The Reagan view on intervention

I was reading an old essay by Kenneth Waltz today when I came across something that seemed straight out of today's discussions about bounded sovereignty and the responsibility to protect:

Senior officials in the Reagan administration elevated the right to intervene to the level of general principle. As one of them said, we "debated whether we had the right to dictate the form of another country's government. The bottom line was yes, that some rights are more fundamental than the right of nations to nonintervention, like the rights of individual people... [W]e don't have the right to subvert a democratic government but we do have the right against an undemocratic one."

(Waltz himself was quoting from a 1985 book called Intervention and the Reagan Doctrine, by Robert W. Tucker.)

I suppose the international consensus on R2P is more sophisticated than the rationale explained here, at least, in that it establishes a somewhat more rigorous standard for intervention—one that's based on the ability to relieve human suffering and not on what must necessarily become a subjective determination about levels of democracy. But still we're left with the inescapable reality that decisions about intervention or nonintervention are made in national capitals on the basis of national interests; thus ever was it so.

Clausewitz: first proponent of the weak-states-as-security-threat school?

Ok, I'm just kidding, but try this one on for size: writing in 1831, the by now somewhat less politically progressive Prussian sage argued that "indeed, the partitions [of Poland, which were visited on the unhappy commonwealth in 1772, 1793, and 1795] were made necessary by the disorderly, almost Tartar-like administration of the vast areas the Poles possessed."

I've added emphasis to the awesomely dickish comparison of 18th c. Polish governance to Tatar anarchy; this is especially rich when you consider how it must've been received by Poles, who were (and are) justly proud of the fact that a Polish king had basically saved Western civilization from the Ottoman hordes just a century and a half before, at the conclusion of a series of wars that were largely sparked (or at least fanned) by... the cross-border raids of Ukrainian and Crimean Tatars.

Clausewitz penned this line anonymously as pushback against Jan Zygmunt Skrzynecki's protests that the Prussian government had violated neutrality and favored Russia in its effort to crush the Polish rebellion. "Poles must know little of their own history," he wrote, "or be deeply ashamed of certain pages in it" to posture about neutrality while looking past the productive use of ostensibly neutral Polish territory by Russian armies during the Seven Years War.

The worst thing that Clausewitz's contemporaries had to say about him is that he had liberalizing, reformist tendencies. His modern critics often misleadingly point to Clausewitz's Russian service as an act of disloyalty to the crown and a betrayal of his own country. But Peter Paret argues that this letter substantiates what ought to have been evident all along: Clausewitz was less concerned with supporting freedom abroad than with protecting the existence and prominence of Prussia. An independent Poland would embolden and aid the main enemy -- France -- and pose a strategic dilemma to Prussia that Clausewitz and his contemporaries found unacceptable. Raison d'etat triumphed over political preference, just as it did two decades before, when Clausewitz joined with monarchist Russia to block French hegemony.