Perilous Interventions
The Security Council and the Politics of Chaos
About the book
Hardeep Singh Puri, India's envoy to the United Nations at the time, gives an insider's account of the Security Council's decision making on the use of force. He recounts a Manhattan lunch on 7 March 2011, where Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and diplomats from Council countries discussed force as Muammar Gaddafi's troops were said to be advancing on Benghazi. Authorization followed ten days later. Puri describes the Council's decision making as whimsical and faults some permanent members for an ill-considered urge to intervene. He examines how the use of force went badly wrong in Libya, Syria, Yemen and Crimea, and in India's own intervention in Sri Lanka in the 1980s.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb praised it as an outstanding, elegantly written study of the side effects of intervention, showing how moral arguments are used to justify meddling in complex systems that the interveners do not understand.
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This book has 1 recommendation
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Flaneur)
This is an outstanding book on the side effects of interventionism, written in extremely elegant prose and with maximal clarity. It documents how people find arguments couched in moralistic terms to intervene in complex systems they don't understand.
These interventions trigger endless chains of unintended consequences --consequences for the victims, but none for the interventionistas, allowing them to repeat the mistake again and again. Puri, as an insider, outlines the principles and legal mechanisms, then runs through the events of the past few years since the Iraq invasion; each one of his chapters are models of concision, presenting the story of Ukraine, Syria, Lybia, and Yemen, among others, as standalone briefings to the uninitiated. It was high time that somebody in international affairs has approached the problem of "iatrogenics", i.e. harm done by the healer.
This book should be mandatory reading to every student and practitioner of foreign affairs.
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