12

WHAT WE CAN DO

A New Global Identity

 

 

 

 

The progress that humanity has made toward ending war has come about not through inevitable, natural, or magical changes, but through the long, hard work of people seeking peace. The job is not finished. However, not only have the number and size of wars decreased in recent years, but our concept of war and military force is changing. The job of soldiers used to be, and still is to some extent, to kill and destroy. Nowadays, however, their job is, as often, to build and protect.

I. Soldiers for Peace

The 150,000 deployed peacekeeping troops in the world—about 100,000 UN and 50,000 non-UN—make up one of the two great interventionary armies in the field today. The other one is the U.S. military force in Iraq and (with NATO) Afghanistan, together fielding a roughly similar number of troops. The head of UN peacekeeping sees it that way, calling his forces from 118 countries “the second largest deployed army in the world.”

One difference between these two armies of similar size is that the U.S. military gets more public attention than do peacekeeping forces. Another difference is in their budgets. At about $8 billion a year, peacekeeping costs roughly about 1 percent of the U.S. military budget. Given this size disparity, the deployment of 100,000 UN peacekeepers in fourteen missions around the world is an impressive military feat. Of course, the words of General Dallaire in Rwanda in 1994 apply to the whole world of peacekeeping today: “Give me the means and I can do more.”

Despite these differences, U.S. military operations and UN peacekeeping are converging in some striking ways. As we have seen, peacekeeping has gotten more robust, as the international community has come to the realization that certain spoilers in rough neighborhoods respond better to attack helicopters than to nice words. UN officials and member states alike have begun to put teeth into the efforts to secure hard-won peace agreements when the actions of a few threaten to unravel them.

At the same time, U.S. forces have undergone a dramatic, if underappreciated, change in mission since the Cold War ended, from conventional combat operations to counterinsurgency. In Afghanistan, U.S. officers drink tea with village elders, army engineers build irrigation works, and anthropologists deploy with military forces to help them understand local cultures. U.S. “female engagement teams” send women Marines to engage Afghan women in village spheres that are off-limits to male soldiers—not because the U.S. military has gotten “nicer,” not because men couldn’t blast their way into Afghan compounds, but because the soft approach works better. The idea of tank phalanxes blazing away to conquer territory and topple governments seems anachronistic. When such an approach was last used, in Iraq in 2003, the results were not just inefficient but downright counterproductive for U.S. foreign policy goals.

Americans used to send soldiers “over there” to conquer and defeat the enemy. Now we send soldiers to put themselves in harm’s way to maintain peace, to establish conditions for political and economic progress, to be diplomats and educators rather than just “grunts.” In this way, U.S. soldiers have become more like UN peacekeepers than either perhaps realizes. Then, too, Americans used to fight alone, even if helped by allied nations, but today they are more integrated than ever with forces from NATO allies in Afghanistan (and, in 2011, Libya), including serving under foreign commanders or commanding foreign troops. Again—just like UN peacekeepers.

The convergence of U.S. and UN forces is likely to extend, in a small way, to a modest convergence in funding in the coming years as well. As demands on UN peacekeeping continue to grow, and the world grudgingly extends more money for those purposes, so will the U.S. government grudgingly realize that it must shrink its military budgets. Spending levels above those of the Cold War are not only unsustainable in a deficitridden federal budget, but unnecessary in a world of fewer wars and less use for traditional military operations. As countries count their pennies, the bargain price of peacekeeping becomes a big attraction while the insane price of industrialized war will make it unappealing. It is not that a rich country such as the United States cannot afford to fight an all-out war against a mortal threat with all the technology it can muster. Rather, it does not need to. Mortal threats are in remission, and money spent on military forces gets the most bang for the buck in operations that resemble, well, peacekeeping.

PAYING FOR WHAT WE WANT

Take out seven hundred-dollar bills and lay them on the table in front of you. If you are an average American household, this is your monthly share of U.S. military spending. Now take out two one-dollar bills and put them on the table. That is what the same household pays for UN peacekeeping. The missions described in this book, the hundreds of thousands of lives not being lost in wars anymore, cost the average American household two dollars a month.

Now imagine how your life would change if that two dollars a month were doubled—not much, if you are like most Americans. Then imagine how the lives of millions of people in conflict areas would change if the world’s peacekeeping budget were doubled. The change would be substantial. Not only would many thousands of people have greater security, perhaps returning home if displaced, or being able to travel to markets. But also greater peace could spark broad social change in a virtuous circle of economic development, better governance, and the rule of law. Those two dollars could dramatically improve millions of lives.

We have seen that starving peacekeeping missions of needed resources is the rule, not the exception. The dysfunctional formula of big mandates and small budgets has proven surprisingly resilient despite repeated calls to change it, such as in the Brahimi Report. By contrast, the successful missions—such as in Sierra Leone—have, in the end, gone in strong, with large numbers of peacekeepers relative to the population size and usually backed up by robust forces from great powers or regional organizations.

