Kevin Sullivan

Intentions over Outcomes

Posted by Kevin Sullivan under Uncategorized

Have UN peacekeepers been complicit in African elephant poaching?  Dan Hannan isn’t surprised:

I’ve argued before that, for many Lefties, intentions seem to matter more than outcomes. But how bad do the outcomes have to be before intentions are no longer an excuse? What has to happen before people face up to the real UN (or EU or IOC or whatever) instead of fantasising about some abstract one?

Appropriately enough, the kind of people who are most unthinkingly pro-UN tend also to be the ones most opposed to the ivory trade. Intentions over outcomes, you see. In truth, the ban on ivory sales has been calamitous, both for Africans and elephants. Experience shows that it is far more effective to declare elephants the property of the people who own the land they roam, thus giving locals an incentive to treat them as a renewable resource.

I have little interest in Hannan’s ode to private property, but his greater point is well taken.  There are, ahem, some pundits and bloggers who believe that the UN–while not a perfect institution by any stretch–still stands as the best alternative to the anarchic, Hobbesian world that would presumably fill the void. 

There are several problems with this false dichotomy, and Hannan hits upon one of them here.  The primary issue with the “UN as ideal” argument is that it depends on this crazy idea that the world would immediately revert to a late-19th Century, multi-polar nightmare.  But this time, there are nukes, powerful missiles and other WMD’s.

I think Richard Haass has done a pretty good job of dispelling this myth; describing a “non-polar” world where the UN is simply an actor among several, rather than a confederate umbrella monitoring the whole system.  Banning the killing of elephants is not the issue; the question is whether or not disinterested or overly interested external actors should be voting and intervening on what are essentially regional problems.  The CITES ban–while certainly good intentioned and feel good–hasn’t helped Kenyan elephants, nor has it balanced out the ivory trade.  However, when local actors moved to do something about the problem, the adjustments were far more beneficial.  Zimbabwe and South Africa, for example, now have more elephants than they can handle.

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