Self-Interest and the Distant Vulnerable Luke Glanville* W hat interests do states have in assisting and protecting vulnerable populations beyond their borders? Today, confronted as we are with civil wars, mass atrocities, and humanitarian catastrophes that have cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians and generated the displacement of sixty million more, this question is as urgent as it has ever been. It is also one that is answered in a variety of ways. Narrow interpretations of nationalism and realism tend to insist that states have no interests in assisting the distant vulnerable. A narrow nationalism claims that a state should never risk blood and treasure for the sake of vulnerable outsiders. In the wake of President Barack Obama’s decision to intervene to protect civilians in Libya in , for example, former U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Bolton re- buked the president for embracing the Responsibility to Protect principle, describ- ing it as “a gauzy, limitless doctrine without any anchor in U.S. national interests.” He charged Obama with “a desire to divert American military power from pro- tecting U.S. interests to achieving ‘humanitarian’ objectives.” The president’s “highest moral duty” is to protect American lives, he declared, “and casually sacri- ficing them to someone else’s interests is hardly justifiable.”  A narrow realism reaches similar conclusions, claiming that, in a dangerous and unpredictable world, the scope of the national interest ought to be restricted to the pursuit of one’s own power and the maintenance of one’s own security. Such an interpreta- tion of U.S. interests was arguably at play in the deliberations within the Obama administration leading up to the decision to intervene in Libya. While they were ultimately unsuccessful in their arguments, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and *I am grateful to Alex Bellamy, Ben Day, Toni Erskine, Emma Hutchison, Andrew Ross, Wes Widmaier, Ben Zala, members of the UNSW Canberra International Ethics Research Group, three anonymous reviewers, and the Ethics & International Affairs editorial team for helpful comments and suggestions that strengthened this article. Ethics & International Affairs, , no.  (), pp. –. ©  Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs doi:./S 335 http:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0892679416000253 Downloaded from http:/www.cambridge.org/core. Australian National University, on 06 Dec 2016 at 03:37:51, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at