One’s thoughts naturally turn to NATO’s 2011 military intervention in Libya, which proponents of killing-and-maiming as a humanitarian strategy like to point to as an effective kill-and-maim episode that debunked the concerns of skeptics.

[…]

But I do think it’s worth interrogating the larger political and ideological construct that says that spending a few billions dollars to help foreigners is a thinkable undertaking if and only if the means of providing assistance is to kill some people and blow some stuff up. The explosives-heavy approach to humanitarianism has a lot of unpredictable side effects, sometimes backfires massively, and offers an extremely poor value proposition. So whatever you think about killing some Syrians this summer, please consider throwing a few dollars in the direction of a cost-effective charity of some kind.

“Military Strikes Are an Extremely Expensive Way to Help Foreigners”, Matthew Yglesias