Frederick Fleitz: Peacekeeping Fiascoes of the 1990s : Causes, Solutions, and U.S. Interests

With his good intentions and his blue helmet, the U.N. peacekeeper was an icon of post-World War II internationalism. He was G.I. Joe for the Eleanor Roosevelt set, muscular assurance that the days of the feeble League of Nations would never return. And for a while it seemed to work. The record was far from perfect, but from Cyprus to West New Guinea to Namibia, the presence of relatively small numbers of U.N. troops was sufficient to separate warring forces and supervise the return to peace. The key to their success was evenhandedness and the consent of those whom they had come to police.

In the wake of the Gulf War and the breakup of the Soviet Union, this comparatively restrained approach to peace-keeping underwent a transmutation. The shambles that ensued is neatly summarized in this book’s delightfully blunt title. The author, Frederick Fleitz Jr., knows his material well: He is a former CIA analyst who covered the U.N. and its peacekeeping efforts during parts of the Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Clinton administrations. Today, he is special assistant to the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, though readers are warned that his opinions "do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of State, the Central Intelligence Agency, or the U.S. government." But what Fleitz has to say makes a great deal of sense, so we must hope that warning is not to be taken literally.

The real starting point for this book is the Soviet collapse, which made it possible for the West to intervene more aggressively in some of the world's most dangerous trouble spots. Fleitz's central thesis is that U.S. policymakers threw this opportunity away; Instead of building on the Cold War victory with a foreign policy that combined the judicious use of force with enlightened national interest, the government decided to expand the United Nations' global role in peacekeeping. The Clinton administration's poorly thought-out liberal-internationalist agenda combined sanctimony, parsimony, and ineffectiveness in roughly equal measure. The consequences were had for the U.N., in that they made a mockery of belief in that organization’s potential usefulness, and often disastrous for the U.S. There is a good reason that this book is dedicated to the U.S. Army Rangers and aircrew killed in Somalia in the terrible events of October 1993.

The rot began in the immediate aftermath of the Gulf War. As Fleitz explains, supporters of a more activist U.N. "seized on the fact that Operation Desert Storm was authorized by the U.N. Security Council" as proof that a new era had arrived. The U.N.'s role in approving the Gulf War was said by many liberals to herald "an end to the unilateral use of military force, at least by the United States." But as Fleitz correctly observes, "these claims ... ignored the reality that the first Bush administration used the U.N. endorsement... largely as a fig leaf to protect the sensitivities of America's Middle East allies."

These claims may have ignored reality, but they helped create a climate in which U.N. peacekeeping could be transformed. The scope of peace- keeping operations became more ambitious and the traditional requirements of consent and impartiality were abandoned. U.N. forces could now be empowered to impose "peace" on warring parties and, if necessary, take sides in a conflict. Fleitz argues that this more aggressive definition of peacekeeping (and the expansion of the U.N.'s role it implied) fitted in well with a liberal foreign-policy agenda in Washington. "It represented a way to implement . . . dreams of Wilsonian internationalism while drastically cutting defense spending." Beyond that, it is not necessary to hear the whirring of black helicopters to recall, as Fleitz does, that this was also a time when some foreign-policy gurus who were to be influential in the Clinton administration were "talking about how the new world order meant the lowering of national boundaries . . . and the beginning of a slow movement toward world government." It's also worth noting (although Fleitz never does so explicitly) that arguments for a more activist United Nations were always likely to find favor in a Clinton White House instinctively suspicious of the U.S. military and its use as an instrument of American power.

Much of the rest of the book is devoted to an examination of how these expanded notions of peacekeeping have worked or, far too frequently, failed to work. With topics that include Rwanda, Cambodia, Liberia, and Bosnia, this makes for grim but never sensationalist reading: Despite its title, this book is not an exercise in simple U.N.-bashing, satisfying though that would doubtless be. Fleitz is, quite justifiably, highly critical of the U.N., but he is also quick to acknowledge the way the organization has all too often been used as a scapegoat for feckless Western policymaking. And just as the book’s narrative is not sensationalist, neither is its style: The text is often highly detailed (this book will be found on the bookshelves of our more sensible universities for years to come) and brutally burdened down by the fact that U.N. military operations are rich in acronyms if not in achievements.

Above all, Fleitz stresses that these fiascoes were nothing if not predictable. With the precondition of consent abandoned, U.N. peacekeepers ran the risk of being seen as an occupying or hostile force, even when the motives for their mission were primarily humanitarian. The umpires had become players. Despite that, the troops sent in to do the dirty work were often as under-equipped as their objectives were ill-defined. In the course of this book, the author offers up various reasons as to why this was, but touches only briefly on one of the most likely explanations: the fact that the U.N. has been used by Western elites to pursue an internationalist agenda that ordinarily would not secure domestic political approval in their home countries. Using the United Nations to this end is a clever trick, but it ensures that peacekeeping missions will almost always be shortchanged when it comes to resources; proper funding would require politicians to admit the full scope of these operations to their electorates. And voters are rarely enthused by the idea of endangering their soldiers in the name of the United Nations.

This absence of democratic accountability—and the level of blame it should bear for foreign-policy disasters—would make an ideal topic for Fleitz's next book. In the meantime, Fleitz offers some highly practical advice: Continue to use U.N. peacekeepers, but only along the lines of the traditional, limited model that used to work so well. Combine a return to that more modest approach with the adoption by Washington of a realistic foreign policy in which bien pensant internationalism is discarded, American interests are put first, and the isolationist temptation is avoided, and the results could be impressive.

It won't be easy, but an intelligent foreign policy never is.