Global Policy Forum

By Jeffrey Laurenti

Among the panoply of international institutions, organizations, associations of convenience, and special relationships that link states, the United Nations looms uniquely large in the arena of peace and security. After all, the foremost reason for which the U.N. was chartered in 1945 was to act in this arena, a fact reflected in the priority of this mission in the Charter's statement of purposes, and the charter of nearly every regional organization created since, including the North Atlantic Treaty, specifically defers to the United Nations as prime mover in this field. For most states, the United Nations embodies the aspiration to a law-based international order; in many states, its intervention has helped douse dangerous conflicts; and with some, it has played the disagreeable role of disciplinarian and enforcer.

While this institution was created from an American template, however, it has long inspired ambivalence among American policymakers, often precisely for its roles in peace and security. When the West was locked in its ideological struggle with Soviet communism, the United Nations was, inevitably, written off as impotent in confronting force-but in some quarters it was also suspect as an instrument, more insidiously, for blurring vital ideological distinctions. Today, a pragmatist's assessment of the U.N.'s security roles will recognize, on the one side, that the United Nations provides legitimacy for potentially controversial measures-not only internationally, but among much of the American public as well-and also spreads the cost of conflict management worldwide ("burden-sharing"). On the other side of the ledger, collective management of conflict through the U.N. can restrict states' freedom of maneuver and drag them into helping deal with situations they could otherwise blissfully ignore. For the United States in particular, these disadvantages add up to a larger risk of "losing control" of policymaking to a collective process-with the ominous result, said critics in the mid-1990s, of "subordinating American foreign policy to the United Nations."

On balance, even from a classic "realist" perspective, the U.N. security machinery is an important complement to other instruments available to U.S. policymakers to achieve their political and security objectives. International deference to the U.N.'s legitimacy yields general cooperation with its mandatory measures, such as sanctions, at minimal cost. Its good offices provide ready channels for renewed negotiations when these can be productive-even simultaneously with application of Security Council coercive measures. And it can organize peacekeeping interventions to assist post-conflict transitions, broadly distributing the costs. The central dilemma for many U.S. policymakers is how to keep the U.N. machinery just credible enough to sustain these advantages without permitting it to acquire such momentum of its own that Washington is boxed into playing consistently by U.N. rules even when it can, at least in the short run, do better by improvisation.

Values Added

In part, the tug of war for American policymakers between reliance on and aversion to the United Nations in the security domain mirrors the intensifying competition in U.S. foreign policy between "values" and "interests." It is often remarked that the American public tends to respond to appeals for action internationally that are based on universal values (e.g., fairness, freedom, law, and time-honored sympathy for an underdog) rather than on national "interests"-such as gaining economic advantage, securing political dominance, or strengthening a military position. Politically compromised though it is, the United Nations is a "values" institution for a large swath of the American public; its engagement in an initiative legitimizes it, suggesting shared purposes with the rest of the international community. Within the traditional foreign policy community, by contrast, interests have traditionally been assumed to trump values, and the problems of peace and security deemed worthy of U.N. ministrations have often been those where Washington could not discern special interests of its own.

That staple of 1990s Washington homiletics, the "rule of law" (implying consistent application of standards to great and small alike), in the context of international relations is often seen as a question of "values." Though many have labored mightily to convince the strong that adherence to law serves their long-term interests, practitioners of statecraft quite reasonably assume that, as sole surviving superpower, the United States may advance certain interests more successfully through ad hoc application of its lopsided power resources rather than through the application of law. Indeed, some policy analysts, noting how law can serve as a refuge of the weak against the power of the strong (and sometimes of the cunning rogue against the chastisement of the righteous), warn that accepting its entanglements simply affords the Lilliputians the rope to tie down the American Gulliver. True, the strong are often thought to have the upper hand in defining the law-but the weak may have some leverage of their own in writing the rules too. This is certainly the case in U.N. political processes. Old-fashioned political log-rolling has its place even in crisis management at the United Nations: Washington could no longer keep stonewalling appeals for peacekeeping intervention in African conflicts it deemed irrelevant to its interests once it had endorsed new U.N. operations in Kosovo and East Timor.

