The Penguin History of the World

Soon, however, the peace-keeping activities of the United Nations were troubling American policy. While the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the UN in 1995 prompted Clinton to tell his countrymen that to turn their backs on the organization would be to ignore the lessons of history, his remarks were provoked by the action earlier that year of the lower house of the American Congress in proposing to cut the American contribution to the costs of UN peace-keeping – against a background, moreover, of American default on its subscriptions to the normal budget of the UN amounting to over $270 million (nine-tenths of the total arrears from all nations which were owed to the organization). United States policy seemed to reach a turning-point with the collapse of a UN intervention in Somalia in 1993 which had led to casualties among UN forces taking part and to spectacular television footage of the maltreatment of the bodies of American servicemen by enraged and exultant Somalis. Soon, the refusal of American participation in or support of UN intervention in the African states of Burundi and Rwanda showed what disastrous consequences could flow from American refusal to participate, or to permit forceful intervention with ground forces, in peace-keeping, let alone peace-making. In these two small countries, each ethnically bitterly divided for generations into a ruling minority and a subject majority, the outcome in 1995–6 was genocidal massacre. Over 600,000 were killed and millions (out of a total population of only about 13 million for both countries together) were driven into exile as refugees. It seemed the UN could do nothing if Washington would not move.

After President Clinton had authorized limited air-strikes against Bosnian Serb forces to bring about the peace settlement that was finally signed at Dayton in 1995, there was much debate among scholars, journalists and politicians about what the world role of the United States should be. Much of this debate centred around the proper use of American power and the ends to which it should be applied – and even about potential wars of civilizations. Meanwhile, Clinton’s diplomacy appeared caught between the wish to create a world more amenable to American ideological goals and a wish to avoid military casualties, first and foremost among Americans.

Among new international problems to be faced was the appearance of new potential sources of nuclear danger. North Korea’s modest nuclear programme in 1993–4 showed (and the Indian and Pakistani tests of 1998 reaffirmed) that the United States was now one of several of a slowly growing group of nuclear-armed states (seven openly acknowledged; two others not), whatever its huge superiority in delivery systems and potential weight of attack. America also had no reason any longer to believe (as had sometimes been possible in the past) that all of these states would make rational – by American standards – calculations about where their interests lay. But this was only one new consideration in policy-making after the end of the Cold War.

In the Middle East, early in the 1990s American financial pressure over the spread of Jewish settlements on the Israeli occupied West Bank looked for a time as if it might persuade the Israeli government, harassed by the intifada and its accompanying terrorism, that a merely military solution to the Palestine problem was not going to work. Then, after great efforts, helped by the benevolent offices of the Norwegian government, secret talks between Israeli and Palestinian representatives in Oslo in 1993 at last led to an encouraging new departure. The two sides then declared that it was time ‘to put an end to decades of confrontation and conflict, recognize … mutual legitimate and political rights, and strive to live in peaceful coexistence’. It was agreed that an autonomous Palestinian Authority (firmly defined as ‘interim’) should be set up to administer the West Bank and the (similarly occupied) Gaza Strip, and that a definitive peace settlement should be concluded within five years. This appeared to promise greater stability for the Middle East as a whole; it gave the Palestinians their first significant diplomatic gains. But the continuing implanting of new Israeli settlements in areas occupied by Israeli forces soon poisoned the atmosphere again. Optimism began to wilt when there was no cessation of terrorist attacks or of reprisals for them. Palestinian bombs in the streets of Israeli cities indiscriminately killed and maimed scores of shoppers and passers-by, while a Jewish gunman who killed thirty Palestinians in their mosque at Hebron won posthumous applause from many of his countrymen for doing so. Even so, hope lingered on; Syria, Jordan and the Lebanon all resumed peace negotiations with Israel, and a beginning was in fact made in the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the designated autonomous Palestinian areas.