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Fool's Errands: America's Recent Encounters with Nation
Building, by Gary T. Dempsey with Roger W. Fontaine. Cato Institute,
2001, 224 pages.
The Folly of Nation
Building by Alan W. Bock
When the war against Afghanistan — or the bombing
campaign, depending on how much of a stickler you are for constitutional niceties
like declarations of war — was just beginning, I distinctly remember hearing
President Bush promise quite specifically that the United States wasn't going to
get involved in "nation building" in Afghanistan. No, no, we had learned our
lessons from the Clinton era. War on evil, yes. Nation building, no.
| | Alan W.
Bock is a senior columnist for the Orange County Register and author of
"Waiting to Inhale: The Politics of Medical Marijuana."
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Bush may have been sincere about this, though no one ever lost any money
betting against the sincerity of an American president. But when the slaughter of
Asians cooled off, the earlier promise became, as politicians like to say,
inoperative. The international dynamics — not to mention the nature of the
people who populate the state and defense departments — virtually guaranteed
it. "Fool's Errands," by Gary T. Dempsey and Roger W. Fontaine, could
serve as something of a corrective. Most Americans have a vague feeling that the
"nation building" adventures in which the Clinton administration dabbled
distractedly — Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo — didn't turn out too
well, but few believe they were catastrophic. Americans try hard to do the right
thing, but those foreigners are just so, well, foreign. Anyway, hardly any
Americans came home in body bags. "Fool's Errands" makes it clear that
even without the body bags, these ventures caused significant damage to the
countries that endured them and to long-run American interests, at least if those
interests include minimizing the number of people who resent the United States.
They were guided not so much by naive American idealism as by the ideology of
nation building, which is more European — or transnational — than
American, and ultimately much more naive than simple boosterism. Dempsey and
Fontaine tell just how miserably all these missions failed, despite — or
perhaps because of — the best exertions of the "best and the
brightest." The notion that the United States is the wielder of virtuous
power isn't an entirely new concept. At least since Woodrow Wilson a certain
breed of American internationalist has been entranced with the idea of using
power to do good, and a substantial number of internationalists have long been
impatient with the idea of national sovereignty. It became more practical to
abandon the idea of sovereignty openly, and make "human rights" and "democratic
enlargement" the guiding principles once the Soviet Union ceased to be a
threat. The idea of nation building has been floating about for some time
in the rarefied atmospheres of academic and diplomatic conferences held in
warm-weather vacation spots. But nation building is a lot more complicated and
difficult than nation builders profess to believe. In excruciating detail,
Dempsey and Fontaine tell just how miserably all these missions failed, despite
— or perhaps because of — the best efforts of America's policy elite.
It makes for instructive, if hardly inspiring, reading. The Clinton
administration's "best and brightest" actually seemed to think, for example, that
installing Aristide by force would transform Haiti into a democratic utopia. They
got involved in Somalian domestic disputes and squabbles from a position of
almost complete and arrogant ignorance, relying on the belief that military force
and good intentions would ineluctably solve tribal rivalries that have gone on
for centuries. They created a "multiethnic" Bosnia and and tried to manipulate
its domestic politics when it proved unstable. They openly played favorites in
Bosnia and Kosovo, creating widespread resentment against the United States from
all sides. |
| They were guided not so
much by naive American idealism as by the ideology of nation building, which is
more European — or transnational — than American, and ultimately much
more naive than simple boosterism. |
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Most of these failures have been reported by the American press. Dempsey and
Fontaine stitch the loose threads into a larger tapestry of failure. And they
explain the kind of thinking that leads to failure. These Clinton-era
fiascoes, the authors conclude, "were expressions of the administration's faith
in the power of government, especially the U.S. government, to engineer solutions
to political and social problems." At the end of the administration, with failure
after failure staring him in the face, Clinton said, "We've got to realize that
there are other places in the world that we haven't fooled with enough." The
White House then presented a "new development agenda for the 21st century" with
