The terms of intervention have evolved over the past decade because of the changing political environment, formal acceptance of new treaties and the challenges of other ethnic crises in a globalizing world. At the top of the list is the Anti-Genocide Convention, originally accepted by President Harry Truman in 1948 but blocked by congressional conservatives for four decades. The treaty declares genocide to be an international crime and mandates treaty signers to prevent and punish the crime. The United States finally ratified it in 1986, and a law making genocide a crime was signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1988. The humanitarian principles embodied in the convention provided the backdrop during the past decade for U.S. military intervention in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia-Herzegovina and on behalf of Kurdish refugees in northern Iraq.
People have to obey the rules and broad outlines of tolerable behavior.
The Kosovo conflict also challenges the convention that a government is accountable for domestic policies only to its own people. By intervening, the world's mightiest military alliance is establishing the principle that a country is responsible to the broader region and even the international community for its behavior at home. On that basis, NATO could argue for intervention in many countries much further afield, experts say. But Europe is a unique test case because building an undivided Europe has been the Western goal in a century-long process. I and II and the Cold War.