Peacekeeping's changing face

Even the most traditional and passive form of U.N. peacekeeping intervention, frequently denominated today as "classic" peacekeeping-lightly armed soldiers monitoring a truce agreed to by armed belligerents-has worn out its welcome in some American circles. Deployments in Cyprus and southern Lebanon draw criticism for prolonging rather than resolving the conflict (a criticism presumably applicable to, but rarely made of, the far larger U.S.-led deployment in South Korea). Perhaps more pertinently, with the growing number of peacekeeping missions in the 1990s the total cost of such ventures has escalated, fueling congressional resistance even to the payment of small operations like those approved by the Security Council for Congo (Brazzaville) and the Central African Republic. Washington skeptics ask bluntly what American interest is at stake in halting civil wars in benighted corners of Africa.

U.N. peacekeeping's biggest costs, and biggest controversies, have arisen from the large-scale "peace-building" operations that the Council has authorized since the end of the cold war. Some of these did follow the classic peacekeeping prescription of consent by all belligerents, and involved multi-faceted international intervention to nurture a fragile settlement, as in Cambodia and Namibia (and, to a less costly extent, Mozambique). In some, armed belligerents rescinded their agreement, leaving international policymakers with the choice of either intervening militarily (the decision taken on Haiti in 1994) or withdrawing (the decision in Rwanda that same year, with disastrous consequences that continue to reverberate today in neighboring countries like Congo/Zaí¯re). In yet other cases, policymakers decided on intervention in the absence of any agreement by the local antagonists to cease fire, usually when (1) at least one of the belligerents was flagrantly violating international norms, especially toward civilians (a question of values), or (2) inaction might result in outside actors being drawn into conflict, adversely affecting major states (whose interests may be jeopardized by political instability). Exemplified by Somalia and the former Yugoslavia, these have been the most troubled and criticized U.N. operations.

Somalia and the former Yugoslavia are also dramatic examples of the expansion of U.N. peacekeeping into "nation-building" in "failed states"-derided by some critics as "social work" (usually with reference to African rather than Balkan conflicts). One leading senator publicly averred that the lives of half a million Somalis were not worth that of a single American soldier, a view that few in Washington saw much point in challenging. But not only have African conflicts been triaged out of any commitment of U.S. military personnel; fevered debate continues on whether the United States has any interest at all in paying a prorated share of the costs of peacekeeping operations there even when other countries provide the troops. It should be noted that the large-scale ventures in "nation-building"--full-service interventions with civilian administrators, election observers, human rights watchdogs, humanitarian relief deliveries, and police and judicial monitors in addition to soldiers-have not actually been undertaken in Africa, but in places of greater strategic interest to developed countries (Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Cambodia, and East Timor). But the concern about U.N. intervention being degraded into "social work" often morphs into a metaphor for despair about Africa.

This was one of the impulses behind a drive in the mid-1990s to shift responsibility for peace operations from the United Nations to regional organizations and so-called "coalitions of the willing." This would allow the United States to invest in peace operations in those regions where it had strategic interests-and where the principal regional agencies, like NATO and possibly the Organization of American States, exclude Washington's most persistent critics. It was assumed that the Organization of African Unity, and perhaps such paper sub-regional organizations as the Economic Council of West African States, could take responsibility for Africa. The all-too-evident weakness of regional organizations in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia has somewhat discredited this strategy, and even the unilateral support the United States has offered to help develop African peacekeeping capabilities in selected countries is viewed with distrust in much of the continent as a cover for disengagement. A threadbare continent simply does not have the financial resources to pay for peacekeeping interventions, even if governments in Africa (and, indeed, in much of the developing world) are more prepared than the United States to accept casualties in the forces they furnish to peacekeeping missions.

Washington's deepening aversion to U.N. peacekeeping operations in the mid-1990s-particularly marked in the Republican-controlled Congress, but undeniable if understated in the Democratic-run administration-had quick results. The United States slammed the brakes on U.N. peacekeeping in 1995, and what critics had dubbed the world's biggest growth industry quickly contracted as the U.S. demanded that Bosnia peacekeeping (civilian as well as military) be stripped from the U.N., and ruled out U.N. operations in West Africa and Albania. Secretary-General Kofi Annan gamely denied that peacekeeping was in decline in 1997, pointing out that there were still 80,000 peacekeeping soldiers around the world, as many as three years earlier-but the awkward fact was that now, over two-thirds of them were run outside the purview of his United Nations.