In assessing the UN’s difficulties in meeting the new demands of the post–Cold War era twenty years ago, Pérez de Cuéllar emphasized the problem of limited resources. The UN, he found, was not adequately prepared to implement Council decisions to use force in internal conflicts because it lacked “adequate funding, managerial staff, and command and control procedures for peace enforcement operations” as well as “appropriately trained troops in sufficient numbers and with the necessary equipment . . . ,” among other deficiencies. UN peacekeepers sometimes act with incredible bravery, but are seriously outgunned.

Two decades later, in 2009, UN experts again worried that the new expansion of peacekeeping, in terms of numbers and the scope of missions, was not being matched by commitments from governments in troops and money. The total number of soldiers, police, and civilians in UN peacekeeping missions grew from 40,000 in 2000 to 113,000 in 2009, but resources devoted to the tasks did not keep pace. “Peacekeeping has been pushed to the wall,” said one. “There is a sense across the system that this is a mess—overburdened, underfunded, overstretched.”

Peacekeepers and UN personnel around the world face considerable danger, made worse by the inadequate resources available to them. A 2008 study found them more likely to be attacked in recent years than inin past decades. “All of us who work for the U.N., we continue to think of ourselves as good guys, and just because you have the [UN] flag, wherever you go you will be all right. We need to realize that our flag is not enough protection.” Before the 1990s, and notwithstanding exceptions such as the first Congo intervention, civilian UN and aid workers “used to be ‘off-limits,’ ” but then they became frequent “targets.” In 1999, rebels in Burundi murdered the UNICEF representative and the World Food Program logistics officer, just a day after a UN official was murdered in Kosovo and a month after a UN doctor was murdered in Somalia. During the Angola war, in 1998, a UN plane was shot down with all killed, including the Special Representative of the Secretary-General. The son of the pilot took another UN flight to search for the wreckage, and that plane, too, was shot down with all killed—twenty-three people altogether.

Ideas for radically changing the UN’s funding levels and mechanisms have foundered. The “Tobin tax,” proposed by the late Nobel Prize–winning economist James Tobin, would raise substantial funds to support the UN. It would apply a very small tax to international foreign exchange transactions, which constitute a very high volume of financial flows, trillions of dollars a day. Debate continues about how to implement such an idea, originally conceived as a way to dampen volatility and speculation in currency markets, as well as who would administer it and how the proceeds would be used. Proposals have included funding the UN, economic development in poor countries, global warming measures, or the creation of a kind of insurance fund against financial collapses. Britain, France, and Canada have all, at some point, supported some variation of such a tax. The Tobin tax could raise hundreds of billions of dollars a year, far more than would be needed to supercharge the current few billions devoted to peace operations. But its economic effects are uncertain and it seems politically impractical. In 2001 it received the kiss-of-death endorsement of Fidel Castro. I would not want higher peacekeeping budgets to have to wait for grand schemes such as the Tobin tax to be agreed and implemented.

AN INSTITUTION WORTH INVESTING IN

It is not just the peacekeeping department that is worthy of dramatically increased support. The UN as a whole can make our world much more peaceful and healthy, if only we would let it. A former Australian foreign minister writes, “It is not widely appreciated just how many different roles are played by the multiple departments, programs, organs, and agencies within the UN system, how many of them have performed outstandingly for many decades, and how very little, comparatively, it all costs.” The UN “family” taken together, including peacekeeping and affiliated agencies such as the WHO, costs less than $20 billion a year. In addition to the 100,000 or so peacekeepers sent by national militaries, the UN system employs about 100,000 people, fewer people than the workforce of Starbucks coffee.

The small size of countries’ permanent missions to the UN reflects the relatively low priority the UN has. As of 2004, the United States had 128 professionals working at the UN, Russia had eighty-three, China sixty-five, Britain thirty-eight, and France twenty-nine. Nonpermanent members of the Security Council typically had smaller missions still. Bangladesh, a top contributor of UN peacekeepers in the world and a country of 160 million people, had 8 professionals in its delegation to the UN when it last served on the Security Council in 2001.

The Secretariat lacks some basic administrative machinery that even small national governments take for granted. For instance, “unlike an actual head of state, the UN secretary-general does not have a plane of his own.” Kofi Annan traveled through Africa “in a jet lent by the emir of Qatar. . . .” Everything the secretary-general needs, he has to beg or borrow from national governments. As Kofi Annan put it in 1999, “With no enforcement capacity and no executive power beyond the organization, a secretary-general is armed only with tools of his own making.” Yet, with this limited tool kit, the secretary-general must take on the world’s intractable problems, with time pressing. “Everything I touch is a race against time—to save lives, to stop killing,” said Annan.

