Wandering in the Void: Charting the U.N.'s New Strategic Role

John Gerard Ruggie

From Foreign Affairs, November/December 1993

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Summary:  The United Nations must define the conceptual no-man's-land-the domain between peacekeeping and enforcement-where many of its blue-helmeted troops currently wander.

The United Nations has entered a domain of military activity-a vaguely defined no-man's-land lying somewhere between traditional peacekeeping and enforcement-for which it lacks any guiding operational concept. It has merely ratcheted up the traditional peacekeeping mechanism in an attempt to respond to wholly new security challenges. The result is that the majority of the nearly 70,000 blue-helmeted peacekeepers now out in the field serve in contexts for which peacekeeping was not intended. Even as the demand for these U.N. troops increases almost daily, they continue to function under rules of engagement and with equipment frequently inadequate to their missions. Moreover, they depend for their effectiveness and sometimes their very survival on a U.N. infrastructure that is increasingly not up to the task.

This growing misuse of peacekeeping does more than strain the United Nations materially and institutionally. It has brought the world body to the point of outright strategic failure. Indeed, in Bosnia that line has been crossed already. The U.N. peacekeeping forces there have performed a valuable humanitarian role, to be sure. Nonetheless, having been deployed in a security environment for which the peacekeeping mechanism was not designed, they have ended up deterring, not ethnic cleansing, nor the dismemberment of an internationally recognized state, but the international community itself from undertaking more forceful action to arrest these acts. The Europeans thus opposed President Clinton's proposed air strikes against Serbian artillery positions because they have peacekeeping troops on the ground that are highly vulnerable to retaliation. Yet those troops-because of their small numbers, limited military capability and quasi-peacekeeping rules of engagement-were neither intended nor able to produce the military stalemate from which a political settlement could have emerged.

Governments must move quickly to assess the constraints and opportunities facing U.N.-sanctioned forces. If the United Nations continues on its present course, its newly constructed house of cards will collapse and take traditional peacekeeping as well as humanitarian intervention down with it. Recent developments in U.S. policy, culminating in the Clinton administration's Policy Review Document 13, indicate a greater willingness in this country than at any time past to explore what the U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Ambassador Madeleine K. Albright, has dubbed "assertive multilateralism." To date, however, the notion lacks any corresponding expression in military doctrine and operational concepts. And President Clinton, in his September 25 speech to the United Nations, struck a decidedly cautious stance.

The international community must define the new domain of collective military activity that lies between peacekeeping and enforcement and figure out if and how its military requirements can be meshed with the national military capabilities and doctrines of those states that are able and willing to make a meaningful contribution to it.

FAMILIAR TERRAIN

Over the years the United Nations has evolved a well-articulated and widely recognized operational concept for peacekeeping. Brian Urquhart, who was present at its creation and presided over the activity for many years, has described peacekeeping as follows:

the use by the United Nations of military personnel and ...

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