Intervention is just one of the subjects covered recently by the immensely provocative TPM Barnett.

He thinks that China has got intervention mostly right and the US has it wrong.

the best nation-building brand out there right now is the Chinese model. I know, I know, it doesn’t meet our threshold definitions of democracy and human rights (not to mention coming nowhere near our EPA standards), but it sure as hell beats America’s post-Cold War product line of Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan and Iraq. Let’s be honest: China’s leveraged buyouts, as mercantilist as they are, beat our hostile takeovers—hands down. And that just tells you how bad America’s military intervention “brand” has become. So, starting with Vietnam. . .

Put another way, you can invade the country and then start up your counter-insurgency/reconstruction ops (the American route), or you might just co-opt the major players pre-conflict with investment offers they can’t refuse (the Chinese route).

if we combined our chocolate (military interventions with a moral compass) with China’s peanut butter (economic interventions with a practical mindset), we might actually come up with a whole superpower, or basically a joint offering that finally covers the market—as in, defeats our political enemies while connecting the economically disenfranchised.

This approach of course means more carnage like Rwanda, in a worst case scenario. But TPMB counters that military intervention gets US soldiers needlessly killed. Moreover the debate raises fundamental questions about R2P.

The outcome of this matter is crucial because many governments are currently rethinking their militaries.

Writing a global rule-set for intervention won’t be easy. The insurance risks map suggests that a militarised insurance company and the United Nations would intervene in regions for different reasons. For example the insurance company would not intervene to stop a humanitarian disaster. From: Mapping the Gap.