It took decades of work to establish even today’s limited freedom of action by the secretary-general. We have seen how Dag Hammarskjöld built up the power and prestige of the office after the great powers believed he would be a passive administrator. Critics of the UN object to exactly that effort to give some power to the office. One complained that “the UN secretary-general has been transformed from an administrative officer into someone with the pretension and grandiosity of a head of state.”

In late 1954 and early 1955, Hammarskjöld defused a crisis between communist China and the United States. Chinese nationalists on Taiwan still held China’s UN seat, and the UN had just officially fought on one side of the Korean War, with China on the other side, so the UN would not seem the best choice as mediator when China shot down an American airplane and took the crew prisoner. Hammarskjöld, however, asked to come to China in his own capacity as secretary-general, not as a representative of the Security Council. This was a new idea—that “the secretary-general had an affirmative obligation to act when peace and security were threatened.” The prisoners were eventually released. In contrast to the original vision of the UN as a collective security organization, and its history in the Korean War, a new role emerged: What the UN “had lost in coercive power it had regained through its unique, suprapartisan status.”

The 1960–61 Congo problem was “a major test of the authority and independence of the secretary-general and the UN secretariat.” Here the secretary-general learned that the veto power of the five permanent Security Council members gave him “considerable freedom of interpretation” in carrying out the Council’s mandates, since stopping him would require all five to agree. Over the subsequent years, one government or another has found itself annoyed by the secretary-general’s actions, but overall the powers of the office have not been abused. On the contrary, more freedom of action and more resources would let the secretary-general do more to limit and prevent violent conflicts around the world.

THREE THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED FIREFIGHTERS

In 1960, the UN put 3,500 peacekeepers from four countries on the ground in the Congo in four days. Why, fifty years later, does it take months? Are our airplanes so much slower than the ones they used in 1960? Are we poorer, or have smaller armed forces to draw on? No, clearly the blockage, so to speak, is in the political plumbing.

A recurring idea to solve this problem is to give the UN standing peacekeeping capabilities. Staff and equip the fire department before a fire breaks out. “Perhaps someday this sensible notion will actually be implemented.” Here is a modest proposal: Just do it! Standby peacekeepers are not so complicated, so expensive, or such a threat to almighty national sovereignty as to warrant the foot-dragging that this proposal always seems to elicit.

You might think that U.S. public opinion would be a big barrier to enlarging the powers of the UN in this way, but the opposite is true. In a 2007 poll, 72 percent of Americans supported “having a standing UN peacekeeping force selected, trained and commanded by the United Nations.” In fact, creating a standing peacekeeping force controlled by the UN is supported by strong majorities, a more than two-to-one ratio of supporters to opponents, in all the Permanent Five countries. Those expressing opposition to the idea make up only 24 percent in the United States, 25 percent in France, 22 percent in Russia, and 25 percent in China. (Britain was not polled.)

While we are at it, why not populate this standing peacekeeping force, under UN command and flying the UN flag, with major troop contributions from the Permanent Five members of the Security Council? The leadership of the P5 would give the force real clout, politically and militarily. The P5 are, in fact, the five most powerful militaries in the world, which is why they have their status on the Security Council. Any force with soldiers from these five countries would have to be taken very seriously indeed by armed parties in a conflict area. And the United States possesses unique global transport capabilities that would be crucial to the success of a quick-deploying force. (The bulk of peacekeeping funds already come from the P5.)

The P5 members uniquely could feel comfortable with a permanent UN force, since they could veto any proposed use of it. No P5 country will ever have to send its soldiers on a mission it does not support. As a side benefit, the participation of P5 military personnel might help the great powers get along, since they would be working on a good project together, somewhat like the effect of outer space cooperation in easing Cold War tensions.

Troops from the current large troop-contributing countries, such as Bangladesh, would be incorporated into the standing force as well. Those countries’ militaries have precious peacekeeping experience, the countries need the revenue, and the troops cost considerably less to maintain in the field than those from Europe or North America. Furthermore, a standing peacekeeping force need not do all the UN peacekeeping. The present system of slowly assembling contributions from many countries could still supply most of the needs. But while this happens, the standing force should be able to deploy to places where a few thousand peacekeepers are needed right away, pending the creation of a conventional peacekeeping mission some months later. Ralph Bunche’s deployment of 3,500 in four days would make a good target to emulate.

The history of peacekeeping has repeatedly and undeniably shown that delays in responding to peacekeeping requests are a huge drag on the success of the whole enterprise. In Sierra Leone, as we have seen, a fast response in 1997 might have saved years of subsequent war. In case after case, stumbles and setbacks have resulted from delays in deployment.

Finally, if we are to have a UN standby force with troops from the Permanent Five Security Council members, why not activate the moribund Military Staff Committee, with officers from those five countries, to take up one of the roles the Charter intended for it?

