockmeier, Kurtz and Junk in this issue. See as well: ‘Bypass Junta's Permission for Aid, US and France Urge’. The Guardian, 9 May 2008.

^86.Schaller, Die völkerrechtliche Dimension, 12.

^87.Cohen, ‘The Burma Cyclone’.

^88. ‘Bypass Junta's Permission for Aid, US and France Urge’. The Guardian, 9 May 2008.

^89. Quoted in: Haacke, ‘Myanmar’, 164.

^90.Allan and O'Donnell, ‘A Call to Alms?’, 370.

^91. Haacke, ‘Myanmar’, 169. Comments by first lady Laura Bush initially gave the impression of an ongoing regime change agenda, as Haacke points out.

^92. ‘Myanmar Faces Pressure to Allow Major Aid Effort’. The New York Times, 8 May 2008.

^93. Interview with Gideon Maltz, National Security Staff, Washington DC, 21 May 2013; interview with Jonas Claes, USIP, Washington DC.

^94.Vlasic, ‘Europe and North America’. 9.

^95.USUN, ‘Statement by Ambassador Susan E. Rice’.

^96.The White House, ‘Press Conference in L'Aquila’.

^97. See the case of Kenya, above. Quote from Rice, ‘Remarks on the UN Security Council’.

^98. Ibid.

^99. Interview with Cameron Hudson, Washington DC, 22 May 2013.

^100. Interview with Ed Luck, Berlin, 14 June 2013. Luck emphasised his own consultations on that matter with US diplomats supporting them in this decision. This was confirmed by US diplomats in interviews at USUN, New York, 28–29 May 2013.

^101. Thanks go to Sarah Brockmeier, who highlighted this to me. See as well Brockmeier, ‘Germany and the Intervention in Libya’; Seibel, ‘Libyen’.

^102. The military intervention in Libya was by and large unpopular in the US, putting additional pressure on Obama to justify a limited US engagement. Jentleson, ‘The Obama Administration and R2P’, 419.

^103.The White House, ‘Remarks on Libya’.

^104.Lizza, ‘The Consequentialist’.

^105.Hastings, ‘Inside Obama's War Room’; Lewis, ‘Obama's Way’. Confirmed by interviews in Washington DC, 21–23 May 2013.

^106.The White House, ‘Remarks on Libya’.

^107. Ibid. For a careful analysis of the patterns of justifying the intervention, see Holland and Aaronson, ‘Dominance through Coercion’, 12–13.

^108. See as well Chesterman, ‘Leading from Behind’, 283.

^109. In this case: resolution 1970 adopted on 26 February 2011. A pattern that was repeated in the case of Cote d'Ivoire, where at about the same time French- and ECOWAS-led forces paved the way for the rightful winner of the elections, Ouattara, into office. Like the Libya resolution 1973, resolution 1975 also invoked R2P and referred former president Gbagbo to the ICC; the US was supportive of all of these measures, invoked some diplomatic pressure on South Africa and instituted some targeted sanctions against perpetrators of violence. See, amongst others, Jentleson, ‘The Obama Administration and R2P’, 417.

^110. Ibid.

^111.Hastings, ‘Inside Obama's War Room’. Senior officials in the administration were nevertheless quite divided on the support for the intervention: Farer and Fuentes Julio, ‘Flesh on Doctrinal Bones’. 217.

^112. See Brockmeier, Kurtz and Junk in this issue. On the rhetoric of Cameron and Sarkozy, see as well Stuenkel and Tourinho, Tiewa and Haibin, Mohan and Kurtz as well as Verhoeven, Murthy and Soares de Oliveira in this issue. The Obama administration, however, avoided the term ‘regime change’ consistently: Holland and Aaronson, ‘Dominance through Coercion’, 12–13.

^113.Benner, ‘Brazil as a Norm Entrepreneur’. See as well Stuenkel and Tourinho in this issue.

^114.USUN, ‘Remarks by the United States’.

^115. Interviews with US diplomats in Washington DC, 24 May 2013, and in New York, 28–29 May 2013.

^116. As Bellamy discusses, the contestation of the R2P-based intervention in Libya might have played a less important role than diverging political interests related to Syria itself for these conflicting agendas: Bellamy, ‘From Tripoli to Damascus?’.

^117. Interviews with US diplomats in Washington DC, 24 May 2013, and in New York, 28–29 May 2013.

^118. See Brockmeier et al., Schutz und Verantwortung, 109.

^119.Rohde, ‘How John Kerry’.

^120. Ibid.

^121. Ibid.

^122. Though some observers still see a stalemate. Blanchard et al., ‘Armed Conflict in Syria’.

^123. See UNSC, ‘Presidential Statement—S/PRST/2013/15’; and UNSC, ‘Resolution 2139’.

^124. Michael Abramowitz, ‘Does the United States have a ‘Responsibility to Protect’ the Syrian People?’. Washington Post, 6 September 2013. Abramowitz highlights that there is only one international norm frequently invoked by Obama, the chemical weapons ban.

