Barry Blechman, "The Intervention DIlemma," 1995


Barry Blechman, "The Intervention Dilemma," The Washington Quarterly, vol. 18, 
no. 3 (Summer 1995)



With the end of the Cold War and, with it, the risk that interventions abroad 
could result in confrontation, crisis, and even war between the nuclear-armed 
superpowers, Americans have begun to rethink the norms governing U.S. 
involvements in the affairs of other states. Contradictory impulses have 
dominated this debate. The typical American urge to export democratic and 
humanitarian values has encouraged activist policies and resulting involvements 
in many countries. But the traditional American antipathy toward "overseas 
entanglements" and, particularly, a distaste for military interventions, have 
diminished support for many individual expeditions that implied a serious risk 
of U.S. casualties or even significant expenditures.
The resulting policy dilemma caused difficulties for President George Bush and 
has bedeviled President Bill Clinton. Both administrations sought to escape from 
the dilemma by turning to the United Nations (UN), both to legitimate 
interventions and to spread the burden to a wider group of countries. As a 
result, the world organization's traditional peacekeeping functions have been 
transformed into more muscular "peace operations." But UN peace operations have 
had only mixed results, and the few clear failures have led to legislative 
initiatives that would severely curtail U.S. participation in UN peace 
operations and possibly cripple the organization's ability to sustain more than 
a traditional peacekeeping role.
Lost in the furor have been the facts that the UN has had more successes than 
failures in its expanded security role, and that the UN's apparent failures have 
not been completely its fault, to say nothing of the possibility that steps 
could be taken to greatly strengthen the UN's potential to contribute to 
international security through peace operations.
Contradictory Impulses
The belief that governments have a right, even obligation, to intervene in the 
affairs of other states seems to have gained great currency in recent years. Of 
course, modern communications have made people everywhere more aware of 
situations that seem to cry out for intervention, and more familiar with the 
personal tragedies that accompany these horrible calamities. Technology, too, 
has provided more ready means of intervention - whether for diplomats to 
mediate, for observers to monitor elections, for paramilitary forces to enforce 
economic sanctions, or for armed forces to carry out military operations - 
removing in many cases the excuse of infeasibility. The governments of the great 
powers, and particularly the U.S. government, have the means to intervene today, 
whether they choose to do so or not.
Yet, far more than the physical means of awareness and intervention has changed. 
The norms governing intervention themselves have evolved. The sanctity once 
accorded to state boundaries has eroded considerably. The interdependence and 
penetrability of states need no elaboration. Serious crises anywhere in the 
world cause financial markets and currency rates to reverberate, affecting 
investors' confidence and the business climate overall. Companies large and 
small depend on foreign investors, components, markets, and technologies. 
Individuals are both affected more directly by turmoil in distant lands and more 
familiar with foreign countries. Ordinary citizens interact more frequently with 
people living abroad. People exercise rights to visit and conduct business in 
foreign countries routinely, almost without thinking about the legal boundaries 
that have been crossed.
Most important, however, profound changes have occurred in popular expectations. 
After decades of little more than formal intonation, the belief that governments 
can be expected to adhere to certain universal standards of behavior, even 
within their own borders, seems to have taken hold. This is certainly not to say 
that all people in all parts of the world already hold this belief. The view has 
penetrated populations to different degrees - most profoundly in Europe and 
North America, to a lesser degree in other parts of the world - but the trend is 
very clear, particularly among the economic and social elites that dominate 
politics in most countries.
What is the basis for the new view? Apparently, increasing numbers of people are 
willing to act on what must be an implicit belief that sovereignty does not 
reside with an abstraction called the state, and certainly not with 
self-appointed military or civilian dictatorships, but with the people of a 
country themselves. Even more, the view seems to hold, the power of all 
governments, even those popularly elected, is limited: individuals have 
inalienable rights that must be observed and protected by all governments. As a 
result, according to this increasingly powerful view, all governments can be 
held to certain standards of behavior involving basic human rights and 
democratic processes. In addition, when a country falls into such disarray that 
no governing body can end a humanitarian tragedy, the world community itself is 
accountable. When such events occur, the view continues, all people in other 
countries, and their governments, have not only the right, but the obligation, 
to intervene on behalf of both oppressed peoples and innocent bystanders.