Is this so much to ask? In a world where peacekeeping plays a critical role in maintaining the world’s substantial progress toward peace, and where rapid deployment would tangibly improve outcomes, a standing UN force would offer great benefits at very low cost. The UN’s founders gave the Permanent Five special status, not just to talk and pass resolutions, not just to cast vetoes, but to shoulder responsibility for world peace and security. If they refuse, they are not great powers but wimps. In a world of 20 million soldiers, a trillion dollars in military expenditures, and missiles that can blow up anything on earth in thirty minutes, I am talking about 3,500 peacekeepers in four days. The citizens support it, the world needs it, and the great powers can easily afford it.

Beyond this modest step, peacekeeping capabilities and budgets could be greatly expanded in future years. The “baseline” of peacekeeping forces worldwide in the post–Cold War era, about 100,000, “has been inadequate for the tasks at hand.” Two recent studies cost out the options for expanding these capabilities. The first, by military policy expert Michael O’Hanlon, finds the costs of a large standby force from industrialized countries would be “very expensive” but “not astronomical.” The second, by the RAND Corporation, finds that costs run ten times higher in a mission that must impose a solution by force compared to one operating with the consent of all parties. For a poor country of 5 million, such as Sierra Leone, a “light peacekeeping” mission needs 8,000 international troops, 1,000 police, and $500 million. A “heavy peace enforcement” mission needs 65,000 troops, 8,000 police, and $14 billion. In each case other costs, such as humanitarian, governance, and development expenses, add another billion dollars. Not to belabor any particular set of figures, the point is that peacekeeping can be realistically planned and budgeted instead of being improvised and funded on the cheap.

WAR PREVENTION

The main focus of this book, as of UN peacekeeping itself, is on actions by the international community to end wars and keep them from restarting. However, we have seen at several points that conflict prevention is another important tool to increase peace, one whose potential has not been realized. It is easier to prevent a war than to end one that has already started. “Once war starts, mistrust and hostility increase, and ending the war through negotiation becomes harder.”

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, as the saying goes. Dag Hammarskjöld in 1960 was already advocating a “switch to . . . preventive action from corrective action.” Kofi Annan said the same thing forty-two years later: “I have pledged to move the United Nations from a culture of reaction to a culture of prevention.” He proposed making “prevention . . . the cornerstone of the collective security system of the United Nations in the twenty-first century.”

The Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict concluded that of the $200 billion spent in the 1990s intervening in Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, Cambodia, El Salvador, and the Gulf War, about two-thirds could have been saved by taking a preventive approach. Early-warning systems could draw policy makers’ attention to conflicts before they blow up.

But as Annan notes, “existing problems usually take precedence over potential ones and, while the benefits of prevention lie in the future and are difficult to quantify, the costs must be paid in the present.” Thus, the focus of the Security Council “remains almost exclusively on crises and emergencies,” and the Council normally becomes “involved only when violence has already occurred on a large scale.” Among other recommendations, Annan suggests earlier attention to conflicts, when preventive measures can be effective. Usually, by the time a conflict reaches the Security Council, the chance for “early” prevention has passed.

Ideally, the deployment of peacekeepers before the outbreak of violence would allow a preventive approach. This has actually happened three times in UN history—in Macedonia (1995–99), Central African Republic (1998–2000), and Haiti (several operations since 1993). In each case, the threat of war receded, yet the rarity of this kind of preventive deployment “suggests that the international community has been reluctant to expend the political and financial capital required for a peace operation without the clear case for deployment that is made by open conflict,” as Annan complains.

A good example of successful conflict prevention (though not by the UN) occurred in Estonia in 1993, shortly after the breakup of the Soviet Union, which had left behind ethnic populations that did not follow new international borders. The city of Narva was located in Estonia but populated almost entirely by Russians, who had suddenly become an ethnic and linguistic minority in the new Estonian state. They voted in a referendum to secede, and the Estonian government threatened force to keep them from doing so. Russia in turn warned that it would use force to protect Narva if Estonia attacked it. The toothless Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) had created a High Commissioner for National Minorities, and that individual went to Estonia and fashioned an agreement whereby the referendum was considered a statement of aspirations rather than an action plan, and the Estonian government backed off its threats of force. The outcome was a lot cheaper than a war, and even a lot cheaper than a peacekeeping mission after war occurred.

Similarly, preventive conflict resolution was quite successful in Macedonia in 1993, where the UN deployed its first preventive peacekeeping mission. After Croatia and Bosnia, the international community was eager to avoid another war in the former Yugoslavia. The mission guaranteed Macedonia’s territorial integrity and supported the Macedonian government, which included both of the rival ethnic groups. Despite several serious crises in the ensuing years, Macedonia avoided war because of political accommodation among the leaders of conflicting communities. And in Bosnia, one study estimated, intervention in early 1992 would have cost $11 billion over four years, instead of the $54 billion eventually spent on the intervention there.