Yet today the United Nations has reemerged center-stage, managing the thankless task of Kosovo peacebuilding, the reconstruction and independence of East Timor, Sierra Leone's reconciliation, and-approved but not underway as of this writing-monitoring a peace process in Congo/Zaí¯re. Washington had resisted U.N. intervention in all these troubled spots, but ultimately concluded that there was no alternative to a United Nations mission. Only by accepting U.N. administration of Kosovo could Washington get Russian support and extricate NATO from a lengthy air war. The Clinton administration recognized that only the U.N. could conduct an internationally credible referendum in East Timor and then assemble an administration for the ravaged territory, but it blocked an emergency U.N. peacekeeping deployment to restore order there, exhorting Australia to handle the peacekeeping itself. But no self-selected group of countries (least of all "white" countries) could successfully interpose a military presence in that Asian setting, and none was prepared on its own to bear the costs; the interim ad hoc force was soon converted into a U.N.-hatted one, paid by assessments on all member states. President Clinton acknowledged the U.N.'s seeming inevitability when, borrowing a phrase from his Secretary of State, he told the General Assembly in 1999 that the United Nations is the world's "indispensable" institution.

The essential assets that the United Nations brings to the security arena are, in short, its global legitimacy and "lawfulness" (important for much of the world, if not Washington's self-styled "realists"), its impartiality, its acceptability as an intervenor in virtually all regions, and its accumulated experience in managing diverse and delicate peacekeeping operations. Its credibility and, yes, moral authority far exceed any other agency's or virtually any government's. On the other hand, unreliable financing has undercut its ability to fulfill mission goals, and U.S. policymakers still must contend with frustrating politics in the Security Council, congressional irritation over paying international bills, and deep doubts about the U.N.'s capacity to stomach-much less manage-the use of force.

Capacity to manage force

Doubts about the U.N.'s capacity to handle force quickly halted the boom in think-tank studies of U.N. military capabilities after the Kuwait war, when Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter (the chapter dealing with coercion to handle "breaches of the peace") seemed to have been born again. Somalia and Bosnia became the metaphors for U.N. military inadequacy with respect to use of force-criticized in the one case because the U.N. was pressed into using force too quickly, in the other for holding back military (or at least air) power that NATO was prepared to supply.

In Somalia, the Italians rejected the American-led campaign against warlord Muhammed Farah Aidid, and their troops referred to Rome all orders to deploy "robustly" before obeying them-apparently proving that nations would not surrender control over their troops in war-fighting situations to U.N. "unity of command." This suggested the unreliability of U.N. command structures in situations where a mission faced violent opposition. Given the nationalist sensitivity in Washington to placing American troops under non-Americans' command under any circumstance, the prospect of placing troops under a "U.N." commander-archetypically imagined in Washington discourse as a Bangladeshi or Fijian general-became an issue of passionate polemic. There are good reasons, after all, to doubt the competence, or at least experience, of commanders from bedraggled Third World militaries in dealing with sophisticated combat threats.

Of course, even if that U.N. commander were British or French, as was the case of UNPROFOR (the U.N. Protection Force in Bosnia)-dispelling the concern about competence-there are other doubts about the U.N.'s psychological capacity to manage force effectively. The Anglo-French U.N. military commanders in Bosnia did not substantially differ from the U.N. special representative there, Yasushi Akashi, in their assessment of what could be accomplished there with the limited military forces that governments had committed: conflict containment and palliative relief. However, Akashi put great stock in the power of patient diplomacy, which had seemed to work when he faced threats of noncooperation and violence in Cambodia, and he consistently rebuffed U.S. pressure to call in air attacks on the Serbs. The few he authorized under the "dual-key" collaboration between the U.N. and NATO (in which both agencies had to agree on application of force, and either could halt it) were symbolic, often preannounced, and derided by critics as "pinprick" strikes. When Washington and its European allies finally agreed on a two-week bombing campaign against Bosnian Serb positions after the fall of Srebrenica, they forced Boutros-Ghali to turn on the bombing and then throw away the U.N. key.

