WASHINGTON — France has invoked the”Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) at the United Nations Security Council, calling for an international aid mission to Myanmar with or without the approval of the military junta. While Russia and China will ensure that nothing comes of it, France’s willingness to propose this in response to a natural disaster represents a departure from what was codified by a 2005 UN General Assembly resolution. Gareth Evans lays this out nicely in today’s Guardian. Says Evans, “if it comes to be thought that”R2P”, and in particular the sharp military end of the doctrine, is capable of being invoked in anything other than a context of mass atrocity crimes, then such consensus as there is in favour of the new norm will simply evaporate in the global South.” As a body of law, R2P may prescribe the circumstances for when and how forceful intervention may be used. In practice, though, it has been an inspiring yet vague norm that could increasingly be used, as it was last week, to advance the liberal internationalist cause in the wake of Iraq and Afghanistan. This is a cause to which I’m largely sympathetic, but I worry that invoking R2P beyond the confines of what has been adopted by the UN will, in the eyes of those who disagree, turn what is a legal document into a manifesto. As the debate over the ethics of intervention rages on, liberal internationalists should realize that R2P has grown up: Perhaps we need a manifesto, but this document, codified into international law, cannot be it alone.

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