Dreams of a Blue Helmet: The Peacekeeping Fantasy
KRAUTHAMMER, CHARLES
Dreams of a Blue Helmet: The Peacekeeping Fantasy By Charles Krauthammer Americans are easily seduced by visions of New World Orders, illusions that arise with alarming regularity in the immediate...
...entry...
...Roosevelt's secretary of state, Cordell Hull, upon returning from the Moscow conference of 1943, declared that soon "there will no longer be need for spheres of influence, for alliances, for balance of power, or any of the other special arrangements through which, in the unhappy past, the nations strove to safeguard their security or to promote their interests...
...When Reagan invaded in 1983, the Democrats did not quite know how to respond...
...became the cover for an American retreat...
...It saw less foreign policy debate than any campaign in the last 50 years...
...In American foreign policy debates, it should not be necessary for one side or the other to claim the backing of Dominica...
...is quite irrelevant...
...The UN...
...is either stymied by opposition by the other Great Powers or simply not interested in an issue, as with Bosnia until very recently-nothing gets done...
...This time we would create Tennyson's parliament of man...
...By what logic...
...There, Great Powers got together to use military force to repel aggression-the one true example of collective security in the postwar era, and one that Schlesinger and other purported champions of collective security vigorously opposed...
...First, in 1991, at the beginning of the Balkan war, the Serbs swept into Croatia and captured about a third of the region...
...The Gulf was no more a collective operation than was Korea, still the classic case study in pseudo-multilateralism...
...And yet now, after the Cold War, I would argue that we have an interest in preserving its largely fictional existence...
...And now Round Three...
...True multilateralism involves a genuine coalition of co-equal partners of comparable strength and stature-the Big Three anti-Nazi coalition of World War II, for example...
...However fervently Americans would like to believe otherwise, peace can only be achieved by hegemony or balance of power...
...As eminent a historian as Paul Kennedy has described the U.N...
...Our second bout of utopianism came with victory in World War II...
...Indeed there would hardly be any debate on the issue if that were all that peacekeeping is about...
...Contrast this with Croatia, a situation precisely the opposite, where the U.S...
...Because a large segment of American opinion doubts the legitimacy of unilateral American action but accepts quite readily actions undertaken by the "world community" in concert...
...The world would have written off Kuwait the way the last body pledged to collective security, the League of Nations, wrote off Abyssinia after it was attacked by Mussolini...
...They roll back no aggressors...
...It is as old as the international system...
...consciously absented itself and indeed gave the green light for Croatia to defy and sweep by the UN...
...effort precisely because President Bush had demonstrated that he was quite prepared to act unilaterally if necessary...
...The peacekeeping forces in the Sinai are a nice symbol of that peace...
...But the greatest illusion of all is not peacekeeping, is not the U.N., is not multilateralism...
...is the ultimate loophole, the perfect dodge for a reluctant America...
...In the 1990s, we have been told, and indeed by such ostensible political realists as George Bush, that a New World Order is dawning, an order based on global community, international law, and collective security...
...resolutions and declarations and proclamations...
...We have seen how such an army operates in Somalia and it was a catastrophe...
...This staggering belief in opinion and reason and dialogue ended not just in tragedy but in parody when Idaho Republican Sen...
...The UN, as hand-holder and temporizer, achieves two things...
...And if there is war, peacekeepers are unavailing...
...was corrupt and deeply anti-Western and served none of our interests, I was for sinking it...
...and peacekeeping budgets...
...The natural state of the world, however, is not perpetual peace but perpetual conflict...
...Thus, in the Balkans, the U.N...
...They have enough trouble as it is with the other countries of the world...
...This was group therapy in fatigues...
...is, at most, a creature of the Security Council...
...did not-during the Cold War and is now trying to impose a peace in Bosnia...
...Why the pretense...
...Because that is how peace comes about: either hegemony or balance of power, not the urging of blue helmets...
...Urquhart has a good idea...
...Pearson proposed the creation of what became UNEF, the United Nations Emergency Force, whose insertion into the Sinai in place of British and French (and Israeli) troops did help save face...
...Marx said that all great events in world history reappear in one fashion or another, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce...
...As before, it is an era marked by the belief that peace is the norm, that peace is something to be kept, that all that it requires is for the unrulies of the world to be civilized by compromise and reason Western-style, and that we do this with talk-Vance-Owen plans, UN...
...The only people unconvinced were those on the receiving end of the multilateralism, the Iraqis...
...And second, it helps keep the other Great Powers out, too, thus reducing the chances of regional conflict going global...
...It simply does not matter what the UN...
...William Borah, upon hearing that war had broken out in Europe in September 1939, said, "Lord, if only I could have talked with Hitler, all this might have been avoided...
