Source: Chantal de Jonge Oudraat, "Making Economic Sanctions Work," Survival, Vol.42, No.3, Autumn 2000, p.116.
5. The "Big Three" and intervention or non-intervention
Of course the development is always incomplete and with exceptions. The authority of UN Security Council may or may not apply in case of the "Big Three:" United States, Russia, and China. The United States would not like being placed within the other two, but although not to the degree of Russia and China, the US has also great concern about compromising its sovereignty to multilateral institutions. This is the case both by legal prosecution through International Criminal Court and Tribunals, and placing its soldiers under multilateral command. This can be well explained by Moravcsik's explanation, since the US is very proud of the Command and Control of its armed forces and consider the risk of its nullification under multilateral control very great. The other two P-5 members, United Kingdom and France, still causes problems from time to time, but they are becoming used to the rules of games of EU and hence always to coordinate their actions multilaterally.
We should face the realistic fact that nobody has the power to force some kind of world view on the "Big Three," not to speak of intervening inside Russia or China (of course the borders are disputed and this creates new problems). I would like to recall an episode at the early stage of twentieth century, that should make us think humbly about the limits of what is possible under "humanitarian intervention:" the Western intervention in the Russian Civil War after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. I came across this, as I was doing my normal lecture of the history of international relations. For a long time, I just mentioned this as a failed and foolish attempt of the outsiders to meddle with a nation's attempt to decide its future. But this year, since I was given this task, the episode struck me in a different way: from every evidence we now possess, the Bolshevik government was a very inhuman regime.
