Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly . INTERVIEW . Richard Haass . September 12, 2003

Read more of Phil Jones's interview with Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass:

Q: During the Cold War, the conventional wisdom was always that the United States couldn't be the world's policeman. Have things changed?

A: Sure, and they've changed in fundamental ways. During the Cold War, it was true. We couldn't be the policeman of the world, in part because we had a rival policeman, if you will, who had very different ideas about what the rules of the game needed to be. In the post-Cold War world, reinforced in some ways by the post-9/11 world, we are alone, for all intents and purposes, in having global reach on the scale that we do.

But it still raises fundamental questions for the United States: When does it use military force? How does it use military force? For all of our power, we can't do it everywhere. We can't do it alone. We need the assistance of others. Some of the same, basic foreign policy questions still arise, even though we don't have the automatic rival that we did during the Cold War.

Q: It sounds like there's no mechanism right now, no organization that can deal with this and answer these questions.
A: There isn't any such organization, and the United Nations is not yet such an organization. The United Nations is nothing more, when you really come to think about it, than the degree of consensus shared by the major powers -- in this case, the five permanent members of the Security Council: the United States, Britain, France, Russia, and China. When these five countries agree, or to put it another way, when these five countries decide not to use their veto, then, potentially, you have an organization that can help decide what is to be done.

But in many instances, as we've seen in recent years, these five countries do not agree. They did not agree, for example, during the situation in Kosovo, when both Russia and China did not want the world to intervene. And clearly, more recently in Iraq, there was anything but consensus. There isn't any organization to which we can refer the most difficult and far-reaching questions of international relations.

What the United States has to do is think what's smart, what's right; and then it's got to try to build as broad a consensus as it can. If it can be done within the United Nations, great. That's clearly the body that has the greatest degree of respect around the world. It can help others come forward if the UN supports it.

But absent that, we may have to turn to multilateral alliances, such as NATO. In the case of Liberia, the cooperation was with ECOWAS (Economic Community of West Africa States), a regional grouping. In other instances, we may have to do something more informal, pull together so-called "coalitions of the able and willing" and do something more ad hoc.

I would just say, as a general rule of thumb, we ought to try to bring about multilateralism that is as broad and as deep and as formal as we can; but we have to recognize in many instances that won't be possible, and then we have to be willing to accept something narrower and more informal.

Q: What is the basic definition of multilateralism?
A: Multilateralism is no less than doing things with others; it's shared work. It means the United States cooperating with others. It can be within an institution, in an alliance, or the UN. It could be something less formal. It could be simply a coalition that's pulled together to meet some immediate problem. Multilateralism simply means the sharing of burdens. It means working together, joining efforts -- no more, no less.

Q: In the United States, are we underestimating what people around the world really want from us?
A: I'm not sure we're underestimating it. What we're seeing is a mixed message. There's tremendous respect for the American people, and there's tremendous respect for American society. At the same time, there's an awful lot of disagreement with U.S. foreign policy.

Now, some of this, I would hasten to say, is structural. Anytime you have one player or one actor that's so much stronger than others, you've got to expect a degree of resentment. That's as true in personal relationships as it is, say, in relations between and among states.

In other cases, though, you have resentment or anti-Americanism because of what we're doing. Not everyone in the recent war in Iraq agreed with the use of force. You had countries go their different ways. It's part of the environment we work in, but one of the goals of American foreign policy clearly has to be to try to smooth that out -- not as an end in itself, but I can't think of anything we would do in the world where we wouldn't be more effective working with others, working multilaterally, than we would be on our own. Maintaining good relationships is not so important as an end in itself; but it is important as a means to an end, to getting the kind of support we want to try to shape the world in ways that we think would be better.

Q: The issue in all this is respect of sovereignty, is it not?
A: Actually, not. For three or 400 years, respect for sovereignty has been at the core of international relations -- and for good reason. Until the early 17th century, what you had was a world in which sovereignty wasn't respected. The kings, the kingdoms, the principalities and the rest, the countries in formation were essentially in one another's pockets an awful lot. What you had was an awfully messy world, particularly in Europe, which was the center of international relations.

Over the last 300, 350 years, what you've seen is widespread recognition that states should not get involved in the internal workings of other states, lest there be constant conflict. What we're now seeing, though, over the last 10 or 15 years, is a bit of pushback against that. People are beginning to say, "Yes, the idea of sovereignty is useful. It is a way of keeping states from going at it constantly. On the other hand, it can't be an absolute." For example, when a government massively represses its own people, commits genocide, or isn't willing to act when a genocide is taking place, say, between two rival groups in a civil war, should the international community just sit back and allow innocent people to be slaughtered? Answer: no. The international community has a right, some might even argue an obligation, to intervene.