If this way of thinking sounds like discussions of preventive medicine and health care costs, it is no accident. Medical researcher and policy expert David Hamburg, a psychiatrist by background, was on the faculty at Stanford Medical School in the 1960s when a group there began rethinking diseases such as heart attacks and diabetes, focusing on prevention and not just treatment. Today we take for granted that any successful public health approach to these kinds of diseases must involve education of the public to adopt lifestyle changes such as in diet, exercise, and smoking. But these were new ideas at the medical school, where doctors had always just treated diseases after they showed up, sometimes too late to do much good.

Hamburg went on to become a leading policy adviser on medical issues, including from 1975 as president of the medical institute of the National Academy of Sciences which advises the government. He promoted the prevention approach to tackle challenging issues of adolescent health and other health policy problems. Then in 1983, when public concern about nuclear war had risen during the first Reagan Administration, Hamburg took over as head of the Carnegie Corporation, a major foundation, and redirected it toward prevention of nuclear war. Then he instigated the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, which applied the prevention approach to the broader problem of war in the world. Finally, he turned to the prevention of genocide, arguing that most genocides are preceded by plentiful signs of what is coming, so that timely intervention could keep genocides from occurring. “Altogether,” Hamburg concluded in 2002, “it is clear that there has been a burst of prevention activity in the early years of the twenty-first century that stands in dramatic contrast to the early years of the 1990s. . . .”

We need to develop the tools of war prevention. It is much cheaper than waiting for wars to break out.

AMERICAN LOYALTY BEYOND AMERICA

The UN’s work for peace, whether through improved prevention activity or expanded peacekeeping, depends critically on U.S. support. America is the host country and leading contributor, yet Americans have long held mixed feelings about the UN. Near the end of World War II, more than 80 percent of Americans favored entry into a “world organization with police power to maintain world peace.” A secret State Department poll showed a similar number supported committing U.S. military forces to the UN to help keep peace. But in the first of several swings in opinion, “by 1950, a Gallup poll found that only 27 percent of Americans thought that the UN was doing a good job.” In 1965, the U.S. secretary of state shouted at the UN secretary-general, “Who do you think you are, a country?”

During the Reagan Administration, U.S. conservatives portrayed the UN “as a haven for Communist spies, as an institution inherently inimical to American interests, and as a profligate organization, badly administered, whose budget was decided by a majority that contributed very little to cover it.” Pérez de Cuéllar reluctantly concluded “that these forces were aiming at U.S. withdrawal from the United Nations” and that some members of the administration shared this aim. As the United States withheld its UN dues over a number of years, by 1986 the UN “was literally on the brink of bankruptcy” despite budget cuts of $30 million annually. By 1988 the United States owed almost half a billion dollars.

After 1994, when Republicans won control of the U.S. Congress, “the UN was a rich target, both substantively and symbolically,” for their criticism. Boutros-Ghali “made the perfect hate object.” In 1996, Republican presidential candidates found strong crowd responses to their attacks on the UN, for instance roaring their approval of Senator Phil Gramm when he said, “I will NEVER send Americans into combat under UN command!” (At the time Americans made up about 5 percent of UN peacekeepers, none in combat operations.)

Congress withheld more UN dues. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Jesse Helms of North Carolina, was a center of opposition to the UN. During the Clinton Administration, Madeleine Albright, first as UN ambassador and then secretary of state, “spent years holding Jesse’s hand and appealing to his chivalrous southern impulses in hopes of persuading him to stop holding up peacekeeping missions and diplomatic postings and budget bills.” Kofi Annan also tried to win over Helms, but although “Helms’s manner toward Annan was always polite . . . he would not budge.”

In 1999, the Senate finally confirmed, as U.S. ambassador to the UN, Richard Holbrooke, the person who had banged heads together to push through the Dayton Agreement and end the war in Bosnia. With great personal energy and skillful diplomacy, he worked out the deals that would bring the United States back into the fold, carry out reforms in the institution, and ensure success in the crucial peacekeeping missions then under way. But the tone shifted again in 2001. “The Bush team seemed not so much hostile to the UN as scarcely aware of its existence.” Despite a period of working through the UN after the 9/11 attacks, the Bush Administration broke with the UN over Iraq and bypassed the international organization in going to war in 2003. In 2008, presidential candidate John McCain proposed to bypass the UN altogether with a new League of Democracies, a fairly radical idea that reflects a deep lack of trust in the UN. Opponents in the Congress have also continued to advocate against the UN.

