Issue of justice only enters where there is equal power to enforce it, and that the powerful exact what they can, and the weak grant what they must,” wrote the great Athenian historian Thucydides in History of this Peloponnesian War. In international relations, ‘self-help’ is finally resort for the security of the state. The invaded Dominican Republic, Panama, Granada and Iraq when it secretly intervened in Iran, Cuba, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Chile, etc without any significant opposition from other great powers. The Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan too was not militarily opposed by a third-power directly, and it is only later that the US got covertly involved in the form of training and supplying weapons to the mujahedeen, to help wage an insurgency against the Soviets. Most of these interventions were justified dependent on the pretext that these were the superpowers and they might do whatever was necessary to maintain their respective spheres of influence. Similarly, India as a regional power justified its military intervention in East-Pakistan (now Bangladesh) on humanitarian grounds. Neither China nor the US could come to rescue their supposed ally, Pakistan. All these incidents recommend that international organizations like the UN alone are not able to stop wars, unless there is also a keen interest by great powers to do now.
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