The United Nations is indeed pervaded by a reluctance-critics say timidity-about using force. Its Charter raison d'íªtre, to "save succeeding generations from the scourge of war," attracts to service in the Secretariat people who see making peace, not war, as the U.N.'s vocation. Many U.N. staffers see the resort to force as evidence of political or diplomatic failure; most seem to feel that the U.N. must stand for a "preferential option for peace." Since it was never endowed with the international military capacity envisioned by its founders (talent that went largely to NATO), there is no internal institutional balancing of peace aspirations with realism about belligerents, the way there is in its leading member governments. Of course, governments themselves are as reluctant as the Secretariat to get the United Nations embroiled in use of military force; most member states are prepared to contemplate use of force only as a last resort, after all else fails, and when one side is clearly more culpable than the other.

With its immense military capacity, the United States is more disposed than most to lower the bar for what constitutes a "last resort," at least in situations U.S. officials feel have urgency. Tellingly, however, Washington's readiness to threaten and use force is effectively limited to application of missile and air power. When it comes to deployment of ground forces, American policymakers seem even more cautious than the Europeans. Moreover, the assumed intolerance of the American political system to any military casualties at all-magnified by the Mogadishu debacle-has become a world legend. Critics of peacekeeping operations suggest that the unacceptability of casualties simply reflects the American public's-or at least American soldiers'-unwillingness to risk injury on behalf of abstract principles of global order in faraway places of which we know nothing (though it is not clear that the same aversion to casualties would not appear in the event of messy interventions in the Caribbean, on the Golan Heights, or in the Taiwan Straits). Nonetheless, when the Security Council invokes Chapter VII, the presence of American troops in a multilateral operation is seen as the evidence of a serious readiness to use force if local factions try to mess with the foreign intervenors.

With its suspicion that U.N. officials lack the hard-boiled temperament to know when to respond to a challenge with force, and with how much force, Washington has refused to place its troops in U.N.-run missions since 1996, when American personnel participated in the U.N.'s Eastern Slavonia transition administration captained by (American) Jacques Klein. Indeed, the only peacekeeping operations anywhere into which the U.S. has placed its troops since 1996 have been in the former Yugoslavia-and under NATO control. Even for the Balkans, on the fringes of Europe, there is lively debate in Washington on whether the United States has a sufficient national interest to warrant the expense of its military engagement.

There are a number of potential remedies to the alleged U.N. allergy to use of force. One is simply to deprive the U.N. of operational responsibility for any peace operations under a Chapter VII mandate-effectively the operative policy between 1996 and 1999. This would almost certainly prove too sweeping. In Africa, where the chances of U.S. military engagement hover between zero and minus one, the United Nations has no competitor for nuanced military intervention, including even the limited use of force. The Nigerian forces that led the occasionally forceful West African interventions in Liberia and Sierra Leone during the late 1990s period of Security Council paralysis-and which were certainly not shy about using force-would have been perfectly willing to serve there as "U.N." troops. If anything, U.N. control would have rendered these interventions more disciplined in accordance with international standards.

Another remedy would exclude the U.N. from directly undertaking Chapter VII missions where the United States or its allies are prepared to commit troops, under the theory that these can manage the decisions on when force is warranted better than hand-wringing U.N. bureaucrats. This has effectively become the practice, at least where U.S. troops are concerned (even the ill-fated Rangers raid in Mogadishu was conducted by U.S. forces reporting to Tampa, not the U.N.). America's allies turn out not to share this view; the British and French had no problems serving under U.N. commanders in Yugoslavia (appointed from the ranks of their own officers), the Italians would have much preferred a U.N. command in Albania, and the Australians urged the same for East Timor. Moreover, when forced to find another hatting than the U.N.'s, they have usually preferred existing multilateral organizations to totally improvised "coalitions of the willing." Their comfort level with U.N. control might change if a Chapter VII mission involved out-and-out war-fighting rather than assertive peacekeeping-but under such circumstances they might reassess the necessity of intervention in the first place.