The current U.S. ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, has helped the Obama Administration to reengage America with all parts of the UN. In 2009 the United States caught up with its arrears, and President Obama even said some nice things about the UN. However, in the 2010 elections that shifted U.S. politics again to the right, some leading candidates criticized the UN and even called for U.S. withdrawal. So Americans have had trouble settling down over the years and taking a consistent position on the international organization that they created and continue to host. But without Americans, there would never have been a UN.

II. Nations and Peoples United

The UN was founded on national sovereignty and continues to be at the mercy of national governments that are its members. This is not going to change anytime soon, and humanity’s efforts for peace need to operate within that framework.

A CLUB OF STATES, NOT PEOPLE

Some observers find the UN too “state-centric” to respond to the challenges of our time. Many critics of the UN point out that it is not democratic. The UN does not consist of the people of the world, but of the states of the world, the national governments. Large and small countries get treated equally, and on the other hand permanent Security Council members get preferential status denied to other large, important countries. These criticisms miss the point. These are not flaws in the UN system but innate elements of its design. It would not work without them.

The UN is rooted in a system of states that evolved over centuries—a formal, symbolic system in which members all enact certain rituals, such as having a flag, an anthem, and a seat in the UN. The system protects and strengthens existing governments, sometimes at the expense of the world’s people, some of whom have poor governments and lack basic rights. The interstate system follows the principle of sovereignty—that states do not interfere in each other’s domestic affairs.

The interstate system divides the entire world and, almost as an afterthought, its people, into 193 units, each with a recognized government. States have rights; individuals traditionally do not. The system supports the government’s right to control all the territory in its state. The places where no state holds control of a territory—such as the tribal areas of Pakistan or the south of Somalia—are generally places of trouble.

The costs of this system are well known, and we have encountered plenty of them in this book. Petty dictators get to take the stage and speechify at the General Assembly, as when Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez equated U.S. president George W. Bush with the devil, declaring that he could still smell the sulfur in the room from Bush’s earlier speech. Human rights abusers have purview over upholding human rights. Heavily armed great powers control efforts on disarmament. The most reasonable and timid attempts to diminish violence or curb abuses in tiny, poor countries are loudly denounced as infringements on sovereignty. Lightly scratch any UN activity, and below a superficial layer of humanity and idealism you will find a thick bedrock of cold, hard national interests. These costs of the interstate system on which the UN rests are sometimes amusing and sometimes annoying, but mostly they are distracting—from the hard, important work of doing what we can do within that system to promote peace. As should be obvious from the mass of evidence in this book, we can do a lot. We should do more.

The interstate system, despite its problems, gets you a lot. It contains and potentially reduces the very large-scale violence that can take place between entire nations, where individuals do not know each other and do not expect to interact in the future. By contrast, in face-to-face settings individuals know each other personally and create social hierarchies reflecting status and access to resources. Individuals can use reciprocity and personal relationships to limit violence. What the interstate system does is to transpose a large-group dynamic, relations among nations, onto a small-group, personal setting. The members of the club, leaders of states, can sit in the UN General Assembly and operate as a community, with its status hierarchy and in-group rituals. This does not always keep wars from breaking out anyway but has been successful in limiting violence in interstate wars.

SOVEREIGNTY AND THE RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT

Although the UN recognizes each member state’s sovereignty on its own territory, over the years a counterconcept has developed, that there are limits to sovereignty when governments commit mass atrocities against their own people. Gareth Evans, former Australian foreign minister, coined the phrase responsibility to protect, R2P for short, while on the commission that introduced the concept. He argues that “mass atrocities are the world’s business . . . ; sovereignty is not a license to kill.” Evans emphasizes that R2P should be used preventively, to head off mass atrocities before they happen. The responsibility to protect citizens from mass atrocities belongs to the national government first and foremost, and falls to the international community only when that government fails to do so. Military intervention against the wishes of the government should be only a last resort. And when intervention occurs, it should be by the UN. But ultimately there must be a limit to what governments may do to their people. The 2011 NATO air attacks in Libya, under a UN authorization to protect civilians, followed this model closely. (The outcome was uncertain as this book went to press.)

The R2P concept is a tricky one because it involves judgment of what kind of atrocities might trigger it. The Russian foreign minister used “responsibility to protect” to justify Russia’s war against Georgia to protect the breakaway Georgian province of South Ossetia in 2008. “We exercised the responsibility to protect,” he said. Russia can justify its actions in Georgia to protect a secessionist province by reference to NATO’s actions in Kosovo in 1999. You can say that Kosovo was different because of Yugoslavia’s history. But then who really can make those judgment calls about when intervention is justified or not? And the answer should be the Security Council.

The Security Council, however, does not generally agree on the issues of sovereignty versus a humanitarian intervention to stop atrocities. Russia, China, and newly independent developing countries all reject interference in their own internal affairs based on human rights concerns, and therefore oppose that kind of intervention elsewhere. Western states, especially the United States, Britain, France, and Canada, and humanitarian NGOs, support intervention to protect populations (unless it is too costly or inconvenient).

