MG: You made the point that the war aims should have been not to maximise the number of dead jihadists but to minimise civilian and other casualties. And indeed, that has become the metric by which this surge has been judged so far relatively successful. That raises a broader question about international law and the responsibility to protect. Traditionalists argue that the UN charter essentially places state sovereignty above almost everything else – the Westphalian system. And the Westphalian system has some surprising defenders even now on both Left and Right, and indeed people like the Chinese government who occupy the simultaneous position that is both Left and Right. But I suspect you, like me, think that that system is out of date. We sometimes have a duty or a responsibility but certainly we should have the freedom to be able to intervene when a state is palpably failing to protect its citizens, to guarantee their survival and to guarantee them the basics. If a state is torturing, presiding over famine, if it’s oppressive and tyrannical and the means exist. But at the moment when I and others advance that case we are told by some people that what we want to do is to rip up international law. Some politicians here still argue that the Iraq war was “illegal”. How do you address that bundle of concerns?

PB: I think there are two ways to conceptualise it and they tend to fall along European and American lines. One way to look at the problem is to say that sovereignty is a legal property conferred by the international community. I refer to it in my book as “translucent sovereignty” because it implies that if the international community feels that the criteria for sovereignty have been violated or are no longer being upheld, it can withdraw the impermeability of the state’s sovereignty, whether it acts through the UN Security Council or perhaps Nato or the Organisation of African Unity. A more American approach says that sovereignty doesn’t descend from the community of states to the state but that it arises from the people – that sovereignty is a consequence of the relationship between a state and its people. When the state acts, not simply not to protect but systematically to destroy a significant population of its own, it has by its own actions thrown away its sovereignty and this is not a matter for the judgment of the community of states, that it is in the hands of the state itself and that therefore it renders itself liable to the electorate. That’s a slightly different view and I sometimes call it “transparent sovereignty”. I use the words “transparent” and “translucent” to contrast it with “opaque sovereignty”, the classical view that you just attributed quite correctly to China. And of course these problems are around us all the time, in Burma, in the Sudan, in Zimbabwe and you see the community of states struggling to find the right international doctrines to deal with it.