It's the fundamental duty of all governments to protect everyone within their borders. By doing so all governments maintain and justify their sovereignty. The only situation that triggers our responsibility to protect (R2P) in a foreign land, is when their own government commits human rights abuses against them on a mass scale. The foreign government is violating its duty, and therefore can no longer claim authority. This is what justifies intervention, including military intervention if necessary, in a humanitarian crisis.

The crisis in Myanmar is fundamentally different than Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya. In those cases abuses occurred, but no where near the level that would trigger R2P. The Myanmar government however is in the act of committing a real crime against humanity. The scale is massive, currently impacting 400,000 people with the numbers rising rapidly. Our responsibility to protect those people is thereby invoked.