Preventing Genocide Is Good

If only saying so were all it took to prevent one

Will this sign achieve its stated goal?

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In 1994, over the course of just three months, extremist Hutu militias backed by the Rwandan government massacred 500,000 to 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis. To give a sense of scale to the genocide, in 1933 the Jewish population of Europe was approximately 9.5 million, while in 1994 the Tutsi population of Rwanda was under 1 million. It took the Nazis nearly six years to murder roughly 2/3 of the Jewish population of Europe, an average rate of roughly 85,000 per month and a peak rate of roughly 14,000 per day. The Hutu genocidaires took only 100 days, using vastly lower-tech methods, to murder approximately 2/3 of the Tutsi population of Rwanda, at a rate of roughly 200,000 per month—and possibly more.

The genocide was so swift, so comprehensive, and so horrific, and Western liberals were so appalled that nothing had been done to prevent or end it, that much of the foreign policy establishment at the time embraced the notion that something very fundamental had to change to make sure nothing like ever happened again. It spawned an entirely new doctrine in foreign policy, the so-called Responsibility to Protect, according to which any bystander nation could legitimately intervene militarily in a conflict to which they were not a party in order to prevent genocide. It also prompted Western nations to strongly support a new regime in Rwanda that promised to turn a new leaf after the genocide, rebuild the country and turn it into an African success story.

A Rwandan miracle is exactly what President Paul Kagame’s regime delivered: soaring economic growth, plunging poverty, remarkably little corruption, and substantially improved state capacity, all of which earned him Western plaudits and investment. At the same time, however, Kagame has cemented his rule by disappearing his political opponents, crushing dissent generally, utterly hollowing out the forms of Rwandan democracy, overseeing revenge killings numbering in the tens of thousands and, most significantly, conducting an imperialist war that has seriously destabilized the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Rwanda was involved in the First Congo War from 1996 to 1997, the Second Congo War from 1998 to 2003 which claimed over 5 million lives, and subsequent fighting in North and South Kivu provinces that continues down to the present. Needless to say, when any of the foregoing prompts Western criticism, Kagame responds by invoking the 1994 genocide—which the West failed to prevent and which he takes credit for having ended—to put himself above said criticism, or any criticism, claiming in particular that his country’s interventions in the DRC are in part aimed at preventing a recurrence.

I’m sure my readers are already assuming I’m going to make an analogy to Israel—a state whose founders were substantially motivated by the slow-motion genocide of Russia’s pogroms, whose birth was midwifed by allied guilt over the horror of the Holocaust, and which has proved a haven for Jews who were ethnically cleansed from countries across the Middle East and who have fled persecution from countries around the world, but which is now being accused in many quarters of committing genocide in Gaza. I’ll get there, but my main point is somewhat different. I want to talk about the intellectual legacy of opposition to genocide since 1994, and only then turn to Israel.

The genocide in Rwanda was an abject moral horror, fully deserving a robust policy response. But that doesn’t mean that a moralistic response—meaning, a politics of moral rules as opposed to moral objectives—is the right one. To begin with, the moralistic response leaves advocates in a bit of a dilemma today with respect to Rwanda. On the one hand, the legacy of genocide might seem to imply an obligation to support Kagame’s regime, just as he demands. But on the other hand, Kagame might seem to have forfeited any right not only to deference but even to support because of his human rights abuses, his tyrannical rule and—especially—his interventions in the DRC. How can this tension be resolved? So long as we’re in a primarily moralistic framework, it kind of can’t.

Much more troubling, there’s the problem that the primary doctrinal legacy of the Rwandan genocide—the Responsibility to Protect—has proven a disaster in practice. It has never been applied with any kind of consistency, nor will it ever be, and the charge of genocide has come to be applied liberally in propaganda efforts across many conflicts both to justify and deny justification for military intervention in ways that have debased the seriousness of the accusation. The most prominent time RtP was applied, meanwhile, was to justify NATO’s intervention in Libya, which turned Libya into a failed state with catastrophic consequences that continue to reverberate today in Libya itself and across the region. It also dramatically undermined the prospects for cooperative diplomacy between the major world powers since Russia and China both believed they had been duped into supporting a war they would have opposed had they understood America’s true intentions. The moralistic framework is still waved about, but few take it seriously. A genocide is arguably taking place right now in Darfur. Nobody believes that the international community will intervene to prevent it.

So where does that leave the West’s relationship with Rwanda? Assume that we are actually concerned with whether the current government is oppressive. How should we adjust our relationship? I don’t know whether American pressure on Kagame would weaken his hold on power or strengthen it—and in either case, the outcome could be bad. A defiant Kagame regime might behave more brutally, while successful pressure to overthrow his regime might not lead to a new democracy, but rather cause Rwanda to fall back into instability and fratricidal warfare. And, of course, the opposite could also be true.

