The How, When and Where of Deploying America’s Armed Forces Overseas : Foreign policy: When U.S. security is not directly threatened, military intervention should not be a reflexive action.

President Bill Clinton takes office amid a plethora of international problems involving U.S. military force. One of his principal tasks will be to define the criteria for current and future deployments of the coun try’s armed forces.

There are three types of issues: those involving U.S. security directly; those affecting U.S. security indirectly, including challenges to our moral values, and those having no significant security component but that affect moral values.

Foremost, if U.S. security is directly threatened, the United States must be prepared to act unilaterally, though even then it would be helpful to enlist international support. The closest approximation to this scenario was the Persian Gulf War.

The outstanding example of indirect security threats combined with challenges to our moral values is Bosnia. The security threat is indirect because if ethnic cleansing spreads to Kosovo, whose population is 80% Muslim, intervention from Turkey, Macedonia and, in time, Bulgaria and Greece, is possible. Moreover, any Muslim-Christian war in which the basic issue is ethnic cleansing of a Muslim population may accentuate the growing threat from Muslim fundamentalism. Finally, a policy of genocide in Central Europe is profoundly offensive to Western moral sensibilities.

All this has the following implications for the Clinton Administration:

The United States faces a classic balance-of-power problem in the Gulf. It must try to stop Islamic fundamentalism originating from Tehran and Arab radicalism emanating from Baghdad. These goals are often in conflict. The United States thus has no other choice than to insist on the strictest application of relevant U.N. resolutions.

Unfortunately, even after Iraq adheres to these resolutions, the basic strategic dilemma remains: weak, Iraq encourages a resurgent Iran; strong, it threatens its Kurdish and Shiite nationalities and its neighbors. Iraq’s conflict with Iran reflects competition for domination of the Gulf. But Iraq needs no U.S. encouragement to pursue its role in that struggle, and it is unlikely to serve Western purposes when it does.

On the other hand, the new Administration must take the threat from Iran seriously. It should not become so obsessed with Iraqi tactics as to exhaust itself in meaningless pinpricks. The need is for a security system in the Gulf to support the moderate regimes on the Arabian peninsula against both threats. Toward that end, a long-term U.S. presence is indispensable. Conflict between Baghdad and Tehran is a bonus but cannot be generated by U.S. policy.

Bosnia will be the most difficult problem. The new Administration must navigate between abandoning its principles and recklessly throwing itself into a conflict going back hundreds of years. So far, the discussion about military intervention has been largely emotional. Arguments about the infeasibility of military operations have been juxtaposed with claims that a few air strikes would bring about a major breakthrough. Neither a political program nor a military concept for such a policy has been put forward. In its absence, the issue becomes one of domestic politics.

It is difficult to argue that the turmoil in the former Yugoslavia affects the United States so uniquely that it must act alone. But the United States does have an obligation to help shape some consensus.

Any decision regarding military intervention in Bosnia depends on two assessments: whether some European nations--whose interests are most immediately affected--can be persuaded to join military pressures against Serbia, and, what this coalition would demand of Serbia. In other words, military actions require a precise political goal.

Second, there must be a commitment to how far the military operations are to be pursued. No one should believe that a nation that has asserted its nationalism against Turks, Austrians, and Germans will yield easily. Graduated escalation led to the Vietnam morass, and it will have the same effect in the former Yugoslavia unless we can define what we mean by success and are prepared to pay the price.

With respect to issues such as Somalia--of moral challenges with no significant security component--the United States should, as a matter of principle, act only in concert with the widest possible grouping of powers, especially those in the region where the tragedy is occurring. Nor should it permit slogans about “leadership” tempt it into actions it cannot terminate, and which involve political consequences that were not adequately studied when the military commitment was made.

It has become increasingly apparent that relieving the famine is the easier part of the Somali problem; the ultimate remedy is to bring government to a country where every pretense of one has disappeared. In practice, this requires what used to be called a protectorate of indefinite duration.

For the United States to undertake such a project in a region in which it has no definable security interest would be unprecedented and probably unsustainable. By the same token, it will be difficult to carry out George Bush’s original plan to turn matters over to the United Nations after a brief U.S. presence. For the nations sending soldiers to replace ours would soon realize they are involved for the indefinite future, and the task would become increasingly difficult the longer the foreign presence is there.

The dilemma Clinton will face is that, if U.S. soldiers leave without handing the situation over to the United Nations, the conditions that brought them there will rapidly return, or that in seeking to turn it over to others, he may find no takers. And turning matters over to the United Nations requires: substantial military capabilities; the authority to use them; a program for resolving the political conflict, and a willingness by the United Nations to impose that solution. Nowhere has the United Nations played such a role. Yet we have no choice except to reduce our profile rapidly and to be careful about future military enterprises of this kind.

The issues described here are but the tip of an iceberg. They may seem a daunting agenda, but it is also one that defines an opportunity candidate Clinton never envisaged: to be remembered as the President who, after victory in the Cold War, shaped the architecture of a new international system.