That was the sort of argument that you saw, say, during Kosovo, when NATO, and the United States participating, did intervene to try to protect innocent men, women, and children. By contrast, when the world didn't intervene years ago in Rwanda, as many as -- what -- 500,000, a million people, innocent people, lost their lives. That's clearly the most dramatic situation.

After 9/11, we decided we were not going to allow the Taliban [to] hide behind the protections of sovereignty in Afghanistan. We decided, with the backing of the international community, that we could take the war to them. We've sent the message that anyone who supports acts of terrorism, allows terrorists to use their territory -- they can't expect that their borders will be respected. Once again, sovereignty can't be an absolute, if you allow your territory to be used to mount terrorist attacks against others.

There's another area now that's also coming to the fore -- by far, the most controversial -- and that's the question of weapons of mass destruction. What happens when a state with a known record of aggression, with a known record of, say, being a bad international citizen, what happens when we get hard intelligence that they are trying to develop or acquire nuclear weapons or biological weapons? Or, what happens when we get good intelligence that they actually possess those weapons? Should we wait and simply, for example, let them use them or hand them off to terrorists; and then we could use our universally recognized right of self-defense? Or, once again, should we think about violating sovereignty -- again, very carefully, but for the reason of protecting ourselves? Those are the kinds of questions that have now come to the fore of international relations.

Q: What is the fallout from the Iraqi situation, where we thought they had weapons of mass destruction and we are not finding any? What's the fallout for future situations where intervention is needed?
A: I don't think there's any fallout on the greater willingness to intervene in humanitarian crises. I don't think there's any fallout in the greater willingness to intervene where countries get in bed, in any way, supporting terrorists. Where I think there could be some fallout -- and it's too soon to really know -- is in the area of weapons of mass destruction, whether the whole idea of so-called "preventive" or "preemptive" strikes becomes more controversial.

I would just simply say that the threshold of certainty has to be high; that if you are going to use military force against a country that you fear is developing weapons of mass destruction -- in particular, nuclear or biological -- that, again, one has to be awfully sure that they're doing it before one would use military force.

Q: You have been inside policy making. What would you say is going on right now within the ranks of our policy makers dealing with North Korea?
A: Nobody wants to grow up in a world, or have one's children grow up in a world, in which nuclear weapons are widespread. This was, in some ways, the prediction of President Kennedy decades ago and, fortunately, that prediction hasn't come to bear. That said, we're beginning to see increasing encroachment, and what we're beginning to see are more countries getting closer to nuclear weapons capability. Clearly, North Korea is, by far, the closest; but now we also have to worry about, say, countries like Syria -- what they may do down the road -- [and] Iran being now the most dramatic [example], as well. We don't want to live in a world where something like this becomes commonplace.

The question North Korea and the rest open up is what, then, are the best sets of foreign policy tools for dealing with it? Is it diplomatic? Can we try to negotiate our way out of this situation by offering them incentives and penalties to consider? Well, some would say we tried that with North Korea years ago, and it didn't succeed. The question now for the administration is, should it try it again with a different package of specifics? That's one set of foreign policy questions.

But say one determines that can't succeed, or, after further evidence, we see it won't; we see that North Korea is continuing to go ahead on its path toward gaining ever larger amounts of nuclear material and missiles. What do we do then? The military option obviously becomes one that you can't dismiss, despite all the difficulties of using military force effectively. It's very hard against a hidden and buried target.

In the case of North Korea, despite the potential that North Korea would have to respond using either massive amounts of conventional force or the artillery, all the men they have in arms, as well as possibly using some of these weapons of mass destruction -- nobody wants to go down that road. On the other hand, [no one] wants to grow up in a world where North Korea, for example, has enough material to make 10 or 20 or 30 nuclear weapons and then either makes them or, perhaps just as bad, hands off that material to various bunches of terrorists, which is something a desperate regime might do.

[There are] no easy answers here. What I'm essentially saying is you've got this range of problems, and you've got a range of potential policy responses, and using military force preventively or preemptively is one of them.