...and conquer the Krajina...
...The U.N...
...Under those circumstances, lesser powers, convinced of American will, joined up...
...So we handed it all over to the blue helmets...
...Fields reading the Bible on his deathbed ("What are you doing...
...It is an excuse...
...is usually between liberals who support it and believe in its promise, and conservatives who oppose it and fear its reach...
...But let's not mistake what is going on here...
...That is because it was run on the shared assumption that the U.S...
...But I doubt it would ever come to pass...
...This strikes me as the equivalent of saying that Liberia is the key to world oil trade because there are so many Liberian tankers...
...They can stand by or withdraw...
...Its apotheosis was the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, solemnly signed by 64 nations (including Germany, Japan, and Italy) declaring that war would henceforth be outlawed...
...When there is no agreement on what cards are trumps," the saying goes, "clubs are always trumps...
...The U.N...
...blessing or without...
...So seriously was this singular exercise in cynicism (for some) and naivet...
...The Gulf War was essentially an American operation...
...For the third time this century, we have fallen into postwar dreams about the possibilities of international life...
...The UN...
...What did it do...
...20 and sponsored by the Donner Canadian Foundation...
...has found a use for the UN.: In the post-Cold War world, the U.N...
...With its air strikes, NATO took sides militarily on behalf of the weaker in the hope of creating a new equilibrium, a new balance of power...
...resolutions and declarations was a conscious product of American diplomacy, a deliberate effort to give the Gulf War the air of international legitimacy...
...involved itself in Rwanda and Somalia and Haiti only because the Great Powers deemed it of insufficient importance to their national interest, of insufficient threat to real international peace...
...Indeed, the entire apparatus of U.N...
...Others joined the U.S...
...If we are serious about the UN, as we are not today, we would allow it to develop its own army...
...By 1947, the United States had been disabused of this utopianism...
...The guarantors of security and peace today are, as they have been for 500 years, the Great Powers...
...It is achieved not by reason, nor by dialogue, and especially not through the agency of today's three preferred fantasies of how to achieve and maintain world order: peacekeeping, the United Nations, and multilateralism...
...Finally, there is multilateralism, an idea that enjoys an entirely illogical moral prestige...
...When American diplomacy manages to neutralize the Russians and the Chinese, as in the Gulf War, the Security Council becomes a creature of the United States...
...The fact is: If there is peace, peacekeepers are unnecessary...
...But for that it would, like all other independent actors with any influence on the world, need an army...
...It was war-making, delivered by a war-making machine called NATO, a military alliance of the sort Cordell Hull decried and declared obsolete, an alliance that kept the peace-the UN...
...If Grenada was the most farcical example of the multilateral myth, the Gulf War was the most elaborate...
...In Somalia, the different units were calling their capitals to ask whether or not to follow the orders of the local UN...
...Peacekeeping as practiced today is 40 years old, invented by Lester Pearson, then Canada's minister for external affairs, to help extract the British and French from the Suez fiasco...
...This is a willful misuse of the term...
...is not a panacea and it's not a threat...
...This was not an army...
...There is a sharp distinction to be drawn between real and apparent multilateralism...
...Looking for loopholes," replied Fields), the U.S...
...The UN guaranteed nothing...
...And in a recent address, Canada's minister of national defense, echoing Kennedy's faith and speaking for many in Western foreign policy establishments, called the UN...
...Take Grenada...
...During the latter part of the Cold War, when the U.N...
...The Great Powers-for reasons of exhaustion, indifference, distance, racism perhaps-did not want to get involved (with the brief exception of France...
...And yet even the conservative Reagan administration felt that it could not admit to naked unilateralism...
...This is not to say that the U.N...
...Most specifically, given the unipolar structure of today's international system, the guarantor is the sole remaining superpower, the United States...
...That is a good thing...
...The danger, of course, is that they might come to believe their own pretense...
...asked a friend...
...The '92 campaign merely confirmed that the U.S...
...leading and prodding, bribing and blackmailing, no one would have stirred...
...Ask the Bosnians...
...Why it should matter to Americans that their actions get a Security Council blessing from, say, Deng Xiaoping and the butchers of Tiananmen Square is beyond me...
...has not kept the Yugoslavs from killing one another...
...Which brings us to the second great post-Cold War illusion: the United Nations...
...In plain truth, international relations remains in precisely the same state it was in one and two and five centuries ago...
...What we have today is pseudo-multilateralism: A dominant great power acts essentially alone, but, embarrassed by the idea and still worshiping at the shrine of collective security, recruits a ship here, a brigade there, and blessings all around to give its unilateral actions a multilateral sheen...
