The U.N. Obsession

What’s wrong with the Clinton foreign policy? After retreat from Somalia, humiliation in Haiti, capitulation to North Korea and dithering over Bosnia, the question becomes acute. The answer does not lie only with a President who has little experience in foreign policy and less interest. Nor does it lie solely with his foreign policy team of well-meaning souls lacking in steel, the kind needed to take a stand and stick to it.

At root, the problem is not personalities but ideas. Even the most skilled statesman would flounder if lashed to the central idea of the Clinton foreign policy: that in the post-cold war era the U.S. can shed its arduous international responsibilities by transferring them to the U.N. or sundry other multilateral constructions. The subordination of America to the will of “the allies,” or the U.N. Secretary-General, or the even vaguer notion of the “international community” provides a convenient alibi for failure. But it is also a near guarantee of failure and a source of endless, needless humbling of the planet’s sole remaining superpower.

Take Bosnia. The Clinton Administration, unwilling to stand aside from the conflict but afraid to do anything about it directly, has chosen indirect involvement through NATO and the U.N. The result? Rather than harness awesome American air power (on display only three years ago in the Gulf War) to a coherent campaign to do something significant about Serb advances, the U.S. allows its air force to become the instrument of absurd power struggles among U.N. officials in Bosnia.

U.N. Commander Michael Rose calls in air strikes around Gorazde, but the U.N.’s chief civilian representative in Bosnia, Yasushi Akashi, preferring negotiation, vetoes them. When air strikes are called again and finally approved by the U.N. bureaucrats, NATO planes are foiled by weather, and a British Sea Harrier jet is shot down. The pinprick attacks fail even to achieve the minimal logic of tit for tat. They become tit for tat — when the weather is good and Akashi is in the mood.

Procedures have since been streamlined, but procedure is not the problem. The problem is that we could ever have contemplated letting the U.N. — with no general staff, no military expertise, no command structure — direct a NATO air campaign in the Balkans.

Beyond tactics, moreover, the U.N. has no strategy. Nothing holds the pieces together. There are thousands of peacekeeping troops; on-again, off-again negotiations; the occasional ultimatum, flexibly enforced; the odd air strike. Amounting to what?

This lack of objectives is not the fault of the U.N. bureaucracy. Strategy is not its business. That must come from the Great Powers. But when the U.S. makes plain that it will pursue nothing that does not command the assent of “the allies” — and the allies have conflicting objectives — the result is guaranteed chaos.

The Gulf War was a success because it was clear to all that the U.S. was going to liberate Kuwait even if it had to go it alone. Join us if you will, but we won’t waver. They joined. Lesser powers do so when convinced of American will.

If Bosnia is not a vital enough interest to warrant American intervention (as I believe), then we should stay out. The pretend intervention of putting ourselves under U.N. command leaves us with the worst of both worlds: devoid of initiative, yet committed to spasmodic engagement whenever the U.N. rouses itself to action.

But the most debilitating effect of our U.N. subordination is neither tactical nor strategic. It is philosophical. One ends up missing the point of foreign policy. When President Clinton held his April 20 press conference on Bosnia, he went into extraordinary detail about the different levels of U.N. authorization for the use of air power. There is “no-fly zone” authority. There is “close air support,” which requires a U.N. request for every bombing run. And there is the Sarajevo model, open-ended authority to bomb a predefined exclusion zone.

The President appeared fascinated by the issue, as if the principal problem of foreign policy is finding its correct legal justification. That is the principal problem, perhaps, for domestic policy. You want to change health care? You must pass legislation to give you legal authority to do it. If you want to save Bosnia, on the other hand, international legal authority is the least of your problems.

In foreign policy, you don’t think like a Governor. You think like a President. You don’t decide what to do by parsing Security Council resolutions. You decide what to do by making a calculus of American national interests, strategic objectives and military capacities. From that you fashion a policy with clear objectives. Then you hire the best international lawyers to find the authority for what you had decided to do in the first place.

The obsession with legalism, with procedure, with finding the right authority to act has drained American foreign policy of initiative and coherence. The Gulf War showed that the U.N. can be a useful tool to help us do what we have to do in the world. But to see the U.N. as the principal agent of world stability and the U.S. as its tool is to forfeit any claim to a foreign policy, let alone to world leadership.