Somalia

Two new books recognize that the United Nations cannot handle the burdens recently thrust upon it, but only one sees the need to set more realistic goals.

The intervention in Somalia was not an abject failure; an estimated 100,000 lives were saved. But its mismanagement should be an object lesson for peacekeepers in Bosnia and on other such missions. No large intervention, military or humanitarian, can remain neutral or assuredly brief in a strife-torn failed state. Nation-building, the rebuilding of a state's basic civil institutions, is required in fashioning a self-sustaining body politic out of anarchy. In the future, the United States, the United Nations, and other intervenors should be able to declare a state "bankrupt" and go in to restore civic order and foster reconciliation.

President Clinton has tried to pursue a foreign policy agenda even more ambitious than his predecessor's. But as international realities and domestic priorities become clear, he has been forced to retreat in area after area of policy. The resulting flips and flops of policy toward Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti, North Korea, and China have undermined U.S. credibility. But more important, they risk making Americans turn inward in dismay, forsaking the prudent internationalism that has characterized American foreign policy since World War II. Let us abandon a kind of leadership we are not prepared to exercise on behalf of a world order the price of which we have no intention of paying.