So, as expected, good money drives out bad at last in benighted Zimbabwe. The authorities have started to allow people to trade in real money and not scraps of paper covered in zeroes.

Or, for now, not covered in zeroes.

I had an interesting discussion this afternoon with someone writing a thesis on the Responsibility to Protect:

• That each individual state has the primary responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing. And it is also a responsibility for prevention of these crimes.

• That the international community should encourage or assist states to exercise this responsibility.

• The international community has the responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means to help protect populations threatened by these crimes. When a state “manifestly fails” in its protection responsibilities, and peaceful means are inadequate, the international community must take stronger measures, including collective use of force authorized by the Security Council under Chapter VII.

In its strict form as adopted at the 2005 World Summit, this new international principle/norm/standard/requirement lays down that states have to protect their own citizens from certain international crimes. If a state manifestly fails to live up these responsibilities, the international community may intervene including by force if necesary.

It does not say that states have to protect their own citizens from their own rulers’ policy incompetence leading to mass deaths or other large-scale disasters. Nor does it say that states have to protect their citizens from the impact of natural disasters.

All of which creates unhappy moral contradictions. It is OK for the international community to jump over the sovereignty fence and stop a Bad Leader killing or expelling his/her own people.

But not OK to jump over to stop a Bad Leader plundering the country, less directly but just as surely leaving millions to starve or die of disease for generations to come.

And not OK to give help to people starving after a natural disaster, when a Bad Leader refuses to let in foreign help.

In each case the Bad Leader’s badness and/or malign selfishness causes massive deaths.

Yet in the first case lives may be saved. In the others, hundreds of thousands of people may be left to die as the world glumly leans on the sovereignty fence watching it happen – the victims are collateral damage of that national sovereignty principle.

The main thing, of course, is that African statesmen should noisily insist that the West must not intervene to stop these African ‘non-criminal’ disasters, but instead must pick up the tab anyway once they are unstoppable:

… former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan led calls for world leaders to help rebuild Zimbabwe’s economy.

If there is a moral case for helping Zimbabwe’s people out of a horrible hole, is there not an identical moral case for stopping its odious leaders steer the country deeply into it?

Whatever happened to our Moral Foreign Policy?

Or even Enlightened Self-Interest?