...Recognizing these obvious facts, congressional Republicans have proposed cuts in the U.N...
...They are quite the opposite...
...Well, you might say: Haven't the peacekeepers in Bosnia actually woken up and done something real now...
...Real collective security, on the other hand, is what happened in the Gulf War...
...But that is precisely because it was not peacekeeping...
...as "the only international instrument that states possess to attain security, prosperity, human rights, and the democratic way...
...On the day of the invasion, the prime minister of a tiny neighboring Caribbean island was flown to Washington, where she issued a claim on behalf of an ad hoc, highly dubious alliance of very tiny islands that it had invited the U.S...
...as the guarantor of collective security in some new post-Cold War order...
...That was demonstrated with stunning clarity in the Gulf War...
...But this is to mistake cause and effect...
...resolutions, Arab troops, EC pronouncements, etc.-was nothing but a transparent cover for what was essentially an American challenge to Iraqi regional hegemony...
...resolutions-and blue helmets...
...Throughout the Cold War, it was these institutions, exactly the ones Hull said we would not need, that safeguarded our security and promoted our interests...
...our best hope for achieving global security...
...or peacekeeping but, as since the Pelopon-nesian wars, on balance of power...
...History is creative but not redemptive," said Rein-hold Niebuhr...
...The war that UNEF was supposed to prevent followed...
...As Henry Kissinger put it, "In the end, peace can be achieved only by hegemony or by balance of power...
...to invade Grenada...
...And the structure of the world being what it is today, with the United States overwhelmingly dominant, that means American power and the will to use it...
...Similarly in Somalia, where the U.N...
...It could...
...It is a fine idea and it would make an even better movie...
...As Henry Stimson explained, this piece of parchment would protect against aggression by "the sanction of public opinion, which can be made one of the most potent sanctions of the world...
...As Ernest Lefever writes, "the morality of state behavior is determined by its purpose and consequences, not by whether the state acts alone...
...And yet it is...
...commander...
...This has led to a lot of pious talk about the UN...
...In May 1967, Nasser decided to force a showdown with Israel, closing the Straits of Tiran, choking off Israel's access to the south, and ordering UNEF out the Sinai...
...In the Gulf, without the U.S...
...It is a favorite dumping ground for messy and minor operations that they, and especially the United States, do not want to undertake on their own...
...resolutions and reservations and protests came to nothing...
...On the other hand, where there is no peace, as in Croatia in August, as in the Sinai in May and June 1967, or as in Bosnia during the last three years, then peacekeepers are useless...
...And second, because an unarmed, largely fictional U.N...
...secretary general thinks...
...But it has kept the Americans and the Russians and perhaps the Turks and the Greeks and others from coming in on any threatening scale...
...blue-helmet operations-like the one in Bosnia-are not instruments of collective security...
...Arthur Schlesinger, echoing the Clinton administration, denounced these Republican attacks on peacekeeping as a blow to "collective security...
...Like W.C...
...The U.N...
...Bosnia is one demonstration of the U.N.'s real role as cover for inaction...
...A real UN army would consist of soldiers recruited as individuals...
...The liberation of Kuwait was attended by all kinds of UN...
...They remind us also that when we really want to end these wars, we must use overwhelming force to alter the balance...
...Because in a dangerous world, dodges and loopholes have their uses...
...First, it helps keep the number-one superpower out of some regional conflicts (like Bosnia, until recently) by providing moral cover...
...This has been proposed many times, most forcefully and convincingly by former U.N...
...By the time we got to the Haiti operation, the UN.-as-exit-strategy had been planned even before the U.S...
...It would be a kind of foreign legion for desperadoes, mercenaries, and idealists from around the world...
...actually serves the purposes of the Great Powers...
...And when, on the other hand, the Great Powers cannot agree-which generally means, when the U.S...
...Then, this summer, the Croatians decided it was time for war again...
...It was a textbook example of an apparently multilateral effort hinging entirely on the fact of American unilateralism...
...The reality of that system is that peace depends ultimately not on multilateralism or the UN...
...And not an army made up of units of the Italian and Canadian and Pakistani armies...
...Unlike the Egyptians, however, they did not even bother with the formality of ordering the U.N...
...The Senate rejected the League of Nations (for reasons of sovereignty) but the American people generally embraced the spirit of Wilsonianism...
...It is important for us to recognize that the post-Cold War world is not new...
...These two peacekeeping episodes, the first and the latest, highlight the fundamental truth of peacekeeping: If you already have peace, you don't really need peacekeepers...
...But anyone who thought that it really preserved the peace was rudely cured of that notion when it was put to the test almost exactly a decade later...