A dramatically different remedy would entail creating a stronger military readiness component within the United Nations. Simply by having a critical mass of military professionals inside the house, the U.N. debate on managing conflicts might reflect a more realistic understanding of what military power can accomplish with defiant belligerents. But even the transplanting of a NATO-sized military staff into the United Nations would not transform the U.N. Secretariat's self-image as tilting toward peace-nor would most member states want it to. In any event, if there is anything that U.S. critics of the United Nations abhor more than a pacifist world organization, it is a militarily capable one. One of the "benchmarks" for partial payment of U.S. arrears legislated by the Congress in 1999 was the requirement that the United Nations have no "standing army" and no special agreements with member states to earmark troops for U.N. missions as called for by Article 43 of the Charter. This has not, however, deterred others in the international community from entering agreements designating units for U.N. peacekeeping.

Authorization of force

The NATO war against the Serb remnant of Yugoslavia in 1999 exposed to public debate a fundamental gap between U.S. policymakers and most other governments about the use of military force. Many NATO allies resisted Washington's call for North Atlantic Council authorization of air strikes against Yugoslavia, on the grounds that only the U.N. Security Council has the lawful authority to authorize military action (except in self-defense). Their reluctant approval of such authorization in October 1998 was seen in Washington as a breakthrough for a new NATO strategic concept that would not be tethered to a Council subject to Russian or Chinese (or developing countries' collective) vetoes. While the question of a regional organization's legal right to initiate war against a sovereign state generated almost no press or political debate in the United States during the Kosovo war, it was a hotly contested issue for virtually every European government. In the aftermath of the war, the Europeans have tended to reaffirm their traditional position, notably in their contributions to the General Assembly debate on "humanitarian intervention" sparked by Secretary-General Annan in the fall of 1999. Some European legal scholars are questioning whether the departure from the Charter framework on Kosovo may have created a de facto exception from the general rule of a Security Council monopoly on lawful authorization of force.

This is not the place to survey the legal merits of the various sides of the argument. A number of American political decision-makers, however, have expressed shock at the notion that the U.N. Charter should bar states (or at least the United States) from threatening or using force against others, except in self-defense, unless authorized by the Security Council. Some have labeled this a power grab by Kofi Annan. Senators speaking at a hearing in connection with a visit to the United Nations assailed this doctrine; one Democratic member declared flatly that "no one in Washington believes that," and a Republican colleague asserted America's right to use military force "to advance its national interests." This is a much broader exception than the Charter-recognized right of "self-defense [against] armed attack"-which itself has given imaginative lawyers considerable room for expansive interpretations.

The question of legitimate authority to use military force in interstate relations is becoming an increasingly contentious one separating U.S. policymakers from those in allied governments and most other states. To the extent that the issue has drawn attention in the U.S. policy debate at all, it is seen first and foremost as a menacing constraint on U.S. military power and freedom of action. The usefulness of the Charter restrictions as a constraint on others that might be tempted to aggressive behavior has, so far, drawn little interest.

The question is far from a debate over legalisms. The gains for national interests that the United States might hope to realize in intimidating a lesser adversary-say, one branded a "rogue" by policymakers or pundits-may be offset by the legitimation of intimidation or force for others (e.g., China on the Spratly Islands). The gap between Washington and other Western capitals on the question of legal authority may have quite practical implications as well. When the new International Criminal Court starts operation, possibly as soon as 2002, officials who initiate unilateral military operations may find it prudent to follow the example of many members of Congress and turn in their passports.

If they see a relaxation of the Charter standard as advantageous, U.S. policymakers may be well advised to facilitate a process of inclusive public debate on the subject with the policy communities in leading partner nations. On sober reflection, the guidelines on lawful use of force written into the U.N. Charter may prove to be a more prudent long-term standard to govern the behavior of states than a more permissive acceptance of use of military force unilaterally to promote national interests.

