Dreams of a Blue Helmet

Americans are easily seduced visions of New World Orders, illusions that “arise with alarming regularity in the immediate aftermath of great wars. 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. For the third time this century, we have fallen into postwar firearms about the possibilities of international life.

The first time occurred immediately after World War I, the Wilsonian heyday characterized by an extra-ordinary belief in the power of parchment and goodwill harnessed to an apparatus of collective security. The Senate rejected the League of Nations (for reasons of sovereignty) but the American people generally embraced the spirit of Wilsonianism. Its apotheosis was the 1928 Kellogg-Brand Pact, solemnly signed by 64 nations (including Germany, Japan, and Italy) declaring that war would henceforth be outlawed. So seriously was this singular exercising cynicism (for some) and naive (for us) taken that its author, Secretary of State Franklin Kellogg, received the 1929 Nobel Peace Prize.

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. . . . Those critics who scoff at it have not accurately appraised the evolution in world opinion since the Great War.” This staggering belief in opinion and reason and dialogue ended not just in tragedy but in parody when Idaho Republican Sen. 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.”

Our second bout of utopianism came with victory in World War II. 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.”

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. This time we would create Tennyson’s parliament of man.

By 1947, the United States had been disabused of this utopianism. The Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, followed by NATO and the other great alliances, announced the end of our second innocence. 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.

And now Round Three. 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.

This is nonsense, dangerous nonsense, as dangerous as the nonsense that followed the first two great wars of the century. 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. I would add: the third time as hallucination. In plain truth, international relations remains in precisely the same state it was in one and two and five centuries ago. As Henry Kissinger put it, “In the end, peace can be achieved only by hegemony or by balance of power. There is no other way.”

However fervently Americans would like to believe otherwise, peace can only be achieved by hegemony or balance of power. 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.

Peacekeeping as practiced today is 40 years old, invented by Lester Pearson, then Canada’s minister for external affairs, to help extract British and French from the Suez fiasco 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. 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.

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. U.N. Secretary General U Thant immediately agreed. The war that UNEF was supposed to prevent followed.

A quarter of a century later in Croatia we had an eerie replay of this same scenario. First, in 1991, at the beginning of the Balkan war, the Serbs swept into Croatia and captured about a third of the region. U.N. forces were then inserted as peacekeepers between Croatia and the Serb territories in the Krajina.

Then, this summer, the Croatians decided it was time for war again. Unlike the Egyptians, however, they did not even bother with the formality of ordering the U.N. out. They simply rolled their tanks through and around U.N. positions, and conquered the Krajina within three days, leaving the U.N. peacekeepers in their wake, cruelly exposed as utterly helpless and pointless. The U.N. forces have since been withdrawn.

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. Today, for example, there is peace between Israel and Egypt. The peacekeeping forces in the Sinai are a nice symbol of that Peace. That is a good thing. But it is a very minor thing. Indeed there would hardly be any debate on the issue if that were all that peacekeeping is about.

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. They can stand by or withdraw.

The fact is: If there is peace, peacekeepers are unnecessary. And if there is war, peacekeepers are unavailing.

Well, you might say: Haven’t the peacekeepers in Bosnia actually woken up and done something real now? 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?

Yes, the strategic bombing campaign has had some effect. But that is precisely because it was not peacekeeping. 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 U.N. did not — during the Cold War and is now trying to impose a peace in Bosnia. 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. Why? Because that is how peace comes about: either hegemony or balance of power, not the urging of blue helmets.

Recognizing these obvious facts, congressional Republicans have proposed cuts in the U.N. and peacekeeping budgets. Arthur Schlesinger, echoing the Clinton administration, denounced these Republican attacks on peacekeeping as a blow to “collective security.” This is a willful misuse of the term. U.N. blue-helmet operations — like the one in Bosnia — are not instruments of collective security. They roll back no aggressors. They are quite the opposite. 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. 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.

Real collective security, on the other hand, is what happened in the Gulf War. 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.

Note that this real kind of collective security, with the Great Powers banding together ad hoc to repel aggression, can occur with U.N. able, using or without. The U.N. is quite irrelevant.

Which brings us to the second great post-Cold War illusion: the United Nations.

