When to support a nation committing war crimes

Hard cases make bad law

On Twitter I wrote that we must support liberal democracies when they struggle against illiberal and authoritarian movements and regimes. This means we must support Israel in its struggle Hamas and Iran.

A person on Twitter, who I generally agree with and respect, responded:

Liberal democracies should not be supported when they commit genocide and when they do demographic engineering to make sure that the majority of a very large ethnic group under its rule is officially stateless just so they can keep calling their racial regime "democratic"

To which I responded:

All existing liberal democracies are deeply flawed and all have committed genocide within living memory. Britain was guilty of widespread, grotesque violations of basic human rights in Ireland, and also in its remaining colonies, as recently as the 1970s. India, under Prime Minister Indira Gand, carried out The Emergency from 1975 to 1977, an era of truly brutal torture and murder by the state, carried out on a staggering scale. Parts of the USA openly and proudly engaged in the torture of African-Americans, for centuries, with certain places, such as Chicago, allowing its police forces to torture obviously innocent people into making confessions of crimes, and this was as recent as the 1980s. If you're looking for a pure liberal democracy, you will not find it. Nevertheless, the aspirational ideal of liberal democracy remains the most beautiful and most moral of all forms of human government. All of us have a moral obligation to keep up the pressure and force the liberal democracies to move closer to their aspirational ideals. However, when these liberal democracies are in conflict with authoritarian movements or regimes, then we do have a moral obligation to support them, because whatever the flaws of the liberal democracies, they are more easily reformed then the authoritarian movements or regimes.

The person on Twitter then wrote me a DM:

Year 2050, the US is still a representative democracy where the citizens of different races can vote, it also has freedom of speech. A liberal democracy. However, it's also a flawed liberal democracy because African-Americans, from all races, were made stateless. They have no citizenship of any country in the world, the US is also bombing the "Black areas" in the US and killing African-American civilians every single day using the existence of anti-US Black militias there as its justification. The so-called Black areas are under American control in every sense except that African-Americans sometimes get to choose their local leaders there who have virtually no power. In this context, there is a coalition of non-democratic African countries that is pretty hostile to the US. A US-African countries war develops. Would you tweet "full support to liberal democracy against authoritarianism" with a US flag in this context?

To which I responded:

There is an old adage, I'm sure you've heard it, that says, "Hard cases make bad law." I assume that even the best liberal democracies will continue to be guilty of injustices, and decent people will continue to pressure the liberal democracies to move closer to their aspirational ideals. When I'm forced to chose between a deeply flawed liberal democracy and an authoritarian regime, I would ask simply, "Under which system am I allowed to fight for justice, with the least risk of violence to myself?" If one side, however flawed, allows me to openly campaign for reform of that side, while the other side would likely put me in prison for doing the same, then I recognize there is some kind of minimal moral sense operating in that more free system that lets me campaign openly for reform, rather than in the regime that would put me in prison if I were to campaign against it.

There is also the separate issue of internal reform, which determines when justice is a matter of getting individual leaders to face punishment, rather than needing to punish an entire system. There are specific commanders in the IDF who likely gave orders that were in breech of international standards, and therefore they committed war crimes, and these specific commanders can eventually be tried at The Hague. It is also likely that those commanders had the support of Prime Minister Netanyahu, and therefore, he too is guilty of war crimes, and therefore he too can be made to stand trial at The Hague. Given the massive rallies we've seen this last year, in Israel, against Prime Minister Netanyahu, it is reasonable to think that at some point Israel will force Netanyahu to answer to international accusations of war crimes.

This distinction is also crucial for understanding what is a liberal democracy: when two sides are in conflict, as in the scenario you pose, which side seems more likely to engage in self-reform? Which side seems more likely to hold its own leaders to account?

They then asked:

So your answer is you would support a flawed democratic US where African-Americans are stateless and their civilians are killed every single day. Right?

To which I answered:

Where multiple states are at war, I would support the victory of the most liberal state, even if that state is not especially liberal. As I said, I would support the victory of the state that 1.) allows me to fight for the reform of that state and 2.) seems most likely to reform itself via internal civil-society processes.

I would also argue that “So your answer is you would support a flawed democratic US where African-Americans are stateless and their civilians are killed every single day” describes most of the last 400 years in what became the USA, so the question is really whether one would ever support the USA at all. But when I look at the last 400 years I see that the USA has made more progress on human rights than nearly any other nation, so I’m confirmed in my belief that we have a moral obligation to support the liberal democracies that allow the free operation of civil society, as the result of that operation, over the long-term, leads to a moral result.