Why the confusion? This was the week Bill Clinton was meant to define the circumstances when American forces might intervene abroad as part of U.N. missions. Members of the administration had just given four speeches on foreign policy (five if you count Clinton’s press conference after his speech at the U.N. General Assembly; six if you count Colin Powell’s farewell to arms). Why wasn’t American policy as clear as a bell?
Senior administration sources say passionately that they now have a workable basis for policy: a “hard-edged” case-by-case evaluation of the circumstances in which American troops should be sent abroad, one tuned to the need for public and congressional approval. They argue that America simply cannot intervene everywhere.
Yet a contradiction remains. All the recent speeches have been drenched with the usual internationalist rhetoric, of calls to leadership, of commitments to American engagement overseas. “History and destiny,” said Powell, in the week’s most ringing phrase, “have made America the leader of the world that would be free.” But in reality, they showed a skittishness about sending American troops into harm’s way. Between them, Clinton and Madeleine Albright, his ambassador to the United Nations, listed no fewer than seven conditions that had to be met before America might contribute to peacekeeping missions. One condition-the need to identify an “end point” in advance-is impractical on its face. The world’s trouble spots are too messy for that. A foreign diplomat immediately noted that Clinton had placed “high hurdles” in the path of intervention.
Some of the difficulties in the language of the new policy were soon apparent. The administration takes the view that its intervention in Somalia can retain public support only if it moves from being obsessed with security and the search for Mohammed Farah Aidid to a political settlement. U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, in a single-spaced letter more than four pages long, has challenged the new policy, and continues to stress the importance of detaining Aidid.
But the administration’s stress on the limits to intervention has struck a chord at home. During the run of speeches came news of the deaths of three American servicemen there-11 Americans have now been killed in action in Somalia. By huge majorities, both houses of Congress have called for a rethinking of administration policy there; many on Capitol Hill think there is no significant American interest in Somalia worth defending. Policy in Bosnia, too, has won few plaudits. Thanks to the Bosnian Parliament’s rejection of the latest peace plan, Congress hasn’t had to decide whether to send 25,000 troops, but the air of unhappiness remains. Republican Sen. John McCain says that “our secretary of state has taken every possible position on Bosnia.”
So the president’s speech gave Democrats critical of peacekeeping, like Sen. Robert Byrd, the chance to say that the administration was now “right on track.” Lee Hamilton, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, stressed that the speech “put some limits on U.S. intervention, and that makes sense to me.” True, the Congressional Black Caucus supports the missions to both Haiti and Bosnia. But the great majority of Congress welcomed the administration’s new policy on Somalia.
In the Pentagon, meanwhile, reaction to the foreign-policy offensive is riddled with its own contradictions. Though there are now fewer men and women on active service than there were in 1952, there are still more than l.7 million of them, and the annual defense budget still runs at $251 billion. The Pentagon once knew what that bought: deterrence of a Soviet strategic threat by the deployment of massive force. But it instinctively dislikes peacekeeping missions, at which it thinks it has traditionally had no particular skill.
Yet as the dispatch of troops to Haiti shows-approximately 600 Americans will be there by the end of the month–the world still requires American military power. Clinton may have said that “if the American people are to say yes to U.N. peacekeeping, the United Nations must know when to say no.” But sometimes the United Nations will say yes. What, then, is a nervous American to do?
One school of thought in the Pentagon holds that America should play to its strengths. It recognizes that neither Congress nor the public likes sending troops abroad. But America has huge, safe bases on which to train the world’s peacekeepers. It has unique resources in intelligence, in transport, in communications, in satellite reconnaissance. Both Britain, in the Falklands War of 1982, and France, when it intervened in Chad in 1983, relied on such support. Pentagon planners are preparing a paper for the United Nations on what America can offer peacekeeping missions in such areas as command and control. By concentrating on such a role, Pentagon revisionists argue, America would not avoid the need for making hard choices about intervention. But it might be able to contribute to peacekeeping missions in lands far away without provoking the constant drizzle of casualties that congressional and public opinion find so hard to stomach.
