Anatomy of a Failure

Before President Bill Clinton sends a proposed 4,000 U.S. soldiers on a peacekeeping mission to Kosovo, he should consider this sobering reality: Peacekeeping operations all over the world are falling apart, despite the investment of billions of U.S. dollars and several dozen lives. Rather than continue pushing America’s luck in regions irrelevant to the nation’s security and well-being, Clinton should end this grandiose post-Cold War experiment in fixing failed states.

The list of failed peace missions is long and growing. Somalia remains a hotbed of chaos and clan warfare following ambitious United Nations and U.S. attempts at nation-building. Five years after a U.S. invasion aimed at “restoring” democracy in Haiti, yet another leader, President Rene Preval, just dissolved Parliament, while the country’s economy remains a basket case and political violence is on the rise: A prominent senator was assassinated on March 1.

Cambodia, once touted as the signature peacekeeping success, has descended into renewed dictatorship. In 1997, barely four years after U.N.-supervised elections, Second Deputy Prime Minister Hun Sen overthrew his rival, First Deputy Prime Minister Prince Norodom Ranariddh, in a bloody coup. Though Hun Sen tried to legitimize his rule by holding elections last July, the balloting was marked by fraud.

The United Nations has just beaten a hasty retreat from Angola, where a long-smoldering civil conflict has reignited. A multiyear U.N. mediation and peacekeeping effort collapsed last December, when Jonas Savimbi’s National Union for Total Independence of Angola guerrillas attacked government forces. In fact, during the initial fighting, two U.N. aircraft were shot down, killing more than two dozen peacekeeping personnel. Secretary Gen. Kofi Annan then conceded the mission was no longer viable, and ordered peacekeepers to leave.

The original U.N. mission in Bosnia floundered and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led successor has long exceeded its deadline. Yet, after three years of occupation by the world’s most powerful military alliance, Bosnia shows few signs of becoming a viable country, as tacitly acknowledged by the administration’s warnings that setting deadlines for final U.S. troop withdrawals could plunge the region back into chaos. In fact, supporters of extensive U.S. involvement in the Balkans now admit the United States may need a military presence in the region as long as it has had one in Korea, nearly a half century.

These dismal results should not be surprising. U.S. participation in peace operations was always a dubious policy. The failed states involved fit no traditional definition of vital or even significant U.S. interests. None is militarily strong enough to threaten America or its major allies. None is a significant market for U.S. goods or a major site of U.S. investment. None supplies any scarce raw materials. Those that were Cold War battlegrounds lost whatever strategic significance they may have had once the Soviet Union collapsed.

Nor, despite numerous warnings, have their troubles repeatedly spilled over to more important countries. Until the Asian financial crisis, most of Cambodia’s neighbors boomed economically and cohered socially, despite that country’s troubles. Interventionists portray the Kosovo crisis as the inevitable result of Bosnia’s recent war, but the Albanian Kosovars’ grievances against their Serb rulers long predate that conflict.

Indeed, Bosnia’s continuing woes have not prevented Slovenia from prospering and flowering politically. Despite broader claims that Bosnia and the rest of the Balkans hold the key to stability in Europe, reform in the continent’s eastern half continues its uneven pace, while much of Western Europe has just established a common currency.

Where failed states’ troubles have hurt their neighbors, as in Rwanda’s effect on the Congo’s continuing turmoil, the “victim” has been equally inconsequential to the United States.

Just as important, though the failed states themselves might be marginal to America, the costs of U.S. involvement in peacekeeping are anything but. The price tag of the Bosnia mission, for example, has already hit $12 billion, with no end in sight. Haiti has cost more than $2 billion. Washington has even spent $1.5 billion on tiny, remote Rwanda.

Moreover, as finally acknowledged by the administration, peacekeeping obligations have stretched U.S. combat forces dangerously thin and increased the tempo of military operations far beyond prudent norms. The new defense-budget hikes supported by Clinton and Congress are mere Band-Aid fixes. Unless Washington’s appetite for peace operations fades, the United States could find itself with a stressed-out force of armed social workers, hard-pressed to handle bona fide security threats that might emerge.

Interventionists have long emphasized America’s alleged moral interests in helping failed states through peace operations. But how moral is it to risk U.S. lives in unnecessary and futile ventures? The record shows that outside forces haven’t the vaguest idea how to fix failed states at any politically acceptable or strategically sensible price.

Tragically, the only lesson apparently learned by the administration from this growing list of peacekeeping failures is to tar domestic critics as isolationists. Moreover, the administration’s policy guidelines for peace operations, issued in 1994, after the Somalia disaster, still define America’s vital interests open-endedly. By emphasizing the reputedly tight links between America’s fate and instability literally anywhere in the world, they create doctrinal pressure to act first and think later when crises erupt.

Nowhere is the obsession with peacekeeping more evident than in the administration’s plans to expand NATO and “adapt” it to “new crisis management and peacekeeping missions,” in Clinton’s words. Indeed, the alliance’s proposed new “strategic concept,” which is to be approved at a summit this spring, has a large peacekeeping component. Such an orientation would practically guarantee the use of U.S. soldiers in civil and ethnic conflicts all over still shaky Eastern Europe and even in more volatile former Soviet republics.

Interventionists inside and outside the administration insist that America’s superpower status requires actively supporting U.N. and NATO peace operations. Yet, the reality is just the opposite. Precisely because the United States is so strong, wealthy and substantially self-sufficient, it can afford to ignore tempests in local teapots, however tragic.

Prolonging the peacekeeping experiment can only needlessly expose Americans to greater risks and costs. It’s time to pull the plug on these operations, and focus our nation’s attentions on higher international and domestic priorities.*