In Defense of Intervention

Tony Smith

From Foreign Affairs, November/December 1994

Article preview: first 500 of 4,483 words total.

Summary:  President Clinton has finally done the right thing in Haiti. Expanding democracy abroad squarely fits America's Wilsonian tradition. Historically, this approach has provided a proven alternative to communism and fascism, a healthy outlet for nationalism, and a sturdy pillar of America's Cold War success. A democratic Latin America holds the best prospect for good relations with the United States.

Tony Smith is Jackson Professor of Political Science at Tufts University, Senior Associate at Harvard's Center for European Studies, and author most recently of America's Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century (Princeton University Press, 1994).

THE WILSONIAN MISSION

The Clinton administration's stand on the promotion of human rights and democracy abroad pleases no one. Some criticize the president for lacking the courage of his repeated conviction that America should take an active role on behalf of these principles; not even the intervention in Haiti satisfies them that he has finally found his voice in foreign affairs. Others, to the contrary, fervently regret that he has such convictions at all and hope that the Haiti involvement will leave him chastened.

Those who criticize the president's convictions call on him to stop making impractical pledges to sponsor unrealistic reform abroad, commitments that serve no vital interests while requiring substantial outlays of power and prestige without clear promise of success. In their view, Washington should restrain its emotions over human rights abuses in China, limit itself to humanitarian assistance to Rwanda and elsewhere in Africa, and offer little more than diplomatic good offices for Bosnia. Involvement that includes armed intervention, as in Bosnia or Haiti, or harsh economic sanctions, as with China or North Korea, is quite unlikely to produce the desired political outcomes. America will bog down in imbroglios of no real importance to the national interest.

From this point of view, the current involvement in Haiti may well turn out to be a difficult and in many ways futile undertaking. Such a negative reading is only somewhat mitigated by the president's good fortune at securing a last-minute victory thanks to the efforts of the team led by former President Jimmy Carter to secure an agreement for a peaceful transition from the regime of General Raoul Cedras to a restoration of Haiti's first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The hope should be that Clinton has learned his lesson from a brush with armed invasion and will rein in any remaining enthusiasm for future adventures.

By contrast, those of us who share the president's convictions lament his failure to stand more forcibly by them. Whether with respect to Bosnia, China, Rwanda, or Haiti, we deplore the way the White House has struck rhetorical poses in favor of protecting oppressed foreign citizenries from governmental or military abuses, only to back down at the first sign that those who deny human rights or attack democratic order might seriously challenge its policy or that public opinion polls show the American public is unconcerned by these outrages. Much suffering could be spared if the United States, working with other countries through multilateral institutions like the United Nations, the Organization of American States (OAS), or NATO, took a clear position on what is not tolerable in world affairs and then moved decisively to enforce the collective will in areas where such efforts could produce results. A historically critical opportunity to give structure and meaning to the post-Cold War world is being missed and will be ever more difficult to recover later.

In this view, the current Haiti intervention is to be welcomed, as are U.N. Security Council resolutions 917 and 940 authorizing ...

End of preview: first 500 of 4,483 words total.