"I don't believe that in this time, in the early 21st century, international politics can be just about nations' interests, narrowly and traditionally defined." So said British prime minister Tony Blair in Cape Town yesterday on the final leg of an African tour that has also taken him to Libya and Sierra Leone.
"I believe in the power of political action to make the world better and the moral obligation to use it," he said, describing British policy in Africa as "avowedly interventionist".
As he prepares to leave office this is an appropriate benchmark against which to assess Mr Blair's overall policy of humanitarian intervention, his major foreign policy doctrine over the last 10 years. He said yesterday it was developed after the complete failure to prevent genocide in Rwanda or the early spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa.
Compared to that, the intervention he supported in Sierra Leone in 1999 to halt the blood diamond wars, or the later initiative taken by the British chairmanship of the G8 to channel much more international aid to poor African states were examples of effective political action to make the world a better place. He pledged support for US efforts to put pressure on Sudan over Darfur and on Zimbabwe with his South African hosts.
Set out like this, it is difficult to disagree with Mr Blair's case for intervention. International politics has indeed gone beyond separatist sovereignty and narrow national interests under the impact of globalisation and a wider ethical awareness. In his speech to the Economic Club of Chicago in 1999 launching a new "doctrine of the international community", Mr Blair declared that the "most pressing foreign policy problem we face is to identify the circumstances in which we should get actively involved in other people's conflicts".
This substantially exceeded the then established international norms of intervention through the United Nations system and was pitched to persuade President Clinton to send ground troops into Kosovo to force a Serbian withdrawal. The Kosovo intervention took place without full UN sanction; but in Mr Blair's second term his ideas influenced the UN secretary general Kofi Annan's successful advocacy of "the responsibility to protect" doctrine adopted by the UN in 2005.
Mr Blair has in fact brought his country to war on five occasions: Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and twice in Iraq, first during the "Desert Fox" operation in 1998 and then fatefully along with the US in the 2003 invasion and occupation of that state. He says intervention is necessary to go beyond what the UN can achieve.
But that principle cannot be applied to the Iraq invasion, which was a war of choice. Mr Blair will deservedly be assessed above all under that category and by that policy mistake. It has given intervention a bad name by branding it as illegitimate neo-imperialism. But following that logic, this should not altogether cloud judgments of Mr Blair's humanitarian interventionism, which has done its fair share of good.