Wandering in the Void: Charting the U.N.'s New Strategic Role

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The United Nations has entered a domain of military activity-a vaguely defined no-man's-land lying somewhere between traditional peacekeeping and enforcement-for which it lacks any guiding operational concept. It has merely ratcheted up the traditional peacekeeping mechanism in an attempt to respond to wholly new security challenges. The result is that the majority of the nearly 70,000 blue-helmeted peacekeepers now out in the field serve in contexts for which peacekeeping was not intended. Even as the demand for these U.N. troops increases almost daily, they continue to function under rules of engagement and with equipment frequently inadequate to their missions. Moreover, they depend for their effectiveness and sometimes their very survival on a U.N. infrastructure that is increasingly not up to the task.

This growing misuse of peacekeeping does more than strain the United Nations materially and institutionally. It has brought the world body to the point of outright strategic failure. Indeed, in Bosnia that line has been crossed already. The U.N. peacekeeping forces there have performed a valuable humanitarian role, to be sure. Nonetheless, having been deployed in a security environment for which the peacekeeping mechanism was not designed, they have ended up deterring, not ethnic cleansing, nor the dismemberment of an internationally recognized state, but the international community itself from undertaking more forceful action to arrest these acts. The Europeans thus opposed President Clinton's proposed air strikes against Serbian artillery positions because they have peacekeeping troops on the ground that are highly vulnerable to retaliation. Yet those troops-because of their small numbers, limited military capability and quasi-peacekeeping rules of engagement-were neither intended nor able to produce the military stalemate from which a political settlement could have emerged.