Toward an Agenda for the Coming Quadrennium

These "global" concerns underlie much of American officials' ambivalence about turning to the United Nations to maintain international peace and security. Even outspoken champions of the United Nations-an apparently endangered species in Washington political circles-acknowledge the deformations in the Security Council political process, the thinness of U.N. capabilities, and the difficulties of sustaining collective political will over the long term for harsh but arguably necessary coercive measures, such as those against Iraq. Others question whether, at this moment of seemingly unchallenged American dominance, the Charter call for "conformity with the principles of justice and international law" really serves U.S. interests. How far to accept U.N. rules of the international game will remain a lively subject for political debate in the United States, as nowhere else.

The mood swings of the Clinton administration on the United Nations reflect these dilemmas. Its initial advocacy of full-throated U.N. lead responsibility for managing conflict situations-epitomized in Madeleine Albright's embrace of "assertive multilateralism"-soon evolved into Presidential Decision Directive 25 of 1994, the hard-nosed calculation of American interests in proposed U.N. peacekeeping missions that had unfortunate collateral effects for a number of Rwandans. This was succeeded by U.N. marginalization, underscored most dramatically by Richard Holbrooke's exclusion of the United Nations from Bosnia at Dayton, and most recently by the tentative and highly conditional U.N. reengagement symbolized by the Helms-Biden legislation on U.S. back dues. For all that, the administration has generally taken pains to avoid overt rupture with international law; another might give less priority to the concerns of America's allies about international law and more to the opportunities for locking in America's current geopolitical advantages.

Given the dilemmas that the U.N. security framework poses for U.S. policymakers, what might be on an administration agenda for the next four years?

Some see the U.N. constraints on the United States as so great, and the U.S. stake in the kinds of problems the United Nations helps resolve as so slight, that they would cut the Gordian knot by complete disengagement. In the 105th Congress, 54 members of the U.S. House of Representatives voted for withdrawal-a quarter of the majority party's ranks. Withdrawal, however, seems neither politically acceptable to most of the American public nor a solution to the problem of constraints on U.S. freedom of maneuver. On the contrary, it could leave the field open for America's abandoned allies to join others in applying coordinated pressures to hem in the wayward hegemon.

A somewhat less dramatic option would keep the United States formally within the United Nations, but continue recent patterns of financial withholding to keep the organization so weak that it cannot offer the international community a credible alternative to passive dependence on Washington. Of course, the United States is already hovering at the brink of vote forfeiture in the General Assembly, but advocates of a hard-ball approach profess to be unconcerned: The only vote that counts, in this view, is the veto in the Security Council-and the Charter does not provide for a two-year delinquent's loss of vote in the Council. This option, it must be noted, assumes that America's interest in collective security is simply negative-to block potential initiatives of others. While it is not obvious that forfeiture of the U.S. vote would stir the American public to righteous indignation, it would likely trigger a firestorm of press criticism at home and seriously undermine confidence in American reliability abroad. Another no-no.

A different approach to resolve the dilemmas about U.N. security roles would bundle a whole-hearted reaffirmation of the Charter framework; prompt and full payment of long-overdue assessments for U.N. peacekeeping operations; a return to payment (without conditions) of current assessments at the start, rather than at the end, of the calendar year; and support for a U.N. rapid deployment force, as candidate Bill Clinton had promised in 1992. Such a program would dispel the deep doubts among many of America's partners, especially in Europe and Japan, about American intentions, and it could allow the United Nations to undertake operations in peacekeeping emergencies far more speedily and effectively than it does now. But the ambivalence in American policy circles may not be so easily wished away, and the Clinton administration's rapid desertion from the ranks of assertive multilateralists suggests that there may not be much political staying power inside the Beltway for strengthening the roles and capabilities of the United Nations.

