In Defense of Intervention

THE WILSONIAN MISSION

The Clinton administration's stand on the promotion of human rights and democracy abroad pleases no one. Some criticize the president for lacking the courage of his repeated conviction that America should take an active role on behalf of these principles; not even the intervention in Haiti satisfies them that he has finally found his voice in foreign affairs. Others, to the contrary, fervently regret that he has such convictions at all and hope that the Haiti involvement will leave him chastened.

Those who criticize the president's convictions call on him to stop making impractical pledges to sponsor unrealistic reform abroad, commitments that serve no vital interests while requiring substantial outlays of power and prestige without clear promise of success. In their view, Washington should restrain its emotions over human rights abuses in China, limit itself to humanitarian assistance to Rwanda and elsewhere in Africa, and offer little more than diplomatic good offices for Bosnia. Involvement that includes armed intervention, as in Bosnia or Haiti, or harsh economic sanctions, as with China or North Korea, is quite unlikely to produce the desired political outcomes. America will bog down in imbroglios of no real importance to the national interest.

From this point of view, the current involvement in Haiti may well turn out to be a difficult and in many ways futile undertaking. Such a negative reading is only somewhat mitigated by the president's good fortune at securing a last-minute victory thanks to the efforts of the team led by former President Jimmy Carter to secure an agreement for a peaceful transition from the regime of General Raoul Cedras to a restoration of Haiti's first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The hope should be that Clinton has learned his lesson from a brush with armed invasion and will rein in any remaining enthusiasm for future adventures.