As eminent a historian as Paul Kennedy has described the U.N. as “the only international instrument that states possess to attain security, prosperity, human rights, and the democratic way.” 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 U.N. “our best hope for achieving global security.”

This strikes me as the equivalent of saying that Liberia is the key to world oil trade because there are so many Liberian tankers. The U.N. is a flag of convenience for international security. It is a guarantor of nothing. The guarantors of security and peace today are, as they have been for 500 years, the Great Powers. Most specifically, given the unipolar structure of today’s international system, the guarantor is the sole remaining superpower, the United States.

That was demonstrated with stunning clarity in the Gulf War. The liberation of Kuwait was attended by all kinds of U.N. resolutions and declarations and proclamations. This has led to a lot of pious talk about the U.N. as the guarantor of collective security in some new post-Cold War order. But this is to mistake cause and effect. The U.N. guaranteed nothing. In the Gulf, without the U.S. leading and producing, bribing and blackmailing, no one would have stirred. Nothing would have been done: no embargo, no threat of force, no Desert Storm. 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.

Indeed, the entire apparatus of U.N. resolutions and declarations was a conscious product of American diplomacy, a deliberate effort to give the Gulf War the air of international legitimacy. The U.N. was to be the flag of convenience under which the U.S. and its sundry friends would liberate Kuwait.

Contrast this with Croatia, a situation precisely the opposite, where the U. S. consciously absented itself and indeed gave the green light for Croatia to defy and sweep by the U.N. and conquer the Krajina. U.N. resolutions and reservations and protests came to nothing.

The debate over the U.N. is usually between liberals who support it and believe in its promise, and conservatives who oppose it and fear its reach. The fact is, both sides of this debate are wrong. The U.N. is not a panacea and it’s not a threat. It is merely irrelevant. Indeed, on issues of war and peace, to speak of the U.N. having some kind of separate, independent existence, some kind of will of its own, is delusional. The U.N. is, at most, a creature of the Security Council. 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. And when, on the other hand, the Great Powers cannot agree — which generally means, when the U.S. 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. It simply does not matter what the U.N. secretary general thinks. It matters what the U.S. president thinks.

This is not to say that the U.N. could never in theory or in principle be an independent actor on the stage. It could. But for that it would, like all other independent actors with any influence on the world, need an army.

This has been proposed many times, most forcefully and convincingly by former U.N. Undersecretary General Brian Urquhart. Urquhart has a good idea. If we are serious about the U.N., as we are not today, we would allow it to develop its own army. And not an army made up of units of the Italian and Canadian and Pakistani armies. We have seen how such an army operates in Somalia and it was a catastrophe. In Somalia, the different units were calling their capitals to ask whether or not to follow the orders of the local U.N. commander. This was not an army. This was group therapy in fatigues.

A real U.N. army would consist of soldiers recruit as individuals. It would be a kind of foreign legion for desperadoes, mercenaries, and idealists from around the world. They would come to New York and swear allegiance to Boutros- Ghali and the blue flag. It is a fine idea and it would make an even better movie. But I doubt it would ever come to pass.

Why? First, because the Great Powers are simply not going to stand for another independent actor’s pushing them around. They have enough trouble as it is with the other countries of the world. And second, because an unarmed, largely fictional U.N. actually serves the purposes of the Great Powers. 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.

Like W.C. Fields reading the Bible on his deathbed (“What are you doing?” asked a friend. “Looking for loop-holes,” replied Fields), the U.S. has found a use for the U.N.: In the post-Cold War world, the U.N. is the ultimate loophole, the perfect dodge for a reluctant America.

During the latter part of the Cold War, when the U.N. was corrupt and deeply anti-Western and served none of our interests, I was for sinking it. And yet now, after the Cold War, I would argue that we have an interest in preserving its largely fictional existence. Because in a dangerous world, dodges and loop-holes have their uses.

The U.N., as hand-holder and temporizer, achieves two things. First, it helps keep the number-one super-power out of some regional conflicts (like Bosnia, until recently) by providing moral cover. And second, it helps keep the other Great Powers out, or, thus reducing the chances of regional conflict going global.