Still, an unsentimental assessment of the most likely security dangers of the early 21st century will surely include several that the United Nations is particularly well placed to address. Regional strife that may suck widening rings of neighbors into its vortex is one. Another plausible threat scenario is the possibility that some states will seek to acquire highly destructive weaponry that only a few others have in their arsenals-or grotesquely destructive weaponry that the world at large has moved to abolish. It may well include the management of turbulent transitions as some states decompose. There will be animated debate about whether conflict in apparent backwaters may adversely affect the international stability and order needed by the prosperous islands of industrial and technological development, but it is a safe bet that some of these situations will disturb Western serenity. It is unlikely that the United States will want to organize ad hoc coalitions to intervene whenever such a situation threatens to spin out of control, and it would arguably be useful for the United Nations to have a better institutionalized capacity for response. The following are areas where it may be possible to build American support for useful initiatives:

Police capabilities. The experience of U.N. civilian police monitors in Haiti and Bosnia, and of U.N. police personnel in Kosovo, suggests the importance of creating a standby international policing capability. In contrast to the military, of course, police are not hired just to be kept in station houses waiting in reserve for the Big Emergency. It took many months of recruitment of individuals who could be spared from their local duties in their home countries' police forces before the U.N. could field a credible police presence in Kosovo. (Where to draw the line between the responsibilities of international police and international peacekeeping troops-where, for instance, between garden-variety crime and the suppression of politically fomented violence-is a separate question.) Foreign police need to be trained to work with each other and with possibly exotic local populations, develop habits of cooperation and common practice, and be deployable on relatively short notice. Italy's carabinieri are often suggested as a model for how an international police capability might be organized.

Standby forces. As already noted, there are lingering suspicions among some political commentators about whether America's interests would be served by a more developed "standby" U.N. peacekeeping capability. In some circles the idea remains anathema, evoking the specter of the dreaded standing U.N. army. Still, other member states have not waited for the Congress to resolve what it thinks about the principle of standby peacekeeping units; to date, 32 have already entered formal memoranda of understanding with the Secretary-General designating units that will be trained and potentially available for peacekeeping duty, including all four leading European Union countries. Fully 88 have formally stated their willingness to support the standby arrangements system, including China, Russia, and the United States. Indeed, the Clinton administration has made a modest financial contribution to support the training and oversight of this effort, despite some congressional criticism. A new administration may see this as an area for high-profile activity, perhaps folding Washington's current African peacekeeping training initiative into a U.N. standby framework.

Peacekeeping oversight capacity. The U.N.'s capacity to manage any peacekeeping initiative has been gravely weakened by the elimination of so-called gratis military staff that had been volunteered to U.N. service by wealthy countries in the 1990s. Fearing that the U.N.'s Department of Peacekeeping Operations was becoming an enclave of NATO-country military officers with no ties to the bulk of U.N. member states, the General Assembly pressed for their conversion to regularly budgeted U.N. military staff positions (giving some developing country officers a share of the posts) or else their elimination. Unwilling to support an increase in U.N. spending over "zero-growth" levels-and skeptical of what kinds of military officers might turn up on the U.N. payroll under the usual U.N. geographical distribution-the United States accepted the banishment of the gratis personnel. Budgets for new peacekeeping operations may provide some funds for central military staff, but only for the lifetime of that operation. Western countries will need to consider whether a strengthened headquarters staff, and whatever that can mean for more effective U.N. deployments, is worth an exception to zero-growth budget discipline.

Sanctions machinery. The U.N.'s area of unique comparative advantage-its ability to command universal adherence to a sanctions regime against a "threat to the peace"-could be strengthened by more systematic approaches to sanctions monitoring and enforcement. Better impact analysis and forecasting of sanctions effects, an investment in monitoring the compliance with each sanctions regime, and provision for possible enforcement against sanction-busting could be made a standard element of sanctions resolutions. However, the cunning campaign of the Iraqi regime against the sanctions its belligerence has brought on Iraq has eroded international willingness to support strong sanctions regimes. While the focus on so-called "smart" or "targeted" sanctions may be a useful honing of an international instrument of coercion-especially on financial assets-it runs the risk of creating Swiss-cheese sanctions that, by inflicting no pain on anyone, prove ineffective in achieving the Security Council's policy objectives. In the next quadrennium American leaders will need to rebuild the confidence of a newly wary international community in the efficacy and importance of the sanctions instrument.