Historically, when murderous civil wars or large-scale abuses of human rights 
occurred in a country, powerful governments with direct interests in that state 
sometimes intervened. Today, as a result of the greater currency of the views 
described above, great powers often feel compelled to intervene in domestic 
conflicts even when their direct stakes are limited. Sometimes, the officials of 
a great power hold to the views just described - and see intervention as a 
humanitarian responsibility. But at other times, if governments hesitate, and if 
the events in question are of sufficient magnitude, various constituencies exert 
political pressures for action - action to end the slaughter, to feed the 
refugees, to restore democracy, to at least save the lives of the children. 
Often, these days, private citizens and organizations become involved in these 
situations before governments even contemplate acting. Religious charities, 
humanitarian organizations, and activist political rights groups are involved on 
the ground in virtually all troubled nations. Their reports and activities 
reinforce, and sometimes help to create, popular pressures in foreign capitals 
for some kind of official action.
Thus, in the contemporary world, major powers react when troubles occur in even 
the most remote parts of the globe. Diplomats are dispatched, good offices 
tendered, observers emplaced, and political and economic campaigns of isolation 
launched. Sometimes, if exercised with persistence and skill, these peaceful 
means of conflict resolution work. More often, they do not: dictators stubbornly 
cling to power, powerful elites continue to oppress the masses, ethnic factions 
continue to revenge historic slaughters with the even greater slaughters made 
possible by modern weaponry.
Why do peaceful means fail? Many factors, no doubt, are responsible, but one 
stands out. In the contemporary age, intervening governments can only rarely use 
peaceful instruments of conflict resolution knowing that they could credibly 
threaten military intervention should peaceful means fail. This is the 
intervention dilemma. Even as the proclivity of major powers to intervene in 
domestic conflicts in foreign nations has grown, the natural reluctance of 
populations to pay the price of such interventions, if challenged, has also 
gathered steam. This reluctance takes two forms: pressures in many democratic 
states against the use of public funds for foreign operations; and, more 
pointed, popular opposition in democratic states to the use of military power in 
most circumstances.
Thus, increasingly, even while powerful political constituencies demand action 
by democratic governments to resolve domestic conflicts in foreign nations, even 
more powerful constituencies resist the use of the one form of intervention that 
often is the only realistic means of accomplishing the first constituency's 
demands - the threat or actual use of force. In an international system with no 
central authority, the absence of credible military threats curtails the 
effectiveness of all forms of coercive diplomacy and limits the effectiveness of 
even peaceful means of conflict resolution.
Formally, of course, countless treaties and agreements concluded over decades 
have proscribed the use of military force except in self-defense. Such morally 
based constraints no doubt continue to motivate many in their opposition to the 
use of force. Even more powerful, however, are more tangible constraints. 
Increasingly, the citizens of democratic nations appear unwilling to underwrite 
military interventions with either blood or treasure. When one looks at the 
history of the twentieth century, it is clear that the moral basis for restraint 
in the use of force has carried only limited weight. It has been the coupling of 
these ethical concerns with the current unwillingness to sacrifice either money 
or lives for government objectives that seems to have turned the tide against 
military interventions.
In the 1950s, for example, the populations of most European powers expressed 
clearly their unwillingness to support military operations m most parts of the 
world, the one possible exception being a direct attack on themselves. Even the 
French proved unwilling in 1958 to continue paying the very high price of 
France's colonialist military intervention in Algeria.(1)
The watershed for the United States came 10 years later in Southeast Asia. The 
popularity of U.S. military operations in Grenada, Panama, and Kuwait may seem 
to contradict this assertion, but a look at the complete record of U.S. military 
operations since the withdrawal from Vietnam makes it clear that popular support 
for military interventions seems to hinge on their brevity, bloodlessness, and 
immediate - and evident - success. The abrupt U.S. withdrawals from Beirut in 
1983-84 and Somalia in 1993-94, following isolated, if dramatic, incidents in 
which U.S. forces suffered casualties, demonstrate clearly the U.S. public's 
opposition to interventions that appear to be either difficult or costly.
Nor is the phenomenon restricted to popular attitudes. Episodes like Beirut and 
Somalia seem to have impressed both the executive and legislative branches of 
the U.S. government, and both major political parties, profoundly. How else to 
explain the sudden termination of Operation Desert Storm short of its logical 
strategic objective of deposing the source of the problem, Saddam Hussein? And 
how else to explain the current bipartisan hesitancy to undertake even the most 
minor military tasks, such as restoring the democratically elected government in 
Haiti?
The unpopularity of military operations helps to explain why the United States 
and European governments came to believe in the early 1990s that interventions 
should be carried out through the UN. Trapped in the dilemma - popular pressures 
to intervene more frequently in the affairs of other states, but even more 
powerful forces poised to oppose the threat or use of military force - the U.S. 
and European nations turned decidedly away from unilateral actions and toward 
multinational activities sanctioned, and often managed, by the UN.