...The UN forces have since been withdrawn...
...had entered this era of perpetual peace, and that we could therefore safely turn our attention to domestic affairs...
...The Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, followed by NATO and the other great alliances, announced the end of our second innocence...
...Rwanda, site of the worst genocide since World War II, is another...
...But to many Americans, it matters...
...Yes, the strategic bombing campaign has had some effect...
...They would come to New York and swear allegiance to Boutros-Ghali and the blue flag...
...Britain's finest hour was the Battle of Britain, an act of unilateral resistance to Nazi Germany...
...Note that this real kind of collective security, with the Great Powers banding together ad hoc to repel aggression, can occur with U.N...
...Multilateral action is invariably considered morally superior...
...is a flag of convenience for international security...
...They simply rolled their tanks through and around U.N...
...It matters what the U.S...
...president thinks...
...Undersecretary General Brian Urquhart...
...Indeed, on issues of war and peace, to speak of the U.N...
...Nothing would have been done: no embargo, no threat of force, no Desert Storm...
...But it is a very minor thing...
...having some kind of separate, independent existence, some kind of will of its own, is delusional...
...It was hailed, universally and enthusiastically, as an example of the much-celebrated multilateralism of a new world order...
...First, because the Great Powers are simply not going to stand for another independent actor's pushing them around...
...I would add: the third time as hallucination...
...had indeed entered its third period this century of postwar utopianism...
...Unilateral" is a word used almost exclusively as a pejorative...
...The fact is, both sides of this debate are wrong...
...Dreams of a Blue Helmet: The Peacekeeping Fantasy By Charles Krauthammer Americans are easily seduced by visions of New World Orders, illusions that arise with alarming regularity in the immediate aftermath of great wars...
...Why...
...for us) taken that its author, Secretary of State Franklin Kellogg, received the 1929 Nobel Peace Prize...
...The Iraqis were right, of course...
...This time we would have a real League of Nations with the United States at its center, with real enforcement provisions, with an active Security Council...
...The 1992 presidential campaign was heavily under the influence of this illusion...
...Did not September's strategic bombing campaign really make a difference, relieving the siege of Sarajevo, pushing the Serbs towards a ceasefire and a negotiated settlement...
...The first time occurred immediately after World War I, the Wilsonian heyday characterized by an extraordinary belief in the power of parchment and goodwill harnessed to an apparatus of collective security...
...Those critics who scoff at it have not accurately appraised the evolution in world opinion since the Great War...
...They charged that the entire multilateral apparatus established in the Gulf by the U.S.-U.N...
...It is largely for domestic reasons, therefore, that American political leaders make sure to dress unilateral action in multilateral clothing...
...The debate over the UN...
...and its sundry friends would liberate Kuwait...
...forces were then inserted as peacekeepers between Croatia and the Serb territories in the Krajina...
...The greatest illusion of all is the one underlying all the others, the illusion about the very nature of the international system: the woolly Wilsonianism that plagued us after the two world wars and now plagues us again in the period of exhaustion and exhilaration that follows the end of the Cold War, the belief in sweet reason and perpetual peace...
...It is merely irrelevant...
...positions, and conquered the Krajina within three days, leaving the U.N...
...A quarter of a century later in Croatia we had an eerie replay of this same scenario...
...This essay is adapted from an address delivered in Toronto Sept...
...The U.N...
...They are hand-holding and temporizing operations, means by which the Great Powers, out of their very reluctance to repel aggressors, pretend to do something...
...It is a guarantor of nothing...
...There is no other way...
...was to be the flag of convenience under which the U.S...
...Hence the U.N...
...Yet most Americans take for granted that there is something morally tainted about unilateral action...
...In other words, it helped keep Sarajevo 1995 from becoming Sarajevo 1914...
...peacekeepers in their wake, cruelly exposed as utterly helpless and pointless...
...It is not an agency...
...could never in theory or in principle be an independent actor on the stage...
...Secretary General U Thant immediately agreed...
...Walter Mondale, the prospective Democratic candidate, could only point out that neither the British nor the French supported the invasion, as if that was somehow a weighty criticism...
...Today, for example, there is peace between Israel and Egypt...
...This is nonsense, dangerous nonsense, as dangerous as the nonsense that followed the first two great wars of the century...
...And, though we are hardly conscious of it, the 1990s, marked by victory in the Cold War, are as classically postwar as were the 1920s and mid-1940s...
...Peacekeeping is a convenient device for allowing the Great Powers to appear to be doing something in a place where they do not really want to be doing anything...
...Liberia, Rwanda, Somalia, and Bosnia remind us of that...
Vol. 1 • October 1995 • No. 7
