Costly dividends: the price of peace

Abstract

Costly Dividends: The Price of Peace Patrick Cronin (bio) Blue Helmets: The Strategy of UN Military Operations. By John Hillen. London, England: Brassey’s, 1998. 320 pp. $26.95 Cloth. Coercive Inducement and the Containment of International Crises. By Donald C.F. Daniel, Bradd C. Hayes, and Chantal De Jonge Oudraat. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 1998. 288 pp.* Policing the New World Order: Peace Operations and Public Security. Robert B. Oakley, Michael J. Dziedzic, and Eliot M. Goldberg, editors. Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1998. 573 pp.* When Chinese premier Zhou Enlai was asked his assessment of the French Revolution, he sagaciously replied: “It’s too soon to tell.” Not even a decade into a new world order, replete with a peace dividend, it may be premature to draw any cosmic conclusions about peace and security in the post-bipolar world. But it is not too early to begin debating the possible solutions. Given the spate of volumes on peacekeeping and peace operations published in this decade, there is clearly a dearth of such caution within the present realm of international relations. Indeed, just as soon as peace operations are mounted - in Haiti and Somalia, in Cambodia and Bosnia - there is a panoply of studies describing these inchoate events. [End Page 208] Evidence of this compulsion with instantaneous analysis is apparent in the bibliographies of the Hillen and Daniel et al. books, or simply by logging on to Amazon.com and searching for the titles of the most recent 100 books about peace operations. It’s an astonishing surfeit of apparently desultory data. International relations theory, and to a large degree the study of history, are conveniently circumvented by these urgent intellectual contributions. Thus it is scarcely a surprise that these utilitarian studies are often scribed by practitioners (ambassadors and soldiers) and those in the employ of practitioners (such as professors at professional military education institutions). Such is certainly the case with all three volumes under review in this essay. John Hillen is a heroic young soldier who fought in Desert Storm and now, perched on the Council on Foreign Relations, is distinguishing himself on the battlefield of inside-the-beltway punditry. Ambassador Robert B. Oakley (Ret.) is one of the finest diplomatists and a principal player in the peacekeeping operation in Somalia; Colonel Michael J. Dziedzic is an Air Force officer and able academic. Both Oakley and Dziedzic, as well as their research assistant Eliot Goldberg, conducted their studies at the National Defense University’s Institute for National Strategic Studies. Donald Daniel and Bradd Hayes are both well-established experts of international peace and security issues with the United States Naval War College and their co-author Chantal de Jonge Oudraat is an experienced United Nations hand. In short, they are a worldly group of writers. Despite the aforementioned skepticism by this author, however, these three books stand out from the rest of the pack. They are not simply descriptive but also incisive, not simply practical but also conceptual, not simply immediate but also visionary. A careful reader will emerge from this trio of volumes having learned both detailed and general knowledge. Before delving into the specifics of each volume, it is possible to make three broad observations that are applicable to them as a set. First, all three books evince the complexity of the international system at the close of the millennium. If the evolution of the system is analogous to a journey by train, our last known destination was the Cold War; at that point we traded our bullet express for a local milk run whose eventual terminus point is not soon to be ascertained. The messiness of the international system, whether non-polar, multi-polar or multi-leveled, seems a durable fixture for the foreseeable future. As John Hillen observes, the concept of “victory” does not apply to the [End Page 209] realm of peace operations, so instead one must rely on less precise measures of effectiveness such as the ability to “limit armed conflict” and “facilitate conflict resolution.” At the same time, the central actors in this systemically tranquil yet locally disturbed system - nation-states - are increasingly encroached upon by...