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In the second Bush-Gore debate of Campaign 2000, George W. Bush answered Jim Lehrer's question in these words: "I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation building." Al Gore, on the other hand, defended nation building in general, and specifically in regard to Clinton's nation-building efforts. The voters were offered a clear choice. Since taking over the government, however, the Bush Administration has done nothing to defend Bush's position, or to remedy the mistakes of Clinton's nation building, Nation building is a form of foreign intervention inside a sovereign state. In another era, this would be called imperialism. It's a type of foreign policy that is alien to American ideals and history except for the Spanish-American War. Unfortunately, support for contemporary interventionism is not limited to Clintonian policies that may have had "wag the dog" motivations. Even some conservatives think it is America's destiny to promote and enforce democracy around the world. In the 19th-century era of colonialism, this attitude was called "the white man's burden." Today, foreign interventionism is called "humanitarian" and is wrapped in "human rights" semantics. At the same time, its advocates, such as Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Madeleine Albright, Strobe Talbott, and Sandy Berger, make clear that they are putting the concept of national sovereignty on the chopping block. Fool's Errands presents a mountain of evidence that nation building simply doesn't work. Clinton's four forays into nation building - Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo - are four devastating failures. Nation building is a fool's errand when one or more factions believes there is more to gain by continuing to fight than by making a peace agreement. Fortunately, America retreated from Somalia and Haiti, but there is no end in sight for our incursions into Bosnia and Kosovo. The Dayton Agreement of 1995 was supposed to be the framework of a unitary, multiethnic Bosnia state, but that goal is no closer today than it was when the agreement was signed. Bosnia is three separate single-ethnic regions with three separate militaries and a complete unwillingness to integrate ethnically or politically. The groups won't share power and the people won't vote for each other's political candidates. Today, the United States continues its expensive, open-ended commitment to Bosnia, with 4,400 U.S. combat troops. The American taxpayers have spent $12 billion on this futile project. Clinton promised several exit dates that were not fulfilled and were phony when he promised them. Kosovo is now a militarized protectorate of the West, occupied by 40,000 foreign soldiers including 6,000 Americans. The prospect of building a democratic, multiethnic society is clearly unattainable, despite the spending of $5.5 billion by the U.S. taxpayers. After allegedly fighting a war to achieve a multiethnic Kosovo, the result is exactly the opposite. A quarter-million Serbs and other non-Albanians were chased out of or fled from Kosovo, which is now torn by crime and violence that have spread to Macedonia. Fool's Errands confronts head-on the false dichotomy that humanitarian intervention is justified by putting human rights ahead of national sovereignty. Humanitarian interventionism can be a pretext for conquest and is probably the cause of the growing animosity of our erstwhile European friends, who now tend to see the United States as an international bully. It's clear that American national sovereignty is our best guarantee of human rights. (Cato Institute, 2001, 170 pp., $19.95) |
or to terminate their continuing costs. Fool's Errands goes a long way toward explaining why Bush's gut reaction to Lehrer's question was correct and why nation building is a wrongheaded policy for America.
