MG: I believe so. But there is one other strain in Philip’s thinking which I think is fair, which is that when we talk about intervention the standard student thing to say is: “Well, you only intervened in Iraq because of oil. As soon as they discover oil in Zimbabwe then the US marines will be in Bulawayo.” While it is a facile thing to say, as Philip has pointed out, there is a nugget of truth behind it, which is if you’re going to ask a democratic country to commit its troops and put its young men’s lives in danger and to commit taxpayers’ money, then if an action is wholly altruistic you will weary the patience of the electorate and those who are underwriting that investment of blood and treasure. So therefore there is nothing intrinsically wrong in saying we want to intervene for altruistic reasons but there are also reasons of enlightened self-interest why we might wish to secure an energy supply at a reasonable price for the free world or why we might wish to secure regional stability in an area in which we have long-­established interests because it’s perfectly fair for those who are stewards of a country’s destiny to balance altruism and enlightened self-interest. And it’s also the case that if we are going to maintain consent for interventions which are purely altruistic then we’ve got to recognise that people want to know that the foreign policy of the country is being shaped by people who have a keen analysis of their country’s self-interest as well as a moral or ethical view of how power can be used for good.

PB: I agree, but I also think that without some strategic interest it is very hard to sustain a humanitarian intervention. So you end up abandoning local allies and vulnerable populations once the going gets tough.

DJ: What about the problem of pre-emptive war? Where a country is believed to pose a very serious threat – particularly in the case of nuclear weapons but other weapons of mass destruction as well – has that justification for intervention now been irreparably damaged by the perceived view that we got it wrong over Iraq? That is actually still a matter for argument among the experts, but the general population seem to have made their minds up that they were misled; yet we do have the very serious case of Iran, which is not simply posing a direct threat to a close ally and potentially also to us but is also destabilising in the sense that it is forcing all its neighbours to arm themselves in the same way. So we have the problem of proliferation. There are other cases – for example, somebody mentioned Pakistan. If Pakistan were to become a failed state with nuclear weapons, would we feel entitled to intervene?