Since the end of the Cold War, the writings of prominent neoconservatives in the United States in response to humanitarian crises have shown remarkable overlap with those put forward by cosmopolitan thinkers and promoters of humanitarian intervention. In both approaches, 'humanity' is understood as a bounded and exclusive community which highly developed Western societies are given the 'responsibility' to police on a global scale. The cosmopolitan desire to transcend borders and generate a global community, in this context, has played directly into the hands of the most staunch advocates of the Iraq invasion, at least in a rhetorical sense. Given this confluence of arguments on the legitimacy of military interventions for human protection purposes, this paper will argue that while the relationship between cosmopolitanism and international violence has been amplified in the context of the war on terror, it is an issue with deeper theoretical roots that must be understood if we are serious about reducing the amount of violence in the world. In response, fresh consideration must be given to the terms of political inclusion and exclusion that have become normalised in discussions on global political change. It may be that the commitment to 'humanity' must be abandoned if human lives are to be saved.