A Poor Case for Quitting: Mistaking Incompetence for Interventionism

Luttwak, on the other hand, cogently laments the fact that we have forgotten the "paradoxical logic" of war, the only useful function of which is to bring peace by annihilating one side or exhausting it through attrition. Modern Western and U.N. diplomacy has prevented wars from running "their natural course." Imposed cease-fires and armistices or the deployment of observers and peacekeepers make the conflict comfortable, giving warring sides a breather -- before they regroup and re-equip for the next round. Luttwak believes that by not allowing nature to take its course in the former Yugoslavia, the level of suffering has been increased and real peace postponed.

Compelling as his argument may be, Luttwak is incorrect about the "natural" consequences of contemporary warfare. The battlefield by itself does not necessarily lead to durable peace except in unusual circumstances: when the victor wins overwhelmingly and then rigorously assimilates the loser, who gets little support from any quarter; when the victor is atypically magnanimous in co-opting or sharing with the loser; or when the weaker side has the rare foresight to sue pre-emptively for a deal. These are not common conditions in the modern era. Losers and victims are less isolated and have more friends, enabling their causes to be sustained and reopened. Internal wars have qualities that tend toward stalemate, not peace: Chechen and Dagestani warlords began battling Russians in the 1830s; Sudan has been at war for most of the past 45 years; Kashmir and Sri Lanka fester more or less on their own with rare bursts of external "meddling"; Angola's factions notoriously reject or scuttle peace initiatives. The stubborn reality is that war in such places serves the interests (however defined) of those elites who choose to fight them.

Rather than a fight to the finish -- which would come at horrendous cost to civilians and would threaten a range of American interests -- regional crises need competent intervention (and not just of the military sort) appropriate to local conditions. A foreign policy of prudent activism will best advance America's global interests in an age of uncertain norms, messy transitions, and expanding challenges to political order. The United States will need strong political, economic, and military tools to address this agenda. And it will need all the partners and allies it can mobilize to build ad hoc coalitions of the willing, to make U.N. peace operations effective (where that is the appropriate approach), and to mount imaginative, purposeful diplomatic initiatives of the kind that have served well in the past.

Competent foreign intervention has been effective at times -- in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Northern Ireland, Central America, certain parts of the former Soviet Union, and various regions in Africa, for example. But Luttwak is right to go after egregious cases of inept meddling. There is no excusing the U.N. Security Council's tolerance of Serb outrages in Bosnia, which discredited and demoralized U.N. peacekeepers trying to carry out mandates designed and approved in Washington and other key capitals. Nothing can explain away the human consequences of the West's appalling refusal to act in Rwanda or its decision to establish refugee camps in eastern Congo under the effective domination of genocidal butchers. But these are not examples of "interventionism" -- they are examples of incompetence.

Chester A. Crocker is Chairman of the Board of Directors of the U.S. Institute of Peace and James R. Schlesinger Professor of Strategic Studies at Georgetown University.