A Poor Case for Quitting: Mistaking Incompetence for Interventionism

When such high-caliber observers as Joseph Nye, Jr., ("Redefining the National Interest," July/August 1999) and Edward Luttwak ("Give War a Chance") call on the United States to scale back its humanitarian intervention in places of low strategic importance, they get attention. Although they use sharply different arguments, both scholars would have the West curtail its tendency to intervene in other people's wars. Unfortunately, their discussions muddle the long-overdue dialogue on U.S. national interests and the proper policy toward peace operations.

Luttwak's essential argument -- that most forms of outside intervention actually postpone peace and perpetuate war, making it better to "let minor wars burn themselves out" -- is seductive. So, too, is Nye's appeal for raising the bar on humanitarian interventions and keeping America's strategic eye focused on higher-priority interests. His is a plea not to squander unique military and political capital on lower-order conflicts. Like Luttwak's argument, Nye's claims could be persuasive, especially as the election season puts the Clinton administration's proclivity for frequent, political use of military power under scrutiny.

The sad thing about the apparent convergence of Nye's and Luttwak's views is that both miss the real point. It is the actual record of U.S. peace operations during the 1990s that is most worthy of criticism, not the inherent merit of using American power -- in all its forms -- to support regional stability and manage conflict. How various U.S. "national interests" relate to one another is more important than the debate between an expansive "Clinton doctrine" and more restrictive ones. Recent American policy has too often succeeded in discrediting worthy ideas, institutions, and principles.

MOVING PAST YOUR ABC'S

Nye is uncomfortable about the ease with which a "C list" humanitarian issue like Kosovo managed to "migrate" to the "B list" of national interests that merit the urgent use of military force. Critical of the U.S. diplomacy that forced Clinton into a test of wills with Slobodan Miloševic, he cautions against responding to "mediagenic" humanitarian crises that stir public passions. He cites cases of real genocide -- such as the Holocaust and the 1994 slaughter in Rwanda -- in arguing that the term has become "trivialized," letting the United States be seduced into wars of self-determination and ethnic conflict. The bottom line for Nye is to confine U.S. military action against "C list" challenges to legitimate cases of genocide and those where strong national interests (beyond purely humanitarian concerns) are present.

No serious participant in the debate argues for the United States as globocop. It cannot intervene against all ethnic cleansing (or pursue an "anti-son-of-a-bitch policy," as Charles Krauthammer puts it). But Nye's effort to segregate neatly a few "hard" cases from the generalized bulk of conflicts in transitional and emerging regions does not stand up well. The "C list" (Kosovo, Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, and Haiti) includes the hard case of appalling genocide in Rwanda, as Nye himself recognizes. It includes Somalia, where much of Africa's current travails began in 1993 when American statecraft lost the will and the way to lead, resulting in an unbroken string of contagion effects as far south as Angola and as far west as the two Congos. The West's failure in Rwanda was the strategic child of its failure in Somalia.

Nye's "C list" also includes the conflicts in two parts of the former Yugoslavia. Only when viewed in a vacuum could they represent "minor wars"; they are actually parts of the same rotting corpse that threatens the security of southeastern Europe. The Western response has been a piecemeal acquisition of de facto protectorates, rather than a holistic approach that would reform the political structure of the Balkans. On closer inspection, then, four of Nye's five "C list" cases are constituents of larger regional security instabilities, not unlike the nuclear crises on the Korean Peninsula and in South Asia. Haiti, the final "C list" case, can be viewed as either a challenge to Washington's democracy project or a classic case of the nation's interest in preventing others' traumas from becoming its own.

Mismanaging the complex security issues of unstable regions, even when they are not of "A list" strategic weight, has a high cost. But contrary to Nye, it is not possible to compartmentalize the globe and wall off the strategic slums. Regional crises exist, they get worse when left unattended, and they have a way of imposing themselves on the Western agenda through humanitarian activism or concerns over terrorism, criminal business networks, failed states, ecological disaster, and global health crises.

Clearly, Nye's "A list" is closely related in practice to his "C list." After all, the "A list" comprises not only America's obvious strategic interests in Russia, China, and Japan, as well as its alliances and global trade and investment, but also its inherent interest as the world's leading status quo power in "preventing disorder beyond our borders." Like the British empire in the nineteenth century, the United States has an interest in stronger international institutions and strengthened norms for advancing -- with no apologies -- its national interests. Preventing disorder means sustained U.S. leadership in peacekeeping and diplomatic initiatives, as well as in confronting proliferation threats. We cannot effectively address Nye's "A list" if we imagine that the "C list" is a separate universe. "C list" problems threaten "A list" interests; if that makes us modern imperialists, as some charge, so be it.

WAR AND PEACE