The New Interventionists

A New Foreign Policy Doctrine

NOT SO LONG AGO we could confuse the end of the Cold War with the end of history and entertain the possibility that we had survived the famous Chinese curse of living in interesting times. A new era of international security seemed about to dawn, where even the most protracted conflicts appeared solvable. International mediation in Angola, Cambodia and El Salvador led to negotiated settlements of long civil wars and revived the hope that ballots, not bullets, would finally determine the fate of peoples around the globe.

But as Ralph Ellison cautioned in his masterpiece, Invisible Man, history is not an arrow but a boomerang. Just when the end of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry held out the promise that rationality and reason would triumph over ideology, the world witnessed the bloody dissolution of states in Yugoslavia, Somalia, Liberia and Ethiopia. So, too, came the revival of virulent nationalism throughout the former Soviet empire and genocidal campaigns on the fringes of western Europe. Even those successful cases of mediated civil war now hover on the brink of renewed bloodshed. The fortunes of history, it seems, have as much to do with the persistence of hatred and memory as with the vicissitudes of grand ideologies.

Yet the end of superpower rivalry continues to entrance America with the chimera of a new world order. That illusion, alongside often violent disorder in many states, has produced a kind of "new interventionism." This outlook combines an awareness that civil war is a legitimate issue of international security with a sentiment for crusading liberal internationalism. The new interventionists wed great emphasis on the moral obligations of the international community to an eagerness for a newly available United Nations to intervene in domestic conflicts throughout the world.

Thus future historians may compare 1991 and 1992 to the years just after World War II, when the doctrine of containment evolved. Like that time, the last two years have seen a series of events, precedents, incremental decisions and policy rationales give birth to a new doctrine of American foreign policy. While that new doctrine remains inchoate, a few important facets are visible and suggest that the United States, far from turning inward, may be taking upon itself a more crusading, interventionist role in world affairs.