The greater cooperativeness of the Soviet Union that began in the late 1980s 
made the turn to the UN feasible, of course, but it did not necessitate this 
major shift in policy. Indeed, as the Soviet military threat receded and the 
United States emerged increasingly as the world's sole military superpower, one 
might have thought that the United States would have demonstrated a greater 
propensity to act unilaterally, or at least in coalition with its traditional 
allies. All else being equal, it is certainly less complicated to act in one of 
these modes than under the UN's aegis. Just the opposite has occurred, however, 
with both the Bush and Clinton administrations turning to the UN in virtually 
every relevant situation.
Figure 1 shows the number of peacekeeping and good offices missions carried out 
each year from 1947 through 1994, by or for the UN. As is well known by now, 
this number has doubled since the mid-1980s, rising from an average around 10 
per year to more than 20 per year. More to the point, figure 2 shows that the 
increase is accounted for in large part by interventions in domestic situations 
- both civil wars and other kinds of internal conflicts. Indeed, the annual 
number of UN missions related to domestic conflicts has grown dramatically, 
rising from less than 5 per year through the 1980s, to an average of roughly 17 
per year so far in the 1990s. ( shows how missions related to domestic 
situations are divided between civil wars and other kinds of domestic 
conflicts.)
Governments turned to the UN for several reasons. First, the democracies have 
shared the goal of creating effective collective means of resolving conflicts 
since World War II. When the Soviet Union began in the mid-1980s to use its veto 
power far less frequently, achieving this goal appeared to be possible for the 
first time.
Second, on more practical grounds, acting through the UN is a means of sharing 
the burdens of maintaining international stability - both the tangible burden in 
money and lives, and the political burden of imposing one's will on others. The 
United States may pay close to one-third the cost of UN peacekeeping operations, 
but that is still better than the three-thirds costs of unilateral actions. 
Action through the UN, moreover, both legitimates and sanctions military 
interventions in the eyes of domestic and foreign audiences. As was demonstrated 
in the Kuwait case, for example, recourse to the UN's formal procedures for the 
exercise of collective self-defense was essential both to retain popular support 
in the United States and to hold together the coalition of nations that actually 
fought the war.
There is, however, a third reason for the turn to the UN, which, even if not 
perceived by decision makers, has also motivated more frequent recourse to the 
world body. When government officials find themselves confronting the 
intervention dilemma - pressures to act, but a distinctly remote possibility of 
acting successfully due to the difficulty of credibly threatening the use of 
force - they have an additional incentive to turn to the UN.
Dealing with civil conflicts through the UN enables government decision makers 
to shift the locus of responsibility. Introducing the issue in the Security 
Council, cajoling action by the world body, is itself a means of satisfying 
those constituencies demanding intervention. Turning to the UN, in effect, says, 
"We are acting, we are drawing attention to the issue, we are writing 
resolutions, stepping up pressures, persuading others to join us, etc." At the 
same time, if UN diplomacy and political pressures prove inadequate and the 
situation remains unacceptable, it appears not to be the government's failure, 
but the failure of the world body. Government officials in many countries have 
been more than willing to practice such scapegoating, as if the UN were able to 
act more effectively or ambitiously than its key members permit.
Naturally, this attempt to sidestep the intervention dilemma by acting through 
the UN failed in many cases. The paper demonstration of action provided by 
activity in the UN Security Council proved of only limited value in stanching 
political pressures for effective interventions in conflicts in foreign nations. 
At the same time, the cloak of respectability conferred by the UN proved of only 
limited utility in confronting the popular reluctance to undertake military 
tasks of any substantial difficulty or cost.
In most civil conflict situations, if political constraints make recourse to 
military force infeasible, the intervenor's leverage is limited. If a civil war 
is not ripe for resolution, if contending factions are not yet convinced that 
the price of continued warfare exceeds any potential gain, mediators cannot 
succeed regardless of their skills. In such cases, only a willingness to 
separate the combatants forcefully and impose a settlement has even a chance of 
ending the war, and then only so long as the intervenor is willing to continue 
sitting on the belligerents.
Similarly, as has been seen repeatedly in recent years, neither political nor 
economic pressures are typically powerful enough to dislodge dictators who see 
everything to lose, and little to gain, by stepping down peacefully. If the use 
of military power is not a credible instrument of last resort, then the 
intervenor's objective is often impossible from the outset. In many situations, 
without a credible threat of effective military action, UN diplomats and 
mediators are no more effective than national representatives in similarly 
constrained circumstances.
