Paving the Road to Hell: The Failure of U.N. Peacekeeping

Of course, as Shawcross repeatedly points out, this sorry state of affairs would change instantly if only the United States and its allies would commit more muscle to U.N. operations. But why should great powers limit their freedom of action by giving bureaucrats from not-so-great powers control over their military interventions?

ENTER AMERICA

At the end of the 1990s, then, the United Nations remains what it has always been: a debating society, a humanitarian relief organization, and an occasionally useful adjunct to great-power diplomacy -- but not an effective independent force. This does not mean we should kill the organization. But it should temper the high expectations of the U.N.'s more idealistic supporters.

It is worth noting that the only interventions that achieved anything worthwhile in the 1990s were conducted outside the U.N. For example, although the Balkans today are not a multicultural paradise, they are relatively peaceful: mass murder has been halted, refugees returned. All this was achieved through great-power action and traditional balance-of-power calculations -- both anathema to the Wilsonians at Turtle Bay. In Bosnia, a Croat onslaught and NATO bombing and artillery bombardment combined to roll back Serb forces and to push Slobodan Milosevic to cut a deal. In Kosovo, a rebel ground offensive, NATO air power, and the threat of a NATO invasion again bludgeoned Belgrade into submission. The U.N.'s role was negligible in both cases.

Given his own history, Shawcross is surprisingly receptive to unilateral U.S. action. He made his name, after all, with Sideshow, a 1979 book excoriating U.S. attacks on North Vietnamese bases in Cambodia as a "crime" and blaming Henry Kissinger for the Khmer Rouge takeover. In Deliver Us From Evil, the same author now describes the United States as a "benign force." This is progress, though Shawcross still seems to put less faith in U.S. leadership than in "a new global architecture" made up of international criminal courts and unenforceable treaties like the ban on land mines.

Such views will strike some realists as woolly-headed. But are realists any more realistic when they deny the need for "humanitarian" interventions? Buchananite isolationists and Kissingerian realpoliticians argue that we need to respect state sovereignty by staying out of other countries' internal affairs. They speak reverently of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, and warn that we tinker with the inviolable state system it created at our peril.

SORRY STATES

But most of the world's nations do not have Westphalian legitimacy in the first place. They are highly artificial entities, most created by Western officials in the twentieth century. Now many of these offspring of European empires, from Indonesia to Yugoslavia, are breaking apart. There is no compelling reason, other than an unthinking respect for the status quo, that the West should feel bound to the boundaries it created in the past. There is even less reason why the West should recognize the right of those who seize power within those borders to do whatever they want to the people who live there -- just as long as no one crosses the artificial line separating that domain from the one next door. If taken to its logical conclusion, this sovereignty-centered attitude leads to semantic silliness. On the day in 1991 when Germany recognized Croatia's independence, did this suddenly transform what had been, the day before, a Serb attack on a rebellious province -- an internal matter -- into a Serb attack on a sovereign state -- an action presumably worthy of international intervention?

Western states certainly never felt bound to respect the sovereignty of others in the past. Surely Prince von Metternich, Kissinger's hero, would have lost no sleep over the violated sovereignty of Afghans or Zulus. Sovereignty has never been an absolute right, but one "for them's that can defend it" (or can get others to defend it for them). When, in the nineteenth century, the Ottoman and Chinese empires grew too weak to enforce their proclaimed borders, the great powers of Europe carved them up into zones of influence where European citizens enjoyed extraterritorial privileges.

Today the West is once again intruding on the sovereignty of failed states around the world. The only difference is that this time around, the great powers abjure any desire to annex new territory and act primarily for what are billed as humanitarian motives -- not national security reasons as traditionally understood.

DOG FIGHTS

Such interventions offend the sensibilities of those who argue, as former Secretary of State James Baker did about Yugoslavia, that "we don't have a dog in that fight." The realists want U.S. forces to keep their powder dry until North Korea invades the South, Saddam makes another lunge for Kuwait, or China goes for Taiwan. Ignore two-alarm fires, the realists advise, and await the five-alarm blaze that may (or may not) come.