Q: Is there any kind of system within our government that is really dealing with these things?
A: I'm not sure there's a "system," but there is an interagency process. There's a decision-making process, and questions of North Korea and Iran today, just like questions about Iraq six months or a year ago -- these are the issues that naturally rise to the top of the decision-making process. And, obviously, the intelligence community gets a seat at the table, along with the Pentagon, both the military and the civilian side, along with the people in the State Department, the people in the National Security Council, in some cases the people, say, at the Treasury Department. That's what you have -- decision-making structure force. I don't know if you have a system. What you have is an awful lot of people who are working awfully long hours, who don't get enough sleep, who are thinking hard about what to do about these challenges. It's not like a scientific experiment or a cookbook, where you can refer to it and come up with a clear set of guidelines.

Q: Nations have their own interests. How do you put together coalitions to deal with a North Korea, an Iran?
A: The short answer is through a lot of diplomacy or consultation. The more serious answer is, in this global world we increasingly live in, it turns out that in many instances not just the United States sees things fairly similarly. Take North Korea. It's not just the United States that doesn't want to see a nuclear North Korea. Obviously South Korea doesn't, the millions of people there, but also Japan very much doesn't want to have to face a nuclear North Korea. Nor does China, because China knows that if North Korea gains nuclear weapons, it could be only a matter of time before South Korea and Japan follow. China does not want to live in a nuclearized neighborhood. That's a perfect example where you have a group of countries that want to see North Korea not develop nuclear weapons, where countries don't want to see a war on the peninsula. That provides a foundation for potential multilateral diplomacy and multilateral action.

When Iraq invaded Kuwait, the United States took the lead in putting together an extraordinary multilateral, multinational coalition of governments, because all of them saw that they had a common interest in not allowing a regime such as Saddam's a stranglehold over the world's oil supplies. So when you take a step back, diplomacy is helpful. What really matters is that we are able to persuade others that what we see as our national self-interest also happens to be their national self-interest.

Q: What do you think would be the situation if we had a Nazi Germany? How would we be dealing with that? Would there be intervention?
A: If you had a Nazi Germany that had massive weaponry, it'd be very difficult to intervene with military force. The costs of intervention would be astronomically high, and you'd have to ask yourself was it doable and was it worth it.

Let's use the present, not the past. Imagine we found out that there were massive human rights abuses going on in Russia. Now, obviously, we'd want to stop that from happening. We would not want a genocide to happen in Russia. But to favor an armed intervention would be an extremely dangerous, if not reckless, course of action, if a possible Russian response was the use of its nuclear weapons in retaliation. So whenever you think about using military force, you've got to ask all sorts of questions about feasibility and doability, on one hand, but also you've got to ask yourself, "What are the tools that the target has to retaliate with?" That's why, again, you can't have an ironclad rule that wherever, for example, there are massive human rights abuses, you will always intervene. I don't think we have that luxury.

Q: And that's what we have right now in North Korea?
A: We have something like that. We have to be awfully careful about how we fashion a potential intervention, because North Korea has some fairly powerful ways of responding. A war on the Korean peninsula, as we learned more than 50 years ago, is a war in which tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people would likely lose their lives. It constrains policy making. You're not operating in some abstract, free environment.

Q: What impact is Iraq going to have on other situations?

A: It's an interesting question. My own guess is that Iraq will have two very different kinds of reactions. On one hand, when it comes to the actual military phase of the war, Iraq, if anything, has a message that we can do a great amount at relatively little cost to ourselves. So Iraq makes us, I think, fairly open to the idea of potentially using military force elsewhere when we have a traditional battlefield, when we have a situation where we can bring American military might and all of the advanced technology that we've developed to bear.

Richard Haass

Unfortunately, though, there are relatively few problems in the world that lend themselves to that. It may not work with weapons of mass destruction in many cases, because we may not be able to find them, just like we have difficulties in Iraq -- where they are hidden or buried. And in other situations, all of our advanced munitions may not provide an answer.

The larger repercussion, the larger consequence of Iraq, could also be sobering. What we've seen -- that using military force effectively in one context, winning the so-called "traditional" or classical military phase of the battle -- doesn't necessarily translate into an easy situation when it comes to dealing with the consequences of that, whether you want to call it "nation building" or what have you. What I think we've learned there is how difficult it can be to translate battlefield victory into lasting security and lasting peace. We're talking about commitments of large numbers of soldiers, indeed, often war in the aftermath and in the actual battle itself; whereas the battle could take days or weeks, the aftermath could take months or, more likely, many years.

This has to be sobering for the United States. It means that we just have to be awfully careful before we think about using military force in ways that would require a total occupation of a country because, quite honestly, we don't have the resources militarily -- but also probably economically and psychologically and politically -- to do what we're now doing in Iraq, what some would argue we should be doing in Afghanistan. We can't simply re-create that in places like North Korea and Iran simultaneously. It would simply be too much.