Thus, in the Balkans, the U.N. has not kept the Yugoslavs from killing one another. Bu[ it has kept the Americans and the Russians and perhaps the Turks and the Greeks and others from coming in on any threatening scale. In other words, it helped keep Sarajevo 1995 from becoming Sarajevo 1914.

Bosnia is one demonstration of the U.N.’s real role as cover for inaction. Rwanda, site of he worst genocide since World War II, is another. The Great Powers — for reasons of exhaustion, indifference, distance, racism perhaps — did not want to get involved (with the brief exception of France). So we handed it all over to the blue helmets. Similarly in Somalia, where the U.N. became the cover for an American retreat. By the time we got to the Haiti operation, the U.N.-as-exit-strategy had been planned even before the U.S. entry.

But let’s not mistake what is going on here. The U.N. 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. Hence the U.N. It is not an agency. It is an excuse.

Finally, there is multilateralism, an idea that enjoys an entirely illogical moral prestige. “Unilateral” is a word used almost exclusively as a pejorative. Multilateral action is invariably considered morally superior.

By what logic? As Ernest Lefever writes, “the morality of state behavior is determined by its purpose and consequences, not by whether the state acts alone.” Britain’s finest hour was the Battle of Britain, an act of unilateral resistance to Nazi Germany.

Yet most Americans take for granted that there is something morally tainted about unilateral action. Take Grenada. When Reagan invaded in 1983, the Democrats did not quite know how to respond. 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.

And yet even the conservative Reagan administration felt that it could not admit to naked unilateralism. What did it do? 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. to invade Grenada.

In American foreign policy debates, it should not be necessary for one side or the other to claim the backing of Dominica. And yet it is.

If Grenada was the most farcical example of the multilateral myth, the Gulf War was the most elaborate. It was hailed, universally and enthusiastically, as an example of the much-celebrated multilateralism of a new world order The only people” unconvinced were those on the receiving end of the ultilateralism, the Iraqis They charged that the entire multilateral apparatus established in the Gulf by the U. S. — U.N. resolutions, Arab troops, EC pronouncements, etc. — was nothing but a transparent cover for “what was essentially an American challenge to Iraqi regional hegemony

The Iraqis were right, of course. The Gulf War was essentially an American operation Others joined the U.S. effort precisely because President Bush had demonstrated that he was quite prepared to act unilaterally if necessary Under those circumstances, lesser powers, convinced of American will, joined up. It was a textbook example of an apparently multilateral effort hinging entirely on the fact of American unilateralism.

There is a sharp distinction to be drawn between real and apparent multilateralism. 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.

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 The Gulf was no more a collective operation than was Korea, still the classic case study in pseudo-multilateralism.

Why the pretense? 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 Why it should matter to Americans that their actions get a Security Council blessing from, say, Deng Xiaoping and the butchers of Tiananmefi Square is beyond me. But to many Americans, it matters. It is largely for domestic reasons, therefore, that American political leaders make sure to dress unilateral action in multilateral clothing. The danger, of course, is that they might come to believe their own pretense.

But the greatest illusion of all is” not peacekeeping, is not the U.N., is not multilateralism. 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 The 1992 presidential campaign was heavily under the influence of this illusion. It saw less foreign policy debate than any campaign in the last 50 years. That is because it was run on the shared assumption that the U.S. had entered this era of perpetual peace, and that we could therefore safely turn our attention to domestic affairs.

The “92 campaign merely confirmed that the U.S. had indeed entered its third period this century of postwar utopianism. 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, U.N. resolutions — and blue helmets.

The natural state of the world, however, is not perpetual peace but perpetual conflict. Liberia, Rwanda, Somalia, and Bosnia remind us of that. They remind us also that when we really want to end these wars, we must use overwhelming force to alter the balance. “When there is no agreement on what cards are trumps,” the saying goes, “clubs are always trumps.” History is creative but not redemptive,” said Reinshold Niebuhr. It is important for us to recognize that the post-Cold War world is not new. It is as old as the international system. The reality of that system is that peace depends ultimately not on multilateralism or the U.N. or peacekeeping but, as since the Peloponnesian wars, on balance of power. 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.

Ask the Bosnians.