Issue 25: June 2003

COMMENT

U.S. considers U.N. approval of force optional

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was recently reported as having participated in discussions on a possible U.S.-organized standing international peacekeeping force outside the auspices of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United Nations. The idea would need to overcome deep-seated skepticism within the U.S. Army, which tends to view peacekeeping as a distraction from its real job of war fighting, and among other countries reluctant to participate in such operations outside the comforting umbrella of the United Nations and NATO.

The United States is the world's indispensable power; the United Nations, the world's indispensable institution. The United Nations has unmatched legitimacy and authority on the one hand, and convening and mobilizing power on the other. But the United Nations does not have its own military and police forces. A multinational coalition of allies can offer a more credible and efficient military force when robust action is needed and warranted. The United Nations would be hard pressed to achieve anything of note without active U.S. engagement, let alone against its vital interests and determined opposition.

The benefits of U.N. peacekeeping to the United States, although uneven, are considerable. For decades, U.N. peace operations have served U.S. security interests from the Middle East to southern Africa, Central America, Southeast Asia and Haiti. By their very nature, peacekeeping operations cannot produce conclusive results either on the battlefield--they are peace operations, after all, not war--or around the negotiating table--they are military deployments, not diplomatic talks.

Conversely, the disengagement of the United States from U.N. peacekeeping has had a spillover effect, eroding partially the legitimacy of U.N. operations and therefore the effectiveness of the United Nations as a manager of international security. This, in turn, has reduced U.S. leverage by spreading the burden of providing international security and lessening the demands and expectations on the United States to take up the slack. At the same time, scapegoating the United Nations has produced a backlash among other nations and so reduced the ability of the United States to use the United Nations in pursuit of U.S. goals, where the interests of the two do coincide.

The power, wealth and politics of the United States are too deeply intertwined with the crosscurrents of international affairs for disengagement to be a credible or sustainable policy posture for the world's only superpower. Moreover, the war against global terrorism is one from which America can neither stay disengaged, nor win on its own. Nor is it one that can be won without full U.S. engagement. A world in which every country retreated into unilateralism would not provide a better guarantee of U.S. national security, now and for the foreseeable future, than multilateral regimes.

Exceptionalism is also deeply flawed. Washington cannot construct a world in which all others have to obey universal norms and rules, whereas the United States can opt out whenever, as often, and for as long as it likes from global norms with respect to nuclear tests, land mines, international criminal prosecution, climate change and other regimes in a sort of disposable multilateralism.

Because peacekeeping is likely to remain the United Nations' instrument of choice for engaging in the characteristic types of conflicts in the contemporary world, the U.S. approach to peace operations will continue to define the nature of the U.S. engagement with the United Nations. Perceptions of U.S. disengagement will in turn erode the U.S. ability to harness U.N. legitimacy to causes and battles that may be more important to the United States than peacekeeping in messy conflicts in far-away countries.

Because the United States, in addition to being the pivotal member of the five permanent members in the U.N. Security Council, will also remain the main financial underwriter of the costs of U.N. peacekeeping, it will continue to exercise unmatched influence on the establishment, mandate, nature, size and termination of U.N. peace operations. At the same time, the level of informed interest about the United Nations is so low in the American body politic that any administration will always be able to distance itself from spectacular failures of U.N. peacekeeping.

The overarching U.S. policy goal with respect to U.N. peace operations is to make them efficient, cost effective and selective. Part of the last point includes leaving war-fighting--peace enforcement--to multinational coalitions acting under U.N. authority. Part of the efficiency drive includes a campaign to increase the professional military capabilities of the Peacekeeping Operations Department at the expense of other units that, in Washington's view, are bloated and top-heavy.

U.S. participation in Chapter 7 military enforcement operations under direct U.N. command are ruled out in the foreseeable future. Contributions of U.S. infantry troops to U.N. peace operations are also unlikely. U.S. participation in U.N. peace operations, whose creation and continuation requires U.S. consent, is likely therefore to remain limited to the provision of unique capabilities like transportation, communications and logistics units and skills, as well as bearing the main burden of the costs of the operations.

U.N. peace operations are only one of many foreign policy tools available to the United States, others being multilateral action through standing alliances like NATO, or an ad hoc multinational coalition as in the Gulf War, or even unilateral U.S. action if the interests involved are sufficiently vital to the United States. Peace operations constitute a continuum of international responses to disorder and poverty. They permit Washington to choose its preferred mode of involvement between international and U.N. responses and U.S. engagement on a spectrum of intensity and geographical theater (differentiating in particular between Europe and Africa) of international involvement.

At the end of the spectrum, if the United Nations is unable or unwilling to acquit itself of the responsibility to protect victims of genocide, ethnic cleansing or other egregious humanitarian atrocities, Washington can forge multilateral coalitions of the willing to lead military interventions to stop the atrocities.

In the case of non-U.N. operations, the United States would prefer to obtain the legitimating approbation of the United Nations if possible, in the form of Security Council resolutions authorizing the operations. But the United States is most unlikely to accept a Security Council resolution as a mandatory requirement for the use of military force overseas.

Ramesh Thakur is UNU Vice Rector and director of the Peace and Governance Programme. This commentary first appeared in the July 9 edition of the Yomiuri Shimbun. These are his personal views.

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