Q: We have people saying about situations around the world, "It's going to be another Vietnam." Have we forgotten that concern in what we're doing?
A: I don't think we're forgotten it, but not everything is another Vietnam. Vietnam was a situation where we didn't have our vital national interest at stake. We fought the war in a fairly constrained fashion because, again, it was during the Cold War, and we worried about the Chinese and Soviet reactions. We didn't really quite persuade the American people that the war was totally worth the effort. So it was fought without putting the full resources of the society behind it. It was fought with very different technology. If you will, it was a "dumb" war, rather than a "smart" war, given what we can now do.

I don't see these situations as other Vietnams, but I do think they are potentially tricky. And I think in each one of them, we've really got to ask ourselves whether our goals are the sorts of goals that military forces themselves can implement, can bring about, can succeed at. Are we prepared, as a society and as a government, to commit what is necessary for as long as necessary? Do we believe that the interests at stake warrant such a commitment? None of these [situations] is a repeat or a replica of Vietnam, but Vietnam is something of a warning in that it forces you to be awfully sober beforehand about the commitment of force. You never want to commit human life unless you are sure, one, it's worth it; and, two, you are likely to succeed.

Q: Are we being caught in a trap of peacemaking and peacekeeping?
A: I'm not sure it's a "trap," but it's an awfully important distinction. Peacekeeping is exactly that; there's a peace to keep. A peace already exists. The demands on your forces are quite modest. These are the so-called "blue helmets" when the UN does it. But basically, peacekeeping is about buttressing an already stable situation -- very low demands militarily.

Peacemaking could not be more different. Just as the word suggests, "peacemaking" is going in there and making a peace. This means there isn't an agreement to buttress. It means people might already be at war, or close to it. And that is far, far more demanding militarily. Many of these situations, like Liberia, like Rwanda, like Somalia, are messy. These are not wide-open battlefields where tanks can operate, or often even aircraft can operate. Instead, these tend to be very infantry-intensive. Often, they're in built-up areas -- major cities, where you've got lots of buildings and alleyways. These are just much tougher situations for our forces. And before we go into them, I think we've got to ask ourselves, "Which is it? Is it peacekeeping or peacemaking?"

What made me somewhat nervous about some of the Liberia debate is, while I understood that lots of people had an inclination to intervene, to do something, it was never quite clear to me, watching some of the debate, whether people actually had a clear image or understanding in their mind which was it. Was it peacekeeping or peacemaking? My view is that it was more likely to be peacemaking, and that to go in required an awfully large commitment of forces to make sure it went well.

History suggests you get into a lot of trouble when you think something is peacekeeping -- go in modestly -- and it turns out to be peacemaking. That's what ultimately happened in Somalia. So you've got to be really sure about what the environment is, what the context is, and then what you're willing to do about it.

Q: Is the UN Charter on all of this helping, or is it making for confusion?
A: The UN Charter largely emphasizes the right of self-defense, which is the classic legitimizing use of force, and nobody argues with that. Where the charter comes up short or is in some ways contradictory is when it deals with all these messy areas that have come up 40 or 50 years after the UN Charter was drafted. What do you do when a state supports terrorism? What do you do when a state is developing weapons of mass destruction? What do you do when a state is slaughtering its own people?

There's a tension in the UN Charter between respect for sovereignty -- because, after all, it's nation-states who are the building blocks and members of the UN -- and, on the other hand, trying to protect people, because the UN is interested in people as well as in governments. The UN Charter shows the tension; it doesn't really resolve it. I don't think the answer is in the charter, necessarily, [or] in revising formal documents. The answer, if it lies anywhere, is in the growth of a consensus, in the first place among the major powers, about what ought to be the rules of the road for international relations. When is it legitimate to use military force? And second of all, what is the process by which legitimacy is grounded? If there's an issue that governments should be talking about in their quiet consultations, it's those two questions: When is it okay to use force? When is it warranted? And, secondly, What is the process by which we say, "This is now acceptable"?

The problem is there's no consensus on these questions. As a result, for the United States the real question of foreign policy turns out to be, when there's no consensus and you can't get the UN's blessing, do you simply sit on your hands or do you act outside the UN? The problem with sitting on your hands, as we saw in places like Rwanda, [is that] a lot of innocent people can die when you sit on your hands. But if you go outside the United Nations, often you will not get the multilateral support you want, and you'll raise real questions of legitimacy.

