Fixing ‘Broken’ Countries: A Challenge for U.S.

In Cambodia, a tentative experiment with democracy collapses in a coup after U.N. advisors pull out. In Somalia, the deaths of 18 U.S. soldiers in a firefight bring an international attempt at nation-building to a premature end. Bosnia stubbornly resists a NATO-led force’s two-year, $6-billion effort to impose a peace.

Of all the challenges of the post-Cold War world, none has frustrated U.S. leaders more than trying to fix “broken” countries--those poisoned by a witch’s brew of ethnic hate, political repression and economic hardship.

In today’s tightly interconnected world, these unstable nations constitute one of the era’s most widespread security threats, and senior U.S. officials argue that preserving stability, even in far-off corners of the globe, is crucial for the United States’ economic and political well-being.

Yet the United States in many ways is uniquely ill-equipped to deal with the challenges posed by broken countries. The public and Congress have little patience for involvement in far-flung places where U.S. interests are vague and high-profile “good guys” are nowhere to be found.

Undersecretary of State Stuart Eizenstat called nation-building “one of the toughest elements” of post-Cold War foreign affairs.

“There’s a hesitation in this country to make commitments that are needed . . . to deal with situations that are messy, where there is no clear foe or quick solution in sight,” he said. “These are complex, long-term problems; we are a short-term, throwaway society.”

The United States’ major European allies also have little enthusiasm for long involvements in obscure countries, although the colonial traditions of such nations as Britain and France tend to blunt public resistance.

“This is a difficulty that all world leaders have faced” since the end of the Cold War, said Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “They are working in a world that’s changing so damn rapidly nobody understands it. It’s only understandable [that] they didn’t get it right.”

But the implications are far greater when it is the United States that holds back. Its disproportionate military and political power, coupled with its image as an honest broker with few historical axes to grind, makes U.S. involvement a virtual prerequisite for the successful rescue of any troubled country. The U.S. position within the United Nations as the country that can bless or kill peacekeeping operations merely adds to the crucial nature of its role.

An increasing number of those familiar with the issues are convinced that the United States must take two specific steps to deal more effectively with such problems:

* Develop at least a loose policy framework to define U.S. global interests more precisely, an exercise that would help identify when and how the United States should undertake peacekeeping and nation-building missions.

* Launch a campaign, led by President Clinton, to build at least marginal public support for some form of U.S. involvement overseas.

“To put it bluntly, Mr. Clinton has to have a dialogue with the American people on foreign policy,” said Richard Haass of the Brookings Institution in Washington, whose recent book, “The Reluctant Sheriff,” explores U.S. options in the post-Cold War world. “It’s inevitable that involvement will be decided on a case-by-case basis, but I do think you can prepare the American people that there may be cases where we have to intervene.”

Lorne Craner, president of the Washington-based International Republican Institute, which supports nation-building and monitors elections, put it this way: “You have to be able to say, ‘Here’s what we think U.S. national interests are, here’s where we’re going to get involved, and here’s where we’re not.’ You don’t always need the president, and you don’t need to enunciate what specific countries fit and what countries don’t. But there is a need for a structure, a framework, to start from.”

Craner noted that the U.S. Agency for International Development recently offered his organization $10 million to promote democracy in Congo, formerly called Zaire, and less than $1 million for the same task in Russia.

“There’s something wrong with these priorities,” he said. “What’s more important for American interests: democracy in Russia or democracy in Zaire?”

Haass argued that recent U.S. zigzags in Bosnia-Herzegovina--where U.S. forces with the international peacekeeping mission first seized a Bosnian Serb extremist TV transmitter, then returned it; where they first encouraged more moderate Serbs to act against extremists, then allowed the moderates to be arrested--reflect divisions at the highest level of the administration about the proper U.S. role there.

The uncertainty, he said, reflects more than traditional tensions between the Defense Department, which counsels caution, and the State Department, where Secretary Madeleine Albright advocates a more aggressive engagement.

“It’s the ambivalence of Mr. Clinton himself,” Haass said.

Administration planners contend that countries as diverse as Cambodia, Zaire and Bosnia each present unique challenges and that efforts to lump them into a single policy framework are doomed. But outsiders trace the administration’s difficulties to other sources, not the least being the administration’s own failure to develop a broad vision of the United States’ role in the world.

Moreover, for senior policymakers eager to use their days in power to make an impact, messy crises in distant, little-known countries are frequently seen as unwanted distractions.

“They hate these issues because their time is too valuable to deal with them,” said John Fox, Washington office director of the Open Society Institute, who was a member of the State Department’s policy planning section when the former Yugoslav federation began to break apart in the early 1990s.

Biden said administration officials had told him that building a policy framework for determining where to intervene was politically perilous because it would imply a long-term commitment that would probably be unpopular.

Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, noted that U.S. policymakers have long been more disposed than the general public to intervene in international crises.

The gap, he said, reached dimensions without recent precedent when the U.S. led peacekeeping missions to Bosnia and Haiti.

“They marked the first times since World War II that a majority of the American public were not supporting a decision to deploy American forces at the time the troops hit the ground,” Kohut said.

He noted that ambivalence to both missions remained widespread even though the initial phases of both operations went smoothly and generated no U.S. casualties.

He also contended that the much-vaunted “CNN effect”--the mobilization of public demands for action in response to dramatic live television coverage--had waned.

“Policymakers see a crisis unfolding on CNN and ask what the public thinks,” Kohut said, “but the truth is the public isn’t thinking anything at all.”