I want to be clear what I’m saying. I’m not saying that moral outcomes don’t matter—quite the opposite; I’m saying they matter enormously. We really should care about preventing genocide; we really should care about preserving and spreading democracy and human rights; we really should care about stopping imperialist wars of aggression and devastating civil wars. Nor am I saying that these goods are naturally opposed, that there’s always a simple tradeoff whereby you can either back a dictator to prevent civil war or back democracy and human rights and risk instability, or that genocide is only possible on one or the other side of that dividing line. Dictators often create precisely the conditions that lead to civil conflict when they are gone; democracy and human rights are not just abstractly good things but are ultimately the ideal mechanism for resolving conflict without civil war; genocide is possible in all sorts of circumstances.

I’m saying, rather: that there’s no simple line to draw between what looks like a moral action and what is a moral outcome; that the outcomes are really what matter; that achieving good outcomes is always a prudential matter, a judgment call; and that you can never be sure your judgment is correct.

That’s the framework I want to apply to the situation in Israel and Gaza today. Hamas is a group with clear genocidal intent; that’s obvious after October 7th if it wasn’t before. Israel is a country that was born in response to genocide. Does that mean Israel should have carte blanche to do whatever it deems necessary to destroy Hamas? No. Not because the history is more complicated than that or the Israelis are the real aggressors or anything else like that; I don’t have to go into those questions to say “no.” The answer is “no” because Israel’s proper response is a prudential question, a judgment call. Israel’s goal of destroying Hamas is justified, yes, but that doesn’t mean jus in bello considerations go out the window, nor does it mean that every justified action will lead to good outcomes. And good outcomes are what matters if we’re evaluating whether a response is good.

So if Israel has not earned that kind of deference with respect to its war, does that mean the world is obliged to put pressure on Israel to end the fighting, given the horrific humanitarian situation unfolding in Gaza, the massive loss of innocent life, and the real potential for ethnic cleansing or even genocide? Again: No. That’s also a prudential question, also a judgment call, one that has to be evaluated based on likely outcomes. Pressure could be counterproductive, prompting no change in Israeli action now and greater Israeli intransigence in the future. If pressure were effective, meanwhile, it could lead to an equivocal outcome in the war that results in worse fighting, and a more terrible vengeance, in the near future. I’m not saying either of those conclusions are certain; the opposite could also be true, and pressure could be effective at creating a new diplomatic opening. I’m just saying that there’s no moralistic framework to decide these things, no clean-handed policy to apply that is certainly right because it is rightly intended. It has to actually work.

I suspect one reason why people gravitate toward moralistic stances is because doing so absolves them of the terrible possibility that whatever they do could not only fail, but be counterproductive. They want to believe that if they have right intent, then they have done right. But intent only matters when you’re talking about culpability. Intent is the difference between murder and manslaughter, the difference between Auschwitz and Hiroshima. To be clear, manslaughter is still a crime, and there’s a persuasive case to be made that the bombing of Hiroshima was a war crime as well. But manslaughter is not the same crime as murder, and even if dropping the atomic bomb was a war crime, that doesn’t make it remotely comparable to the Nazi-perpetrated genocide. When making these kinds of assessments of culpability, intent matters enormously.

But when you’re talking about doing good, and about preventing evil, results are all that matter. Intent is irrelevant. In this regard, the bien pensant attitudes of campus sloganeers—according to which having the proper hashtag in your profile is always good but declaring your lack of evil intent when you don’t is in no way exculpatory—have things entirely backwards.

I freely admit that I don’t know enough about the situation in Rwanda to have a real view on what the prudentially wise policy there might be. But I do know enough about Israel to know what the effect has been of the Biden Administration’s support. It has bought the United States enormous popular gratitude in Israel, across the political spectrum. That’s political capital that, at the proper time, the administration will have the opportunity to spend. What they will spend it on remains to be seen, of course, and the enemies of peace in Israel may yet stymie any attempt by America to cash that check—and if that happens, that should have a real impact on administration policy. But I don’t think it’s wrong to speculate that, if Israel doesn’t go down the dark road I fear it could, the political capital America earned by President Biden’s support may have played a vital role in preventing it.

Is that how we should assess our policy toward Israel at this moment? Well, if the goal is to prevent genocide, then I think so. Contra Stephen Wertheim’s recent piece in The New York Times, right after October 7th was the point of least leverage for anyone to influence Israeli actions through pressure, and the consequences of counterproductive pressure for Palestinians and, ultimately, Israelis as well could have been catastrophic. As horrible as things are right now in Gaza, they could still get a whole lot worse. I could be wrong about the answer to that prudential question of course—I don’t think I am, but of course I could be—but if we have a strong interest in preventing genocide, then that question—how best to leverage our relationship with Israel to achieve the least-bad outcome—is the right question to be asking. Taking a stand is irrelevant in and of itself; it’s only relevant if it works.

If, on the other hand, the goal is to keep America insulated from the consequences of Israel’s policies—or if the goal is to damage the Jewish state whatever the cost to the Palestinians or Israelis—then perhaps a higher risk of catastrophe is tolerable. I wouldn’t take that view, but others may legitimately differ.

I just wish, when they do, that they’d be more honest about what their priorities really are.