Interview with the Author

MH: Proposals to enlarge the permanent membership have been around for a long time. But unlike some of the funding problems, which are intractable, it is not unrealistic to think that the council's permanent members will someday include nations like Germany and Japan. That would help to give the Security Council more legitimacy as a global arbiter and rid it of some of its image as an antiquated body dominated by the victors of World War II.

FA: In your article, you mention offers from Nigeria, Ghana, and Tanzania to intervene in the Rwanda crisis, and in the end they stayed home because of lack of equipment. There was a similar experience that held up promised supplies for the Democratic Republic of the Congo. How will we avoid this sort of bickering in a system of regionally based peacekeeping?

MH: Once we get to the point where a system of U.N.-sponsored regional peacekeeping is recognized as the norm, it will be much easier to give bilateral aid to countries than to fund international peacekeeping efforts. I'm not saying these solutions will be easy, but if there is some consensus on a hybrid approach between the realists, who reject liberal internationalism, and the idealists, who insist on it, then we may not get as much bickering as we did in the past.

FA: Today, you say, "realpoliticians and liberal internationalists [are forced] into bed together." Could you elaborate on that phrase?

MH: If we recognize the premises that I lay out, then the most practical conclusion is that neither solution alone-liberal internationalism or realpolitik-works in these situations. If you depend only on the U.N. without bringing in real military muscle-which the U.N. is never going to get-then we're going to find that the U.N. continues to lose its credibility. If, on the other hand, you rely just on local force, as in Sierra Leone the first time around, you are cutting intervention off from the watchful eye and increasingly tough standards for behavior that prevail in the international community-of which the only real representative is the U.N. You also lay the seeds of future conflict by breeding suspicion of regional hegemons within the nations that are subject to intervention. So the two traditional sides in the debate really have to take a hybrid approach.