The word "dilemma" is overused, but this is a real dilemma. That is the point we're at now. The goal has obviously got to be to try to work quietly with the Russians, the Chinese, the French, the British, and others to come up with commonly accepted rules of the road for when it's acceptable to intervene and how to go about it. We're simply not there yet.

Q: How does the 1993 debacle in Somalia explain the current intervention situation?
A: When the first Bush administration got involved in Somalia, it was a very limited use of American military force. It was humanitarian intervention, but it was designed to keep people alive -- not to fix, much less solve, the political problems of Somalia.

Gradually, then, under the Clinton administration, the policy evolved. I'm not sure a decision was made, so much as it simply happened, and increasingly we found ourselves going after political figures in Somalia -- ultimately [warlord Mohamed Farrah] Aidid -- to try to, in some way, break the back of the political opposition. The problem, I would say, was we took on a more ambitious mission. We went from a narrow, humanitarian mission to a form of peacemaking; we didn't put the right kinds of forces, or enough forces, into it; and we got into trouble. When we got into trouble and lost nearly 20 lives, the administration simply decided it wasn't worth staying and the American people wouldn't support it.

I don't know if that was the right call or not. But, in any case, it highlights the dangers of taking on more ambitious, peacemakinglike operations when your forces are not configured for it. I think the consequence of Somalia was profound. What it did was it really reinforced American reticence about getting involved in these messy situations, where you don't have clearly defined battlefields with clearly demarcated boundaries between the forces of one side and that of the other. It also had the effect of making us very wary about using military force where our so-called "vital national interests" were not at stake.

And that's understandable; but then a few years later, Afghanistan came along. What we learned there is that even in a country like Afghanistan, where there's no inherent, vital American national interest, indirectly it can affect American vital national interests -- in this case, by supporting terrorism. We used to draw a line, and we used to say on one side of the line are so-called interventions where national interests are at stake, like Iraq after they invaded Kuwait, and people felt that wasn't a humanitarian intervention per se but a good, old-fashioned strategic intervention. And then you had Somalia or, more recently, Liberia, which are old-fashioned, humanitarian interventions.

What Afghanistan should have taught us is that there really isn't a distinction, because the same territory where people can be slaughtered, which makes it humanitarian, can be territory which suddenly terrorists decide is a nice, cozy place to set up shop. What we've learned in this global world is that interventions which seem to be humanitarian can turn out to be a lot more. As a result, we may not have the same opportunity to stand aside when "only humanitarian" interests are at stake.

Q: You have said that order is more important than justice. Explain the morality of that.
A: [That's] one of those tough statements to defend, but let me defend it. [What] I went on to say was that if you have order, you have the potential for justice. If you only have justice and no order, then I don't think that justice can last. Order is the more basic of the two. If things are calm, if people aren't being slaughtered, the most basic human right -- that of life -- is being protected. You have the chance for evolutionary politics; that's what we've seen in lots of Latin America and Asia, where you used to have so-called very top-heavy authoritarian regimes. Because you had order gradually, you saw processes of greater democratization take place, to the extent that today, most of Asia and most of Latin America are, indeed, democratic. You have large amounts of order and justice. That's why I see order as the more basic. If you don't have order, it seems to me that you open yourself up for the chance of conflict. And when you have conflict, you're not going to have justice. Anytime you have a conflict, an awful lot of people are going to lose their homes or, worse yet, their lives.

Q: You have mentioned Rwanda in passing. What happened there in 1994?
A: What you had was a situation in Rwanda where, obviously, on the ground it was going from bad to worse. Reports were coming in, but you simply had -- I don't know a word for it -- no appetite in Washington or in New York at the UN to get involved. What you had was a gun-shy administration and, indeed, a gun-shy international community which, on one hand, recognized how awful things were, though perhaps some were in denial; but I think most people understood just how bad things were. You had a collective unwillingness to act. It's almost that simple. People were worried -- after Somalia, in particular -- about the potential costs of the intervention. The argument was that it was a humanitarian intervention; our vital interests weren't at stake. People felt -- and I hope my wording isn't misunderstood here -- that it was almost a luxury. It was a form of intervention that we couldn't support. Some thought that a small amount of determined western forces could have fixed it. Others were skeptical. I don't know, even in retrospect.

Again, Somalia was key. You simply didn't have a desire to take it on, and it highlights [the fact] that the decision not to use military force is just as big as any decision to use it. The moral stakes are no less if you decide not to intervene. Policy makers and others should never forget that.

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