The ‘Age of Impunity’
Moral Maze
BBC
4.5 • 609 Ratings
🗓️ 10 February 2021
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
“America is back”, said President Joe Biden, ushering in a new era of US foreign policy. There is a lot in his in-tray. Having announced an end to US support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen, he faces a coup in Myanmar, Russia’s election meddling and the “very credible case” of genocide against the Uighurs in China. There has been a sense for some time that liberal democracy is in retreat, politically, morally and perhaps also militarily. The result, according to some, is that we have become toothless in holding aggressive actors and rogue regimes to account. David Miliband, CEO of the International Rescue Committee, has described this as the ‘Age of Impunity’, where “war crimes go unpunished” and “militaries, militias, and mercenaries in conflicts around the world believe they can get away with anything”. Others might argue we have short memories, and the last century is full of tyrants we neglected to confront, atrocities we failed to prevent and conflicts we made worse through our morally-motivated interventions. If the US is resetting the global democratic order, recommitting to alliances and international agreements, what should be its guiding principles? Is there a place for morality in global affairs, or has it always been about realpolitik and enlightened self-interest? As a nation and as a group of nations, is it time to assert strong moral values on the global stage, whatever the consequences, or is it better to be pragmatic and honest about the problems we can and can’t solve? With David Miliband, Dr Joseph Nye, Prof Adrian Pabst and Prof Patrick Porter.
Producer: Dan Tierney.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Good evening. The Russian jet must have known it was an ambulance centre. |
| 0:03.6 | It was a well-marked complex on the edge of a Syrian town and would have been unmistakable even from altitude. |
| 0:09.4 | It fired anyway, killing two aid workers busy trying to save lives. |
| 0:14.0 | The jets came back shortly afterwards, deliberately to kill the rescuers. |
| 0:18.2 | The aid workers' boss, the former Foreign Secretary David Miliband, sees them as victims |
| 0:22.6 | of a breakdown in the world order. In a passionate speech to the World Economic Forum, he talked |
| 0:28.1 | of a new age of impunity, where rogue states, sectarian movements, terrorist groups, commit crimes |
| 0:34.8 | against humanity and are no longer held to account. There are those who |
| 0:39.4 | will say that nothing's changed, that Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, made the 20th century more murderous. |
| 0:45.8 | There are those who will look at the recent history of Western interventions in the Middle East |
| 0:49.6 | in Afghanistan that seem to them to have created worse problems than those they were intended |
| 0:54.0 | to solve. But there is a sense that liberal democracy has been in retreat. Afghanistan that seemed to them to have created worse problems than those they were intended to |
| 0:54.3 | solve. But there is a sense that liberal democracy has been in retreat, a waning of power, |
| 0:59.9 | of influence, of confidence that Western values have been traded away for economic advantage. |
| 1:06.3 | Now a new president is in the White House, saying America is back. |
| 1:11.1 | Bluster? Or a promise to reset the terms of international relations? |
| 1:16.2 | Morality and diplomacy. Our moral maze tonight. The panel, Anne McElvoy, senior editor at The Economist. |
| 1:21.3 | Mona Siddiqui, professor of Islamic and inter-religious studies at Edinburgh University. |
| 1:25.2 | The chief executive of the RSA, Matthew Taylor, |
| 1:28.4 | and the historian Tim Stanley. Tim, a historian's view, age of impunity? I think it's always been an |
| 1:35.1 | age of impunity. And in the past, one could argue that we had a degree of liberal democratic |
| 1:40.8 | impunity when we went to war in Iraq. Look, all moral people hate |
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