Global Policy Forum

Statement of John R. Bolton
Senior Vice President, American Enterprise Institute

Before the House Committee on International Relations

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee, I wish to thank you for inviting me to testify before you this morning on United States policy toward United Nations peacekeeping operations, and how decision making by the present Administration conforms to its own announced standards in several specific contexts. I have a prepared statement that I ask be included in the record, and that I will summarize, and I would then be pleased to answer any questions the Committee might have.

I. UN PEACEKEEPING IN THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION

President Clinton signed Presidential Decision Directive 25 ("PDD 25") for "U.S. Policy on Reforming Multilateral Peace Operations" on May 3, 1994. Unclassified versions of PDD 25, which had been under discussion within the Administration from its outset, were released subsequently.

1 I understand that the General Accounting Office has conducted an evaluation of the Administration's compliance with PDD as written, and I will not attempt to duplicate that here. Instead, I will examine briefly some of the flaws inherent in PDD-25 as written, and as are currently being demonstrated even as we meet here this morning in a number of ongoing or contemplated UN operations. This is obviously a complex subject, which we can analyze only summarily today, but the Committee's continuing interest in this subject is extremely important and worthwhile?

The central deficiency of PDD-25 is that it really provides no policy guidance at all. Despite rhetorical gestures in the direction of limiting and rigorously analyzing proposed peacekeeping operations, loose language throughout the document permits justification of nearly anything the Administration ultimately decides to do. As a former official in the Executive Branch, I strongly support flexibility in Presidential decisionmaking, but I also believe that when the President purports to announce a policy decision, it should be a real decision, and he should mean it. I do not believe that PDD-25 meets these minimal standards.

The White House press announcement on PDD 25 says that "peace operations can be a useful element in serving America's interests," and that PDD-25 is intended "to ensure that use of such operations is selective and more effective."

3 President Clinton and other Administration officials have made similar remarks about "selectivity" on several occasions. For example, the President said to the UN General Assembly in September, 1999: "I know that some are troubled that the United States and others cannot respond to every humanitarian catastrophe in the world. We cannot do everything everywhere." Just before her trip to Sierra Leone in October, 1999, Secretary of State Albright said: "We have to resist the temptation to use our forces in every dispute that catches our eye or our emotions."

4 The State Department version of PDD-25 seems to track these objectives when it says that "peacekeeping can be one useful tool to help prevent and resolve (regional) conflicts before they pose direct threats to our national security."

5 However, it then immediately adds that "peacekeeping can also serve U.S. interests by promoting democracy, regional security and economic growth." This is the critical sentence that has, in the actual unfolding of Administration policy, made the rest of PDD-25 essentially superfluous. The real issue for top decision-makers is not what a proposed policy might do, but what it will do in concrete cases presented to them for resolution. By turning from "direct threats to national security" to generalities and abstractions, however desirable they are, PDD-25 deserts the world of policymaking for the world of philosophy. While of philosophical interest, at least for some, it should come as no surprise that PDD-25 seems to be typically ignored by those whose decisions it purportedly constrains and directs. Specifically, there are two important ways in which PDD-25, at its very outset, confuses or obscures political-military realities, obliterating distinctions that should be important in formulating American policy.

First, it says that "(f)or simplicity, the term peace operations is used in this document to cover the entire spectrum of activities from traditional peacekeeping to peace enforcement aimed at defusing and resolving international conflicts."

6 While simplicity is generally commendable, it can be affirmatively dangerous when it conceals important differences among fundamentally divergent alternatives. "Peacekeeping" has been traditionally understood in the UN context to mean the deployment of UN "blue helmets" subject to three preconditions: (a) consent among the parties to the dispute; (b) neutrality of the UN forces deployed; and (c) the use of force by UN personnel essentially only for self-defense. By contrast, "peace enforcement," a relatively new term, means the UN's willingness and the ability to use force to achieve its objectives. The best synonyms for "peace enforcement" are words like "war" and "combat," which probably explains why they are not favored at the United Nations. (Some have gone so far, for example, as to characterize "Desert Storm" as a "peace enforcement" action.)

The UN's actual roles in "peacekeeping" and "peace enforcement," however, could not be more widely divergent, a divergence utterly lost by PDD-25's reference to a "spectrum of activities," as if they all fit together seamlessly. Slurring these two concepts together under the term "peace operations" thus virtually guarantees that proposed missions for the United Nations will be confused and misunderstood, and, therefore, that their goals will be unclear, resources inadequate or misallocated, and end-points indeterminate. This confusion has been graphically demonstrated by failed UN efforts in Somalia and Bosnia, where attempts to shift UN missions from "peacekeeping" to "peace enforcement" (and back again) resulted in tragedy for the United States in Somalia, and humiliation for the United Nations in Bosnia. As will be described more fully below, this confusion continues to haunt both the UN and the United States in several current crises.

Second, PDD-25 states that "(t)erritorial disputes, armed ethnic conflicts, civil wars (many of which could spill across international borders) and the collapse of governmental authority in some states are among the current threats to peace."

7 Critically absent here, however, is any reference to the UN Charter's triggering threshold for jurisdiction by the Security Council, which is "the maintenance of international peace and security? This omission is not accidental, since even PDD-25's language about civil wars expressly concedes the possible absence of a true international threat, and the other categories (apart from territorial disputes) implicitly contemplate entirely intra-state disputes. This essentially open-ended expansion of the Security Council's role eviscerates the Charter's limitations, making it impossible in principle to explain why the Council should not be involved in virtually every case of armed conflict around the globe. Accordingly, this is not simply a technical issue of breaching a jurisdictional limit, but a fundamental policy shift, even if little noticed in media reporting. Moreover, the change from basically international to basically intra- state conflicts involves more than simply a matter of degree. PDD-25 itself admits this when it refers to American support for "peace operations.., as a tool" to allow "failed societies to begin to reconstitute themselves.