Statecraft

I too was anxious about the second temptation that faced – and must always face – American foreign policy-makers, namely that of ubiquitous intervention in pursuit of ill-defined goals. My concern was not, of course, that America would become too powerful, but rather that it might dissipate its power, and eventually lose the essential popular mandate for the use of power.

How, where and on what criteria should the American superpower and its allies intervene? We should resist pressure to set out inflexible rules in these matters: one of the marks of sensible statecraft is to recognise that each crisis is qualitatively different from another and requires its own response. But acknowledging that fact makes clarity of strategic thinking even more important: it is in unknown territory that you most need a compass. This is amply borne out by experience of the interventions which America and her allies have undertaken since the end of the Cold War.

The Gulf War against Iraq, in whose preparation I was involved, seemed to many at the time to represent the shape of things to come. Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in the early morning of 2 August 1990 would probably never have occurred at the height of the Cold War. Moscow would have prevented such reckless adventurism by any of its dependants. But it is equally certain that there would never during the Cold War years have been a unanimous decision of the UN Security Council to back the use of force against Saddam, particularly when ‘force’ involved a US-led operation in the Middle East.*

These were the circumstances in which President George Bush Sr delivered an address to a joint session of the US Congress on 11 September, which introduced a new expression to the lexicon of international policy analysts. The purpose of the President’s speech was to rally support for the operation in the Gulf and its objectives, which he spelt out as follows:

Iraq must withdraw from Kuwait completely, immediately and without condition. Kuwait’s legitimate government must be restored. The security and stability of the Persian Gulf must be assured. And American citizens must be protected.

So far so good – indeed, excellent.

But the President went on:

A new partnership of nations has begun and we stand today at a unique and extraordinary moment. The crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation. Out of these troubled times … a new world order can emerge. A new era – freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice and more secure in the quest for peace. An era in which the nations of the world, East and West, North and South, can prosper and live in harmony. [Emphasis added]

So the ‘New World Order’ was born.

As I have already noted in the context of remarks by President Havel, this sort of stuff makes me nervous. President Bush, like any leader in time of war, was justified in raising the rhetorical temperature. But anyone who really believes that a ‘new order’ of any kind is going to replace the disorderly conduct of human affairs, particularly the affairs of nations, is likely to be severely disappointed, and others with him.

In fact, one of the first purposes to which I committed myself in the period after I left Downing Street (and after Saddam Hussein was left in power in Baghdad) was to throw some cold water on the ambitious internationalism which the Gulf War spawned. So, for example, speaking to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council in November 1991, I did not dispute that a new state of affairs had emerged as a result of the fall of Soviet communism and the advance of democracy and free enterprise – 1 did not even quibble with the expression ‘New World Order’. But I also urged caution. I recalled the eerily similar language about ‘New World Orders’ which characterised diplomatic discussions between the two World Wars, and I quoted General Smuts’ epitaph on the League of Nations: ‘What was everybody’s business in the end proved to be nobody’s business. Each one looked to the other to take the lead, and the aggressors got away with it.’

Had I been less tactful, I might have added that Saddam Hussein also ‘got away with it’ – at least to the extent that he was still causing trouble in Baghdad while President Bush and I were writing our memoirs.

There were important lessons to be learned from the Gulf War, but only some were absorbed at the time, and some wrong conclusions were also drawn. In one important way, the campaign against Saddam turned out to be untypical of post-Cold War conflicts. The degree of consensus about military action was the result of a temporary and fortuitous series of conditions. Once Russia and China became more assertive, the UN Security Council was unlikely to be an effective forum for dealing with serious crises. Equally untypical was the fact that Saddam Hussein had managed to unite most of the Muslim nations against him. Much as he tried, he was thus never able to rely on anti-Western feeling to provide him with useful allies. Saddam was a blunderer. But as a rule in the post-Cold War world it was more likely that events would follow Samuel Huntington’s thesis of a ‘Clash of civilisations’, where opposing religions and cultures wrestled for dominance, than Francis Fukuyama’s forecast of ‘the End of History’, where democracy was the inevitable global victor.*

The real lessons of the Gulf had nothing to do with New World Orders but a lot to do with the fundamental requirements for successful interventions. It was the decisiveness of American leadership under President Bush and the superiority of American military technology which ensured the defeat of Saddam. America’s allies – particularly Britain and France – helped. Diplomatic efforts to keep the coalition together were also valuable. But American power and the resolution to apply it won the war – and they could have won the peace too, if excessive concern for international opinion had not prevented America’s demanding the complete disarmament of Iraqi forces.

What the Gulf War really demonstrated was the necessity of American leadership. But this was not to everyone’s liking – not even, one suspects, entirely to the liking of the US State Department. Multilateralism – in effect, the use of force only under the authority of the United Nations and for international purposes – became almost an obsession in the years that followed.

It is worth recalling just how much of a contrast this was with earlier American interventions. Under President Reagan the actions against the regimes in Grenada in 1983 and Libya in 1986 were unashamed exertions of American power in defence of American and broader Western interests.* Nor had President Bush shown before the Gulf War any inclination to break away from this formula. When on 20 December 1989 the United States overthrew the government of General Noriega in Panama it acted decisively against a drug-trafficking thug who had apparently been planning attacks on American citizens and who was implicitly threatening vital American interests in the Panama Canal. It was a large operation involving twenty-six thousand US troops and it provoked an international outcry – I was almost alone among other heads of government in voicing strong support.

But with the 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 of superiority over the enemy but also as a means of avoiding NATO casualties. Rightly or wrongly, most leading US politicians judged that American public opinion was not prepared to face the risk, let alone the reality, of losses in Kosovo.