The UN has been a useful vehicle for taking limited military actions to help 
mitigate the more visible aspects of conflict situations - ensuring the delivery 
of humanitarian assistance, implementing ceasefires, and so forth - but the use 
of real force to impose solutions has almost always been ruled out. The prospect 
of significant financial costs and, particularly, loss of life, has proven just 
as powerful a deterrent to forceful interventions in foreign nations under the 
UN flag as under national insignia. As a result, in most UN peace operations, 
the rules of engagement have carefully specified constraints that both ensured 
that UN forces remained out of harm's way and made it impossible for them to 
enforce solutions. In the one case in which such constraints were eased, and 
casualties occurred, the haste with which even the world's greatest military 
power withdrew doomed the mission to failure and proved to many the weaknesses 
of the UN.
Emerging from the Dilemma
Currently, both the administration and most members of Congress who have 
addressed the issue are seeking to restrain the number and scope of military 
interventions by the UN. The greater emphasis now being placed on "realism" in 
deciding when and how to intervene, as spelled out in the administration's 1994 
peacekeeping policy, is essentially an attempt to break out of the intervention 
dilemma by mustering pragmatism as the first line of defense against the 
political impulse to intervene. Rwanda was the first clear demonstration of the 
new policy. Following the brutal intensification of the civil war in that 
troubled country in April 1994, the United States worked to maintain realistic 
boundaries on the strengthening of the UN mission there.
A greater emphasis on realism in approving UN interventions is clearly 
appropriate at present, given the huge expansion in the organization's agenda 
over the past few years and its clear inability to carry out many of the tasks 
that have already been assigned to it. But the United States should not define a 
realistic intervention policy too narrowly, for failures to intervene are not 
without their own costs. By committing itself to making the changes that would 
make the UN an effective instrument for containing world conflict, the United 
States would make possible, eventually, a more ambitious definition of what is 
realistic.
The United States and most other great powers may not have significant, tangible 
interests in Rwanda, but they do have economic and political stakes in other 
places that have been, or might in the future be, rent by civil conflicts. The 
realism that long delayed military intervention in Haiti cost the United States 
dearly, for example, in terms of losses for Americans who do business in Haiti, 
in terms of the cost of dealing with Haitian refugees on the seas and in the 
United States, and, more important, in terms of the impact that U.S. timidity 
had on perceptions around the world of the nation's fitness to lead the world 
community.
In other cases, too, realism defined too narrowly could have profound long-term 
effects. The jury is still out on the effects of the U.S. and European failure 
to intervene decisively in the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia. The U.S. 
decision was right not to put troops on the ground there without a peace 
agreement, excepting the deterrent force in Macedonia, but the consequences of 
this realism are not yet clear. The potential for new conflicts in the Balkans, 
and for the broadening of old ones, remains high. Such contingencies could 
engulf the entire region in war and trigger even broader and longer-term 
conflicts among the great powers.
And, finally, there is a moral cost of nonintervention that should not be 
ignored. The impulse for intervention is not some fad, nor a plot foisted on 
innocent populations by a liberal clique, as some have maintained. It reflects 
the deeply held humanitarian values of democratic populations in the 
contemporary age. Five hundred thousand people may have died prematurely in 
Rwanda in 1994, many of them children. How do Americans feel about that tragedy? 
Could it have been prevented or, at least, restrained in its consequences? How 
would Americans feel if it were the case that an investment of a few hundred 
million dollars could have prevented one-half the Rwandan deaths? Every person 
evaluates such trade-offs, or potential trade-offs, differently. They not only 
have to judge the cost to Rwandans against the cost to themselves, but must also 
reach a judgment about the likely effectiveness of the intervention. There is no 
single right or wrong answer.
Civil conflicts and humanitarian tragedies affect every American by indicating a 
failure in fundamental human values. They also affect Americans more tangibly, 
by diminishing business activity, by disrupting financial markets, by 
stimulating population movements that impose economic burdens and political 
disruptions on neighboring countries, by posing risks of broader conflicts that 
would upset world peace and prosperity in momentous terms. If the United States 
could prevent such conflicts for free, and for certain, citizens would clearly 
want the government to act. Judging when it is realistic to act is a more tricky 
endeavor, which requires hardheaded assessments of options and interests.
