U.S. foreign policymakers betrayed the American founding by occupying “the center of the liberal world order,” Russia’s top diplomat said before condemning an international commitment to oppose genocide.
“Its founding fathers wanted its leadership and exceptional nature to derive from its own positive example,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Thursday at a military academy in Moscow. “The world is changing, however, and — who knows — America might yet purify itself and return to its own forgotten sources.”
Lavrov’s remarks elaborated on his call for “a post-West world order,” as he put it at the Munich Security Conference in February. He criticized the United States directly and indirectly while defending Russian military intervention in Syria as a legal defense of President Bashar Assad’s regime. At the same time, Lavrov took aim at a United Nations doctrine that condemns genocidal acts by a government, saying it amounted to foreign meddling in a country’s internal affairs.
“[Western countries] are trying to secure for themselves, for example, the ability to interfere in other people’s affairs under the pretext of non-compliance with all sorts of unilaterally engineered human rights concepts like the so-called ‘responsibility to protect,’ ” Lavrov said. “We are against such a distorted interpretation of the most important universal international legal norms and principles.”
The “responsibility to protect” doctrine holds that governments are obliged to protect their own people and, when they fail to do so, the international community ought to intervene. “If humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica, to gross and systematic violation of human rights that offend every precept of our common humanity?” U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in 2000.
Russia endorsed the “responsibility to protect” doctrine at the United Nations in 2005 and even used it to justify its own military actions. Lavrov, in 2008, defended Russia’s invasion of Georgia by accusing the Georgian government of committing genocide. But then-U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, whose book on the massacre at Srebrenica made the case for an international “responsibility to protect” civilians, compared Russia’s assault on civilians and Syrian rebels in Aleppo to past genocides.
“Aleppo will join the ranks of those events in world history that define modern evil, that stain our conscience decades later. Halabja, Rwanda, Srebrenica, and, now, Aleppo,” she said in December.
Lavrov justified the Syrian intervention by noting Moscow’s alliance with Assad’s government, but also told the officers that Russia would not “remain on the side, let alone be isolated from international processes” in foreign policy. “I can say that the greatest misfortunes in the past centuries came to Russia almost always from the West, while Russia, according to Mikhail Lomonosov’s famous dictum, ‘expanded through Siberia,’ bringing different peoples and lands in the East under its wing,” he said. “Our country has its traditions and wholesome values, and we do not try to impose them on anyone. We warn our partners at the same time that when they are in Rome they should do as the Romans do.”