The UN Charter says, “Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.” However, this principle is trumped by the enforcement measures allowed under Chapter VII when the Security Council acts on a threat to international peace and security. Thus, in practice, the international community can infringe sovereignty by declaring an internal situation—presumably a serious one such as genocide or massive starvation—to constitute a threat to international peace. Sometimes this rings true, as when Saddam Hussein’s attacks on Kurds in the north of Iraq after the Gulf War sent masses of them fleeing over the mountains toward Turkey. In other cases, the international threat seems a bit more contrived.

“Humanitarian intervention” includes robust peace enforcement missions as well as traditional military interventions undertaken for humanitarian reasons, and even, in some definitions, nonmilitary actions such as economic sanctions and criminal prosecutions.

The conflict between human rights and sovereignty came to a head in Kosovo in 1999. The proponents of intervention there argued that Serbian actions against Kosovo Albanians constituted either ongoing or imminent genocide, which required a response. However, Security Council action was ruled out by both Russia (Serbia’s traditional ally) and China (a champion of sovereignty because of sensitivities about Taiwan and Tibet). Various concerns made intervention by the EU, OSCE, or the United States impractical. “Faced with a genuine dilemma, the members of NATO decided, not implausibly . . . , that intervention was the lesser of two evils,” concludes human rights scholar Jack Donnelly. The justification for intervening, however, troubled Donnelly, who had lived through the U.S. intervention in Vietnam, because “it has considerable potential for partisan abuse. . . . Caution is in order. The presumption always ought to be against intervention not authorized by the Security Council. But that presumption may in rare cases be overcome.”

Historically, humanitarian intervention long predates the UN. The concept has a “historical pedigree . . . in the various measures taken by the European powers in the nineteenth century to curb supposed abuses within the Ottoman Empire.” Political scientist Gary Bass shows that “over a century ago, it was a known principle that troops should sometimes be sent to prevent the slaughter of innocent foreigners.” Human rights rhetoric played an important role in forming foreign policy, especially in Victorian Britain, as during the antislavery movement and the “mass uproar against vicious Belgian colonial rule in the Congo.” Britain’s government cared about Greeks oppressed by Turks, as did Russia’s about Bulgarian Slavs massacred by the Ottomans and France’s about Christians in Syria. Furthermore, today’s heated debates—about universal human rights, about sovereignty as a shield for oppression of minorities, and about altruistic interventions that mask imperialistic designs—“were voiced loud and clear throughout the nineteenth century.” The calls for interventions in that century did not align with imperialism, nor were they limited to efforts by Christians to protect other Christians where threatened overseas. The key force driving humanitarian intervention in nineteenth-century Europe was the rapid rise of a free press, which reported on atrocities overseas and thus sparked public outcries for action by democratic governments that responded to public opinion.

Norms regarding human rights have evolved in recent decades. Traditionally, notwithstanding Bass’s observations about the nineteenth century, human rights have been considered “a profoundly national, not international, issue.” During the Cold War, “it was widely accepted . . . that the use of force to save victims of gross human rights abuses was a violation of the [UN] Charter.” But “a new norm of UN-authorized humanitarian intervention developed in the 1990s.” In 1999, Secretary-General Kofi Annan supported the concept of humanitarian intervention if “fairly and consistently applied.” He told the General Assembly, “The state is now widely understood to be the servant of its people, and not vice versa.” The concept of humanitarian intervention was consistent with the spirit of the UN Charter, he argued.

But member states did not appreciate this weakening of their sovereignty, which contrasted with the positions taken by previous secretary-generals. The Group of 77 (G77), a bloc of developing countries, “formally repudiated the doctrine of humanitarian intervention as an unacceptable violation of state sovereignty.” Not only did former colonies not want interference in their internal affairs—if they murder their own citizens, it is nobody else’s business—but they did not trust the Security Council, on which they had little say, to make decisions about intervention. Actually, Annan claimed in his 1999 annual report, “the failure to intervene was driven more by the reluctance of Member States to pay the human and other costs of interventions, and by doubts that the use of force would be successful, than by concerns about sovereignty.” The next year, Canada’s prime minister set up the commission that developed the concept of R2P, and in 2005 the UN formally endorsed it.

In 2008, after the Burmese government turned down international aid to hard-hit cyclone victims and the international community refused to intervene by force to help them, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright wrote that sovereignty was on the rise again and humanitarian intervention moribund. The U.S. invasion of Iraq had given international military interventions in violation of sovereignty a bad name. The 2011 Libya intervention, however, showed that the R2P still has life.

