There's two theories concerning what happened in Ukraine last weekend. One is that the Russian government, as per a tradition of destabilizing neighbors who dared to cross them by arming insurgents within their borders, gave high-end military hardware to idiots who proceeded to shoot down a civilian airliner after mistaking it for a legitimate target. The other is that Flight 17 was loaded with exsanguinated corpses and shot down by the Ukrainian air force as part of a pretext for an invasion of Russia / after being mistaken for Putin's personal aircraft, all as part of a conspiracy involving Western journalists, the internet, and in fact every media source that isn't controlled by the Russian government.
The whole incident has been called a game-changer, but when the folks on TV use the words their referring to states' policy towards Russia. I'd prefer it to be a game-changer in terms of changing the way the game is played entirely.
See, despite the phrase "international community," states aren't always good neighbors. Sure, they occasionally give aid packages to each other, help find another country's lost plane, form neighborhood organizations that change what we think global governance can accomplish, or liberate their friends from their enemies. But when it comes to civil conflict, the response is usually "could you keep it down, please?" If the countries of the world were houses on a block, it'd be one with constant gunshots and screams coming from far too many homes, while the rest mostly crank up their sound systems and try to ignore it.
The issue is, as usual, sovereignty. States are recognized as the ultimate legitimate authority within their borders, and only within those borders. Therefore, any internal conflict is the problem of that particular state, and others have no "right" or obligation to interfere. There's a couple of problems with this, though. First, for a civil war to be going on in the first place, a state has by definition lost its monopoly over the legitimate use of force used within its borders, and is sufficiently weak that a rebel groups believes it stands a chance of overthrowing it. Or in other words, civil wars happen in states that are least equipped to deal with them, yet their neighbors expect them to handle the problem.
Second, there's no guarantee that a civil war will stay confined to those neat little lines we've drawn on the globe. Even in a "normal" civil conflict, and despite the aforementioned tenants of sovereignty, states like to meddle. Russia supplying the separatists in Ukraine is nothing new, the issue of the past week is that this meddling cost an airplane full of noncombatants their lives. Worse are situations like the one in the Middle East, where the ISIS group is committed to redrawing the map entirely. It was able to establish itself in Syria during its ongoing civil war, and is now pushing against a neighboring failing state, and is influencing politics throughout the region.
The inevitable questions after looking at all this is: what if, rather than merely condemning the fighting in Syria, someone had decided to intervene and bring it to a conclusion years ago, before ISIS built its power base? What if someone had helped Kiev's new government pacify its rebellious eastern provinces, and secure its country's borders so no Russian anti-air platforms could be fired by trigger-happy morons at civilian aircraft?
Ah, but the phrasing of the question provides the answer. When we say "someone needs to do something," we rarely mean "I should do something."
If states are the ultimate authority within their borders, then there is no legitimate agent in the world to go around interceding in civil conflicts to keep things like Flight 17 from happening - at least, not without those states' invitation. And who would such a do-gooder be, anyway? The United States, a war-weary superpower with a host of domestic issues to deal with? The European Union, which can't quite decide whether it wants to move beyond its component national identities? Or what if it's China or Russia that decides to go about (in Russia's case, overtly) interfering in civil conflicts to resolve them? Would less authoritarian parts of the world be happy with the results?
And even if the world decided that someone was authorized to go around using force to end civil wars before they spread further, would that agent want to? Could they afford to? Some of the factors behind the United States' non-intervention in Syria was the fact that we'd just spent a decade occupying two countries in what's looking like a failed attempt at spreading democracy, and that Syria's anti-air capacities were a couple of levels above those of the regimes we'd previously crushed - the conclusion was that intervening in Syria was likely to be even less pleasant than "fixing" Iraq and Afghanistan. But even if our military was still in top form, and confident it could evade Syrian AA fire, would we have been willing to commit out forces to a potentially lengthy occupation and peacemaking process? Or would we be willing to have those soldiers available in case of a crisis that impacted states we were directly interested in?
Maybe it won't always be like this, but we're at an awkward stage in our development as a global community where our humanitarian inclinations are up against national interest and political notions devised to empower kings, which leaves us knowing we ought to act without feeling that we're able to. And so we get the current situation, where we sit and watch civil wars happen, and hope that they stay relatively civil so we don't have to send troops to prop up an ally when a conflict spills over national borders, or lose citizens to trigger-happy insurgents supplied by a borderline rogue state. Like watching a neighbor's house burn down and praying that the sparks don't land on our yard.
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