The New Interventionists
Article Summary and Author Biography
A new doctrine for American foreign policy is gradually emerging from the tumult of the first post-Cold War years. Like the doctrine of containment that opened the crusade against communism, the new strategy of interventionism is inchoate in its first expressions, ill thought out in its implications and its chosen instruments. Neither the United Nations nor the United States has the necessary will or resources to bring peace in the dozens of civil wars that now mar the global landscape from Bosnia to Somalia, Liberia to Cambodia. Interventions driven even by moral or humanitarian impulses may actually prolong the civil strife they seek to resolve.
Stephen John Stedman is Assistant Professor of African Studies and Comparative Politics at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the author of Peacemaking in Civil War: International Mediation in Zimbabwe, 1974-1980.
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.
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