an "accelerated campaign against global poverty" and the elimination of the
"digital divide," and advocated "democratic enlargement" as a uniquely American
(i.e., bureaucratic) response to globalism. Clinton's people were quite open and
explicit about the fact that their program meant an end to outdated concepts like
national sovereignty and that it would cost a great deal in military force and
foreign aid. "Fool's Errands" provides extensive quotations from academic
proponents of nation building, many of whom had the chance to apply their
theories as officials during the Clinton administration. They explicitly abandon
the theory of equal sovereignty among nations, which has been a governing
principle of international law for almost a century — and which was designed
to minimize international conflict. The principle of equal sovereignty holds that
what a sovereign state does inside its borders is its own business, even if it is
reprehensible to others. Military action is justified only when a country takes
action outside its borders, by making war on or interfering in the internal
affairs of another sovereign state. Although the principle of equal
sovereignty was sometimes exploited by repressive regimes (e.g., the Soviets and
Chinese) and, like any general rule of action, had gray areas — (when a
subsidy to a foreign opposition group becomes an interference that could be
called aggressive, for example) — most states respected the sovereignty of
other states. With the end of the Cold War, however, came much
chin-rubbing about the proper role of the United States in a world in which it
was no longer needed to contain the Soviet Union. As Dempsey and Fontaine put it,
"One theme that proved popular with the foreign policy establishment — and
which coincidentally required maintaining Cold War-era levels of global activism
and defense spending — was 'promoting democracy.'"
| Proponents of nation
building explicitly abandon the theory of equal sovereignty among nations, which
has been a governing principle of international law for almost a century.
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Scholars left and right, including Morton Halperin, Tufts professor Tony
Smith, Harvard professor Stanley Hoffman, and American Enterprise fellows Joshua
Muravchik and Michael Ledeen, wrote articles and books arguing that the primary
goal of American foreign policy should be to "promote democracy." National
security adviser Anthony Lake noted in a 1993 speech that the United States had
successfully contained threats to market democracies, but "now we should seek to
enlarge their reach. We should strengthen the community of major market
democracies. We need to pursue our humanitarian agenda not only by providing aid
but also by working to help democracy and market economies take root in regions
of greatest humanitarian concern." This became policy when Secretary of State
Warren Christopher announced in June, 1993, that the Clinton administration's
goal in Somalia was not simply to contain a potential threat, but to play "a
sturdy American role to help the United Nations rebuild a viable nation-state."
Although the term "nation building" was abandoned after the Somalia debacle, the
same motive prompted U.S. interventions in Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. By
the end of the 1990s, the pretense of respecting national sovereignty had
virtually disappeared. There were crusades to wage. Bill Clinton told Wolf
Blitzer in June, 1999, shortly after the end of the NATO bombing campaign in
Kosovo: "Whether within or beyond the borders of a country, if the world
community has the power to stop it, we ought to stop genocide and ethnic
cleansing." This echoed what then-U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar
had said as long ago as 1991, "that the defense of the oppressed in the name of
morality should prevail over frontiers and legal documents." Francis Deng
declared that the concept of sovereignty should be "reinterpreted as a concept of
responsibility to protect one's own citizens. The sovereign has to become
responsible or forfeit sovereignty." Jan Vederveen of the Institute for Social
Studies in the Netherlands averred that "It is not so much that sovereignty is
becoming an 'archaic' notion, as some assert, but that it is increasingly being
viewed as conditional in relation to human rights." I am tempted to give
two cheers for the notion that human rights are more important than state
sovereignty. But in practice this notion has been used mainly to justify
intervention and aggression (what else would you call a bombing campaign?) by the
biggest, most powerful state in the world, or by an agglomeration of powerful
countries. Perhaps it would do no good to send copies of "Fool's Errands"
to members of Congress and to executive-branch policymakers. But if you're uneasy
about the notion of nation building, this book will give you even more powerful
reasons to be concerned.
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