The recent failures of the UN in a number of interventions - more properly, the 
failures of the members of the UN in a number of interventions - should cause 
Americans to be modest in their estimates of what is realistic. This is 
understandable. But the United States can, and should, push the boundaries of 
realism, by working to make the UN a more effective instrument for interventions 
in conflicts. If the United States had greater confidence in the UN's abilities, 
it would be more ambitious in what it considered realistic. Any number of 
reports have spelled out the reforms that are required.(2)
* Most important, the UN needs to be taken seriously as an institution and 
reorganized and professionalized accordingly. Necessary reforms go well beyond 
the symbolically important step of establishing an independent inspector 
general, the keystone of current U.S. demands for UN reform. To become an 
effective organization, the UN requires, at a minimum, a streamlined bureaucracy 
beginning at the most senior levels, the appointment of a deputy secretary 
general to manage the organization and coordinate its component agencies, the 
assignment of clear responsibilities to senior officials, and the imposition of 
a professional personnel system grounded firmly on merit.
* The financial aspects of peacekeeping and other UN military activities need to 
be handled in a more routine manner. The budgets for peace operations should be 
placed in a single account and integrated into the regular UN budget. Their 
costs should be apportioned to member states on the basis of the same formula 
used for other organizational expenses.
* The UN also needs to be given the means of conducting military operations 
effectively. This includes the financial resources necessary to build an 
infrastructure capable of providing effective command, training, and logistical 
capabilities, and sufficient resources to carry out the mandates of individual 
missions effectively. Member states need to earmark military units for potential 
use in UN operations and to give them the specialized training and equipment 
they need to be effective. Consideration also should be given to permitting the 
Security Council, through an organization governed by the Military Staff 
Committee, to recruit a small quick reaction force composed of individual 
volunteers. Such a force would make it possible to establish the vanguard of a 
new peace force promptly after a Security Council decision to intervene.
UN reform has long been discussed, but little has been accomplished. The time is 
ripe for a far-reaching initiative. All that is required is a coherent U.S. 
position with the support of both the president and Congress, determined and 
persistent U.S. leadership, and a little common sense.
Finally, the executive branch would be in a better position to judge when 
interventions are realistic - and when they are not - if it worked more closely 
with Congress on these issues, long before it reached the point of decision. 
Legislators necessarily know more than the executive about the beliefs of their 
constituents - about the balance in any one situation between the 
interventionary impulse and the bias against the use of military force. This is 
not to say that executive branch decisions should always be determined by 
opinion polls. Consultations with Congress can help to reveal not only what the 
public believes, but also what actions and policies might encourage positive 
changes in public opinion.
Closer coordination between the branches on these issues also has the potential 
to build political support either for interventions or for decisions not to 
intervene, whichever is relevant. Congress clearly believes that its financial 
powers are short-circuited when the administration supports the initiation of UN 
missions without real consultations and then hands the bill to the legislature. 
The leadership group and ranking members of key committees clearly should be 
consulted prior to U.S. approval of any UN mission. A more serious problem 
concerns those UN missions that will include U.S. combat forces. In these cases, 
any administration is well advised, in its own interest and in the interest of 
sustaining its policy, to seek formal congressional approval of the commitment 
of U.S. forces.
Although the consultative process between the branches on UN peacekeeping and 
potential military interventions improved during 1994, the accession of a 
Republican majority in Congress has led to legislative initiatives that would 
make it virtually impossible for the United States to make use of UN peace 
operations to advance its own interest in a more stable and humane world. Such 
legislation has already been passed by the House and will be taken up by the 
Senate later this year. It would be tragic if the House bill, particularly its 
provisions that would sharply cut back U.S. contributions to UN peace 
operations, were permitted to stand.
As the branch of government most directly attuned to currents in public opinion, 
and necessarily most responsive to them, Congress can play a special role in 
helping the executive branch to break out of the intervention dilemma. A more 
forthcoming position by the executive branch on the establishment of formal 
consultative procedures might help to avoid the passage of crippling 
legislation, enabling the United States to move beyond the current debate and on 
to more constructive actions to strengthen the UN's ability to carry out peace 
operations.
Notes
1. France, of course, has continued to intervene in Africa in the years since, 
but only on a scale so small that the operations could be managed by highly 
specialized volunteer units.
2. See William J. Durch and Barry M. Blechman, Keeping the Peace: The United 
Nations in the Emerging World Order (Washington, D.C.: Henry L. Stimson Center, 
March 1992), and Peacekeeping and the U.S. National Interest, Report of a 
working group cochaired by Senator Nancy L. Kassebaum (R-Kan.) and 
Representative Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.) (Washington, D.C.: Henry L. Stimson 
Center, February 1994).
Barry M. Blechman is cofounder and chairman of the Henry L. Stimson Center in 
Washington, D.C.
  
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