Power and Justice in Humanitarian Intervention: An Offensive Realist Perspective

Abstract This article looks at how the United States picks and chooses when to carry out humanitarian intervention. It uses offensive realism as its lens. The central puzzle is simple to state but hard to answer: if justice is meant to be a universal principle, why did the United States intervene in Kosovo (1999) and Iraq (2003) but stay out of Rwanda (1994) and Sudan-Darfur (2003)? To answer this, the study runs a qualitative comparative case study across the four crises. It applies a Most Different Systems Design (MDSD), which lets strategic interest stand out as the one variable that changes across cases. The paper tests three hypotheses drawn from offensive realism: strategic gain, rival weakening, and resource control. Across all four cases, the same pattern appears. Where a crisis touched U.S. strategic interests, the United States acted. Where it did not, mass killing was left unanswered. This suggests that Washington's use of the language of justice is selective, not principled. The article also makes a smaller, methodological point. It argues that international relations theory needs to stay close to evidence and observation, a stance close to what some scholars call "barefoot empiricism." By pairing offensive realism with detailed case evidence, the paper pushes back against liberal accounts of humanitarianism and adds to a wider debate on why states intervene, and why they so often do not.