The UN, Nation Building, and Peace Keeping

In last week's New Republic Peter Beinart had an incisive TRB on the role the Unitred Nations can and must play in the world, especially in a post-Iraq world. What struck me is the way in which Beinart uses the Congo as his testing ground. despite some obvious worries,

But, nonetheless, the Congo hasn't been this hopeful since the 1960s. And the credit goes to an intriguing coalition of European money, African diplomacy, South Asian muscle, and U.N. expertise. Although U.N. formulas require the United States and Japan to foot a significant share of any peacekeeping bill, it was mostly the Europeans who financed the elections. South Africa and Angola pressured Kabila and Bemba to respect the results. South Asian troops kept the peace.

As the United States grows allergic to nation-building in the wake of Iraq, some combination of these forces might be the world's best hope for nursing broken nations back to health. While Europeans are more reluctant to wage war than Americans, they are often more inclined to help keep the peace. In fact, the European Union is developing a 60,000-person rapid-reaction force largely for that purpose. South Asia has become the world's largest source of peacekeepers, and the numbers could grow as India flexes its international muscle.

I, like Beinart, have often expressed my skepticism of the United Nations. I am wary of its echo-chamber status on a host of human rights issues as well as on Israel. I have serious concerns with the fact that in the General Assembly despotic nations sit aside liberal democracies. I worry that the UN takes such a closed view of peacekeeping that its soldiers on the ground can be neutered, s in Rwanda in 1994. I worry that its unwieldy nature can mask corruption. And I have on more than one occasion used words like "feckless" and "ineffectual" to describe the body.

Nonetheless, like many liberals, I still cannot help but let my idealistic side win out when it comes to the UN. For all of its flaws, the UN fills what I believe to be a necessary place within the international community. While I'd like to see the UN do much better, or while I might like to develop a new organization that from the outset avoids some of the biggest flaws of Turtle Bay, the reality is that even in its imperfect form, the UN can do some good in the world. Nowhere is this more evident than in the realm of peacekeeping, and especially post-conflict peacekeeping.

Beinart recognizes this reality:

Then there's the United Nations itself--which, while often mocked in the United States (sometimes deservedly), has become the foremost repository of peacekeeping expertise in the world. As rand's James Dobbins has pointed out, both the United States and the United Nations did a lot of postwar stabilization in the '90s. But, while the Bush administration essentially discarded that knowledge and started from scratch in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United Nations now has a cadre of officials with extensive nation-building experience. Of course, Turtle Bay can't overthrow governments. But, when it comes to ushering post-conflict societies toward democracy and peace, as Dobbins notes, the United Nations actually has a better record than the United States.

Looking at the post-Iraq world, two realities jump out. In the United States, nation-building will be a dirty word. And, across the globe, nation-building will remain desperately necessary. As Oxford University's Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler have shown, peacekeeping is the most cost-effective way to prevent a country from sliding back into chaos. Indeed, the rise of international peacekeeping deserves significant credit for the decline in civilian deaths since the end of the cold war.

If the United States no longer has much appetite for such endeavors, we should at least support those who do. Largely as a result of the Congo, U.N. peacekeeping costs have shot up, and it is easy to imagine the United States trying to rein them in. We should do exactly the reverse. To consolidate its fledgling democracy, the Congo actually needs more blue helmets--and we should help pay for them. The United States goes through missionary phases and anti-missionary phases, but, in the end, this isn't really about us. The important thing isn't who saves countries like the Congo; it is that they get saved.

We live in a world where it is easy to think in terms of dualities. Red State or Blue State? Republican or Democrat? With us or against us. But rarely do these dualisms reflect the reality of the world. The Good UN or Bad UN debate is not interesting because it is not useful. There are things that the UN does well. We should cultivate those in hopes of minimizing those things that the UN does not do well. Those of us who never came around on John Bolton, even if he was not as bad as we thought he might be, always worried that he was unaware or unwilling to do the work to help the UN to do the things that it does well, blinded by that which it does not. It is telling that Africa, so oftentimes overlooked by most of the world, proves to be the best testing ground for what the UN can do. Beinart is right that we should draw the right lessons from recent events in the Congo and we should encourage the UN to do better but also to do more of what it does well.