^125. See, for instance, Hof and Simon, ‘Sectarian Violence’.

^126. Danny Postel and Nader Hashemi, ‘Use Force to Save Starving Syrians’. The New York Times, 11 February 2014.

^127.The White House, National Security Strategy 2010.

^128.The White House, ‘Presidential Study Directive on Mass Atrocities’.

^129.The White House, ‘Remarks at the Holocaust Memorial Museum’.

^130.The White House, National Security Strategy 2010, 48.

^131. However, the security strategy of 2006 mentioned the prevention of genocide and mass atrocities as an important policy priority: The White House, The National Security Strategy 2006, 17.

^132.US Department of State, Leading Through Civilian Power, 128–129.

^133.US Department of Defense, ‘Quadrennial Defense Review Report’, vi and 15.

^134.US Senate, ‘Recognizing the United States’.

^135. Some observers suggest that the years after the World Summit were years of consolidation of R2P, while after Libya the emphasis is now on institutionalisation and operationalisation: Weiss, ‘RtoP Alive’; Bellamy, ‘Libya and the Responsibility to Protect’; Jentleson, ‘The Obama Administration and R2P’, 420.

^136. Interview with Cameron Hudson, Washington DC, 22 May 2013.

^137.Albright and Cohen, Preventing Genocide. The authors of the report rightly envisaged an opportunity to infuse its ideas into the political process and chose to publish near the 60th anniversary of the Genocide Convention and the start of the Obama presidency.

^138. Ibid., xv.

^139. Interview with Gideon Maltz, National Security Staff, Washington DC, 21 May 2013. Syria was an exception that proved the rule: public pressure, not least from Congress, prompted the APB to suggest its own recommendations early on, but they failed to be taken into account at the regular meetings, even at the presidential level. Brockmeier et al., Schutz und Verantwortung, 13. Samantha Power and others continued, however, to push hard for more robust efforts (Glasser, ‘The Price of Smart Power’). Nevertheless, the failure to act in a high-attention, non-prevention case like Syria put the expectation management strategy of the APB at risk. Afterwards, it focused even more on cases that were not yet visible and could be subject to true prevention strategies. Interview with Cameron Hudson, Washington DC, 22 May 2013.

^140.Jentleson, ‘The Obama Administration and R2P’, 400.

^141.Albright and Cohen, Preventing Genocide, xxi.

^142.The White House, ‘Presidential Study Directive on Mass Atrocities’.

^143.The White House, ‘Remarks at the Holocaust Memorial Museum’.

^144. For instance, interviews with Gideon Maltz, National Security Staff, Washington DC, 21 May 2013, and with Cameron Hudson, Washington DC, 22 May 2013.

^145. Interview with Cameron Hudson, Washington DC, 22 May 2013.

^146. This was put into practice right away, when then Director of National Intelligence, Dennis C. Blair warned in testimony before Congress in 2010 that there is the danger of future mass killings in Southern Sudan: Abramowitz and Lawrence, ‘How Genocide Became a National Security Threat’.

^147. Many interviewees remarked that the traditional rivalries between thematic and regional entities within the State Department continue to hamper the implementation of those co-ordination efforts.

^148. Though not a signatory to the ICC, the US increasingly supports the ICC via the UN Security Council and direct assistance. Phone interview with Beth van Schaack, State Department, Office of Criminal Justice, 10 June 2013.

^149.Jentleson, ‘The Obama Administration and R2P’, 400; for an in depth discussion of MARO, see Brockmeier et al., Schutz und Verantwortung, 41–42.

^150.The White House, ‘Remarks at the Holocaust Memorial Museum’. Interview with official at the US Treasury, Washington DC, 23 May 2013,

^151. Interviews with US diplomats in Washington DC, 24 May 2013, and in New York, 28–29 May 2013.

^152. Interviews with US diplomats in Washington DC, 24 May 2013, and in New York, 28–29 May 2013.

^153. As Brockmeier et al. emphasise, two main factors helped the atrocity prevention agenda gain traction in the public discourse: political entrepreneurship and individuals as well as social movements and advocacy campaigns. Brockmeier et al., Schutz und Verantwortung.

^154. Interview with Cameron Hudson, Washington DC, 22 May 2013.

^155. Interview with Gideon Maltz, National Security Staff, Washington DC, 21 May 2013, and with Cameron Hudson, Washington DC, 22 May 2013.

^156.Albright and Williamson, The United States and R2P, 11.

^157. As Hamilton elaborates, the APB was briefed from the outset about rising tensions and the US administration acted quickly and coherently after 5 December 2013, when there was first credible evidence about atrocities being committed: the French UN Chapter VII resolution was co-sponsored, Obama taped a message directed at the population of CAR, one day later, the administration channelled US$ 60 million in military assistance to the UN mission, airlift capacities were immediately deployed and Ambassador Power travelled to Bangui to support reconciliation efforts: Hamilton, ‘Samantha Power in Practice’.