Security Council reform. A major source of American policymakers' unease about submitting problems to Security Council management is the politics of the Council itself. Those permanent members that feel themselves slighted by U.S. policies, or that may have a different approach to or interest in a particular conflict situation and its potential resolution-i.e., Russia and China-have shown an increased willingness to flex their veto muscle to gain leverage with Washington, or at least to stymie it. The United States is quite attached to its own veto, however, and a re-calibration of the two-tier Council voting system is not part of any realistic discussion for Council reform. Instead, the Clinton administration has called for an expansion of the Security Council, and specifically for the addition of at least two more permanent members-Germany and Japan. The broad guidelines governing U.S. policy toward Council enlargement have reflected widely shared American concerns: Any Council enlargement should be directed to the more important states in each region that can effectively contribute to international security, rather than adding more small fry; and the Council's total size must be kept small and "efficient." Whether adding more permanent seats is the most effective route to that goal has been the subject of considerable debate, and the coalition of states opposed to expanded permanent membership (especially within the parameter of a 20-seat Council) has blocked the U.S. plan. In early April 2000, however, the U.S. representative to the United Nations appeared to drop the U.S. ceiling of 20 or so members, which could have far-reaching consequences for the Council's operations. Given the sentiment that had prevailed in Washington on Council reform before Clinton's ascension-"if it ain't broke, don't fix it"-it seems unlikely that a future administration and a future Senate can be counted on to back a deal on a Council bloated to 25 or 28 members.

Financing. Funding international peace operations brings the discussion of U.N. peacekeeping full circle to the initial congressional complaints about it in early 1992. House appropriators' anger at rising peacekeeping costs led the Bush administration to block a prophylactic peacekeeping operation in Somalia; the Council simply invited concerned states to provide peacekeeping units or contribute funds for them. Almost none responded to the call, the security situation deteriorated, mass starvation ensued, and late in the year the U.S. led the huge rescue operation that would have such fateful consequences. Since then the U.S. Congress has unilaterally decided to cap America's share of U.N. peacekeeping costs, skipped payments on major operations in 1995-96, and denied funding altogether for small African observer missions. The result has been a crisis for international peacekeeping: Other states delay making payment of their assessments, starving U.N. operations financially when they may most need to demonstrate their presence and credibility to local actors; Kosovo is the most glaring recent case. U.N. inability to pay past-due reimbursements to troop-providing countries also discourages states from offering troops to new missions, or continuing them in old ones. Presumably the Clinton administration will be able to secure some reduction in the U.S. share of peacekeeping expenses this year, but whether it will be enough to satisfy congressional expectations of a 25 percent level is still in doubt. Its successor will need to consider fresh ways of assuring rapid payment of assessments on urgent peacekeeping emergencies, since the protracted congressional appropriations process produces funds many months, sometimes more than a year, after the emergency that triggers a new peacekeeping mission. Of course, delays in funding do remind other member states of the U.N.'s dependence on U.S. funding, thus administering a valuable lesson; but analogous lessons could also be administered by delays in payment from the European Union (aggregate 38 percent of peacekeeping costs) or Japan (20 percent). The problem is the impact on peacekeeping effectiveness.

Concluding observations

While many multilateral organizations can provide vital support for international peace and security, there are essentially two through which the United States would normally work-the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United Nations. While U.S. planners tend to have a high comfort level with NATO (and their dominance of decision-making there is little challenged), the United Nations tends to be more problematical. Accountability to a much more diverse and often critical membership, the parameters imposed by international law and the mandates hammered out by the Security Council, and the U.N. Secretariat's skittishness about use of force draw criticism in Washington.

Still, the U.N. on balance brings far more strengths than inconveniences to the tasks of peace-making, peacekeeping, and peace-building. As Secretary-General Kofi Annan noted in his Millennial program report in April 2000, the half-century since the U.N.'s founding represents the longest period without war between the major powers since the emergence of the sovereign state system, and inter-state war (as opposed to unilateral interventions in internal conflicts) has become relatively rare. This may be less a tribute to the U.N. itself than to the growing hold of international law and, arguably, to a cold-war "balance of terror" (though the near-disappearance of inter-state war is even more pronounced since the cold war ended). Despite their ambivalence, American policymakers can benefit from a pragmatic agenda to enhance U.N. effectiveness in the security arena.