This may not, in fact, have been true. And if it was true it may have reflected poor leadership, or uncertainty about the declared (and undeclared) war aims. Or again it may, paradoxically, have been the effect of the enormous importance of television coverage in modern crises. By making so vivid the suffering of people in distant lands, television greatly increases pressure for intervention. But at the same time, by dramatising even more the grieving of the families of servicemen who are lost, it undermines national resolve to fight and to risk casualties.

America’s commitment to the world’s security is so extensive, and the sacrifices it makes so considerable, that it ill behoves America’s allies to complain about reluctance by American families to sustain losses in other people’s wars. But American leaders should recognise that this reputation, however unjustified, has given encouragement to America’s enemies. This is all the more poignant when, as in Kosovo, the refusal to risk the loss of allied aircraft, and so to envisage operations below fifteen thousand feet, dented our effectiveness in preventing the ethnic cleansing of a civilian population we were committed to protect.

By contrast, the technological dominance of America, which had been such a factor in the Gulf, was by the time of Kosovo eight years later still more evident. In the Kosovo operation, however, it was less America’s superiority over the Yugoslav army, which actually proved quite adept at protecting itself, but rather America’s superiority over her NATO allies that was now most remarkable. The facts here speak eloquently for themselves.

Although all nineteen members of NATO made some contribution to the operation, that of the United States was overwhelmingly dominant. America paid for 80 per cent of the cost – Britain and France made up most of the rest. The US supplied 650 of the 927 aircraft that took part in the air campaign. The US flew two-thirds of the strike missions. Almost every precision-guided missile (PGM) was launched from an American aircraft. The US was alone in contributing long-range bombers, which dropped about half the bombs and missiles used in the campaign.

The cause of this imbalance was not generally, with the notable exception of the Greeks, any lack of commitment by the rest of NATO, and certainly not by Britain. The problem was rather that America’s allies had neither the quantity nor, above all, the quality of weaponry required to be effective partners of the US. Thus while the British flew more than a thousand strike missions, three-quarters of the munitions we dropped were unguided. When poor visibility interfered with PGMs that relied on laser-designation or optical guidance, only the Americans had the technology (in the form of the Joint Direct Attack Munition) which allowed them to attack targets in all weathers. Finally, it was US intelligence which identified nearly all of the bombing targets in Serbia and Kosovo.

Is Kosovo, then, the shape of things to come? In one respect, at least, it should not be. We should be extremely wary of the doctrine of humanitarian interventionism as the main, let alone the only, justification for the use of force. There is, after all, a far more traditional alternative. Sovereign states have a right of self-defence which precedes the United Nations Charter and is not dependent on it, or on votes in international forums. Other states have a right to come to the aid of countries which are the victims of aggression. That is what military alliances like NATO are about. The habit of ubiquitous interventionism, combining pinprick strikes by precision weapons with pious invocations of high principle, would lead us into endless difficulties. Interventions must be limited in number and overwhelming in their impact.

There is always a risk in attempting to make observations about conflicts that are still underway, as is the case of that against bin Laden and the Taliban at the time of writing. On the other hand, if broad conclusions about the conduct of interventions are to be of practical value they must also be applicable in special cases – even one as special as that which now confronts America.

Moreover, the experience of recent years does indeed help, if only in knowing the pitfalls to avoid. The action against bin Laden and his network and the state that has harboured them is morally just, legitimate and necessary. America does not require anyone’s agreement to act in self-defence against an unprovoked attack on its own people. It needs the support of countries whose territory or airspace are required for the conduct of operations. It may also find it valuable to receive practical help from its allies: Britain has been particularly active, for which the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, deserves much credit.

But it is important not to allow ever wider coalition-building to become an end in itself. As we saw in the Gulf War of 1990, international pressures, particularly those exerted from within an alliance, can result in the failure to follow actions through and so leave future problems unresolved. So far, though, I am heartened by the fact that President Bush seems to have concluded that this is an American operation, and that America alone will decide how it will be conducted.

When democracies go to war, it is natural that they invoke the highest moral principles. That is always especially true of America’s wars. And such principles are indeed truly involved in the present conflict. It is not mere rhetoric to state that democracy, liberty and tolerance are all under threat from violent Islamist fanatics embracing terrorism. But winning wars requires more than moral fervour: it demands clear thinking about targets and timetables, accurate estimates of the enemy’s strength and intentions, pre-emptive action to minimise risks and guard against consequences. That is all the more so in this war against terrorism, because we are primarily dealing with distant lands and, in large part, unknown conditions.

In such circumstances, the conclusions I drew above about the need to limit the aims of interventions, while maximising their effect, are especially germane. It is doubtless true that the West should have done more in earlier years to prevent Afghanistan becoming a political powderkeg. And we should now supply humanitarian aid. But I would caution against open-ended attempts at nation-building. What matters, above all, is to neutralise the threat which resulted in the outrages of 11 September. That means taking out the terrorists and their protectors, and not just in Afghanistan but elsewhere too – a large enough task even for a global superpower.

America’s action against bin Laden and the Taliban also demonstrates one other feature about interventions, which we should not overlook. The American people immediately understood that what happened on 11 September was an act of war against them. They responded accordingly. The military commitment by the United States and the willingness of its citizens to sacrifice their lives are testimony to how nations behave when their very survival appears at stake. They remind us that in the modern world only nation states will fight wars at sufficient cost in blood and treasure to achieve lasting victory.

The question of whether to act in Afghanistan was unusually clear-cut. But, more generally, knowing when and how to intervene is as much a matter of instinct as of reflection, although one does of course also need to reflect. The interesting arguments over foreign policies based on moral imperative versus those based on pragmatic national interest are really in the end only that – interesting. The greatest statesmen in the English-speaking world – men like Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan – adopted policies that always contained both elements, though in different measures at different times. I should therefore prefer to restrict my guidelines to the following: