Statecraft. Margaret Thatcher
emergence of the doctrine of the New World Order such robustness was diluted in the search for international consensus. The intervention in Somalia was the high – or perhaps low – point of this subordination of US national interests in favour of multilateralism. In December 1992 President Bush authorised the deployment of up to thirty thousand US troops to safeguard food supplies for the Somali population, suffering starvation largely as a result of the chaotic conditions that followed the overthrow of the previous President Muhammad Siad Barre in January 1991. President Bush justified his action to the nation in a televised address:
I understand the United States cannot right the world’s wrongs, but we also know that some crises in the world cannot be resolved without American involvement, that American action is often necessary as a catalyst for broader involvement of the community of nations. Only the United States has the global reach to place a large security force on the ground in such a distant place quickly and efficiently, and thus save thousands of innocents from death.
In fact, Somalia was the first of the ‘humanitarian interventions’. Later under President Clinton the multilateralist doctrine was pressed to its limit and beyond. In May 1993 the UN took control of the operation. Five thousand of the twenty-eight thousand troops were American: this was the first time that American soldiers had served under UN command – a radically new departure. Thus far eight Americans had been killed in combat in Somalia. But as opposition among the Somali warlords – particularly the most powerful of them, Muhammad Farah Said – grew, the situation deteriorated. In the end more than a hundred peacekeepers (including thirty US soldiers) were killed and more than 260 (including 175 Americans) were wounded. Six months after a gun battle that left eighteen American dead in October 1993, the US officially ended its mission in Somalia. By the time the United Nations operation was wound up a year later it had cost the UN itself $2 billion and the US some $1.2 billion in addition. The well-intended intervention left behind it chaos as bad as ever it found. Its legacy was also much agonised heart-searching about the components of a fiasco which had dented American prestige and rendered American public opinion extremely wary about other such ventures.
The Somalia intervention exemplifies all the classic features of what not to do. Its objectives were insufficiently thought out; it suffered from ‘mission creep’ – the tendency to expand involvement beyond what is originally envisaged, and beyond what available resources permit; and, finally, lines of command were blurred.
I suspect that the Bush and Clinton administrations had been keener to respond to the sufferings in Somalia by ‘doing something’, because since the late autumn of 1991 they had been doing little to prevent or remedy the sufferings in Croatia and Bosnia. (I deal with these and subsequent Balkan matters in a separate chapter, because they are so interlinked and because they contain their own lessons.*) But we should recall that until the Washington Agreements of March 1994, which ended the Croat-Muslim conflict, the US had been studiedly absent from the former Yugoslavia, arguing that this was a European problem for Europe to solve. And only in August 1995 was European-led diplomacy finally abandoned, as NATO bombing in support of Croat-Muslim ground forces established a new balance of power and paved the way for a kind of peace.
The intervention in the autumn of 1994 in Haiti marked the beginning of a gradual shift back towards an American foreign policy that reflected American national interests. More than sixteen thousand Haitian refugees had been intercepted by the US Coast Guard in the months preceding the US mission. These were mostly economic migrants, but undoubtedly the corrupt, authoritarian military government in Haiti had made things worse. Accordingly, the UN Security Council sanctioned an American-led military intervention to restore President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power. In fact, negotiations led by former President Jimmy Carter resulted in a peaceful handover by the Haitian military regime to a force of over fifteen thousand US troops, who then ensured the return of Aristide. The operation, code-named ‘Operation Restore Democracy’ and hailed by President Clinton as a ‘victory for freedom around the world’, was unfortunately in truth much less than either. Aristide was no democrat, but rather an extreme left-wing authoritarian, and Haiti has since made little progress under him or his chosen successor towards legality, honesty or stability. America has spent $3 billion in Haiti but the place is still plagued by ignorance, poverty and corruption, and is an active centre of drug-trafficking. The best one can say of the intervention in Haiti is that it was a modestly useful venture in US immigration control.
Since Haiti, it has been the situation in the Balkans that has dominated debate about the means, scale and objectives of international intervention. Sixty thousand US and European troops were deployed in Bosnia in the wake of the 1995 Dayton agreement and, despite Congress’s misgivings and the present administration’s evident impatience, there has so far been no large-scale withdrawal.
On top of the continuing commitment to enforce and maintain the peace in Bosnia came the NATO operation in Kosovo in spring 1999. That campaign signified three important further developments in the conduct of interventions.
First, military action was taken without clear authorisation by the UN Security Council. Admittedly, several earlier UN resolutions, which talked of the need to act to prevent a destabilising catastrophe, could be used to provide a degree of legal cover.* Kosovo was, however, different in that no attempt was made to gain UN Security Council authority for the use of ‘all necessary means’ (i.e. force) before the operation. In this regard, it marked a major departure from the approach adopted in the Gulf in 1990. Similarly, NATO, which had hitherto been considered a defensive alliance without an ability to act ‘out of area’, was the organisation in whose name the war was conducted. Thus there was a quite different legal and institutional framework for intervention to that in the Gulf.
Secondly, and consequently, the Kosovo campaign was described and justified from the outset as a ‘humanitarian intervention’. There was, of course, at one level a rather disingenuous reason for this: emphasis upon humanitarianism rather than the use of force avoided awkward questions about the need for explicit UN authorisation (which was not, in fact, forthcoming because of Russian and Chinese obstruction). Moreover, the notion of a humanitarian tragedy leading to a threat to international peace and stability, and thus to legitimate international intervention in a sovereign state’s affairs, had been evoked already in recent years in Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia. But coercive humanitarian intervention, which had hitherto been a novel doctrine of uncertain scope and fuzzy legality, now began to be declared the basis of a revived if undeclared New World Order.
Above all, the doctrine was warmly embraced and loudly proclaimed by such enthusiasts for assertive internationalism as Britain’s Prime Minister, Tony Blair. In his speech to the Economic Club of Chicago in April 1999, Mr Blair claimed to be ‘witnessing the beginnings of a new doctrine of international community’. He noted that ‘we cannot refuse to participate in global markets if we want to prosper’ – which is true. He added that ‘we cannot ignore new ideas in other countries if we want to innovate’ – which is not strictly true at all, though an unexceptionable piece of flannel. But his final thought, that ‘we cannot turn our backs on conflicts and the violation of human rights within other countries if we want still to be secure’, is patently an oversimplification.
We may believe that it is right to intervene to stop suffering inflicted by rulers on their subjects, or by one ethnic group on another: I am sure that it sometimes was, and is. And we may believe that we should be prepared to intervene in order to preserve our security, or in defence of an ally: I am convinced that we have to show resolution in doing so. But to pretend that the two objectives are always, or even usually, identical is humbug. The danger of swallowing it is even greater for America as a superpower with global interests than for a medium-sized military power like Britain. This doctrine of ‘international community’ à la Blair is a prescription for strategic muddle, military overstretch and ultimately, in the wake of inevitable failure, for an American retreat from global responsibility.
The third and last feature of the Kosovo operation that I want to mention here does indeed directly concern America’s capability to launch and carry through successful interventions: this was the degree of reliance upon advanced military technology, not just as a source