ONE WORLD, ONE HUMANITY

Despite the resilience of sovereignty against humanitarianism, the people of the world, and not just their governments, are players in this game. The UN is an organization of states, not individuals, yet it has a place in our individual lives. Paul Kennedy, a historian at Yale who has long studied and worked with the UN, calls the image of blue-helmeted peacekeepers “one of the highest expressions of our common humanity and a testimony to human progress.” Conor O’Brien wrote in 1962 that “the United Nations, with all its defects, is the most hopeful political institution that human beings have developed.” Pérez de Cuéllar sees the years in which the UN has existed as “years of fundamental enlargement of human expectations . . . , a time of unparalleled human advancement, something often obscured by the perils that have accompanied it.”

Since I was a kid, American children have carried cardboard boxes around on Halloween to trick-or-treat for UNICEF. “The UNICEF box was more than just a vehicle for collecting spare change,” writes anthropologist Robert Rubinstein. “It was a symbol that . . . stood for the entire United Nations.” The UN in turn “represented the emergence of an institutional embodiment of a moral force for the development of a better world . . . These meanings were crystallized and condensed into the little cardboard boxes, carried about by school children. . . .”

Today, peacekeeping stands as the most important symbol of the UN, represented in the public imagination by “the symbolic artifacts of peacekeeping—images of blue berets, white vehicles with large black UN letters painted on them, and, of course, the United Nations flag. . . .” However, the view of the UN as a moral force for good has been challenged by a myth of the UN as “an inefficient, ineffective, corrupt, and bureaucratically moribund institution.” Bureaucratic and inefficient it may be, but the UN is not only a moral force but our moral force. It belongs to all of us—Americans especially—and we should let nobody steal it from us. The UN is both an ideal of what the world can be, and a practical tool for bringing us closer to that ideal.

The UN flag belongs not to an institution nor to any national government, but to humanity. I say, go online and buy one, three by five feet, for about six dollars, and fly it. My New England college town flies the UN flag (not on the same flagpole as the American flag) in front of Town Hall. Why not? Our country does belong to it. If you do not want to fly the UN flag every day, how about once a year on May 29—the day the first peacekeeping mission began in 1948—which has been observed in recent years as the International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers. It would not hurt to pause once a year and pay tribute to all peacekeepers and especially the 2,500 or so who have died in the course of their missions.

There is an organization Americans can join to support the UN. The United Nations Association of the USA has 20,000 members. Compare that with other big important causes of our time—1.3 million members in the Sierra Club, for example—and it is clear that support for the UN is underdeveloped.

PASSING THE WORLD DOWN THROUGH THE GENERATIONS

In her 101-year-long life, my grandmother saw amazing changes in the world. Born near the end of the nineteenth century, she remembered the first automobile to come through her town in upstate New York, with people circling it in wonder asking, “Where’s the horse?” She witnessed the advent of radio and then television and finally computers, which she considered pure magic. A lifelong feminist, Zionist, and activist in progressive causes, she saw women win the right to vote; the civil rights movement; the Holocaust and the founding of the state of Israel; the rise of communism and its fall; the creation of the League of Nations, its failure, and then the United Nations. Toward the end of this long life, she told me that the most important thing was this: She had seen two world wars and her greatest fear was a third one.

Grandma’s fear did not come to pass. Writers sometimes talk about the Cold War as a “third world war” and Islamic terrorism as a fourth, but these are metaphors. My grandmother, who saw the real thing twice, knew the difference. She died peacefully, in a world that had not experienced a world war for generations.

What might my own grandchildren say about me in another fifty years? “He was born in the remote past, before space flight and the Internet. In his early decades, two superpowers kept thousands of nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert, so that a mistake could have destroyed the world in a flash. Back then, the great powers fought big interventionary wars in places like Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, while bloody civil wars held back the economic development of many poor countries in Africa and Asia. The United Nations lacked the resources to accomplish its key missions, and the world’s countries tackled global problems like AIDS, global warming, and terrorism with great difficulty and many missteps.” I would reply that at least we did not have world wars in my lifetime! Step by step.

So let us move history forward another step, and another. We may not achieve “true” peace, or “permanent” peace, or “just” peace, but we can increasingly achieve what the world needs most—a peace that stops the shooting and opens the door to a future.

Should we let ourselves feel hopeful when there is still so much wrong in the world and so much left to do? What if you were trying to rescue someone trapped in a car underwater? After much effort, you have finally attached a chain, albeit precariously, and used a winch to raise the car almost to the surface. Would you become complacent and take a lunch break? Or would the prospect of success focus you on putting every effort into completing the operation without the chain slipping off? Would it be immoral to shout, “Almost there! Keep going!” to the winch operator?

Today, bit by bit, we are dragging our muddy, banged-up world out of the ditch of war. We have avoided nuclear wars, left behind world war, nearly extinguished interstate war, and reduced civil wars to fewer countries with fewer casualties. We are almost there.