Calling All Regio-Cops: Peacekeeping's Hybrid Future

On September 6, an angry crowd stormed a U.N. relief office in West Timor. The mob sacked the building and, in a sickening echo of Mogadishu in 1993, burned the bodies of three U.N. workers in the streets. The U.N. quickly evacuated its remaining personnel from the Indonesian province, casting a pall on its unsteady mission across the border in the newly independent East Timor.

The disaster underscored an independent report that the U.N. had released just a few weeks before. Published at a time when, in Sierra Leone, hundreds of peacekeepers were taking turns being held hostage -- the most recent victims being British troops who went in to rescue their blue-helmeted predecessors -- the paper was a call to arms that harshly criticized the U.N.'s peacekeeping efforts and laid out a prescription for more robust forces, command, and control.

These events and the U.N. report reinvigorated a debate that has become all too familiar. The debate revolves around several key questions: Can U.N. peacekeeping be made to work at long last, or are such efforts doomed to failure? Are international norms effective, or is raw military might the only thing that can stop the villainous Foday Sankohs of the world? Is humanitarian intervention impractical, or is there some way of balancing both sovereign rights and global values? Such questions have absorbed academics and the international punditocracy for much of the last decade, ever since the tidy Cold War world of interstate conflicts -- in which the U.N. played a simple, uncontroversial role as a buffer along cease-fire lines and borders (as in Cyprus and the Middle East) -- descended into today's maelstrom of ethnic, tribal, and religious bloodshed.

This debate over humanitarian intervention is an important and well-intentioned one. It is also, for the most part, a phony debate. The discussion, at least as it has been framed in recent years, offers up false choices. For most of the post-Cold War period, arguments about a new world order have centered on whether either the United States or the United Nations, acting separately or in concert, could become some form of globo-cop. But ten years after the fall of the Soviet Union, it is high time for the world to recognize that neither option will come to pass. Washington does not have the will for it, and the U.N. (thanks largely to American stinginess) does not have the way.