On the menu today: Biden administration officials want someone to militarily intervene in Haiti and restore stability to that most beleaguered of countries — but they don’t want the U.S. military involved, a contradiction that raises the question of just how Biden and his foreign-policy team define “international leadership.” It is hard to believe that Americans would embrace another military deployment in the name of nation-building, but Americans also don’t want to see further waves of Haitian migrants and refugees ending up on their shores. And once again, the foreign-policy wonks who embrace the overhyped “smart power” philosophy find themselves stuck for solutions when faced with a truly complicated, seemingly intractable foreign crisis.
Biden’s Next Foreign-Policy Problem
The easy way to begin this newsletter is to make a joke about the ongoing 1990s comeback. Brendan Fraser is enjoying a career renaissance; there’s yet another Addams Family reboot; allegedly this fashion style is coming back; and according to the New York Times, once again, a Democratic president who’s about to face a Republican House is contemplating a military intervention in Haiti:
Now, fearing that the humanitarian crisis engulfing Haiti could spur mass migration to the United States and elsewhere, some top Biden administration officials are pushing to send a multinational armed force to the country, several current and former officials say, after the Haitian government made an appeal for such an intervention last month.
But the United States doesn’t want its own troops included in that force, even though officials fear that the tumult in Haiti will send an even bigger wave of migrants to American shores.
I know this is going to shock you, but it turns out that no other governments want to send in troops as peacekeepers into Haiti, either.
This is another attempt to use the “leading from behind” philosophy that the Obama administration talked up back in 2011, with Libya being the example at the time. Unsurprisingly, when a U.S. president or administration says to the nation’s allies, “Hey, you guys should go deploy your forces over there and take on that extraordinary difficult mission, while we keep our guys over here out of harm’s way,” a lot of the nation’s allies respond, “You first.”
The foreign-policy team that strutted around the world stage and boasted that “America is back!” in early 2021 is now attempting to assemble the “Coalition of Anybody Except Us.” It would be funny if it weren’t so damned tragic.
Apparently, some parts of the Haitian government would welcome an intervention:
The international community should send a strike force to Haiti to confront gangs even though police have ended a blockade of a fuel terminal that caused a humanitarian crisis, Haiti’s ambassador to the United States said on Monday.
The UN Security Council in October discussed sending troops to confront gangs, but those proposals have received little attention since police took back control of the Varreux terminal in November.
“The situation has not changed, the opening of the fuel terminal did not bring a solution to the problem,” said Bocchit Edmond in an interview at the Haitian embassy in Washington, adding that gangs continue to expand their territory.
“If you don’t have an international presence to help confront the armed gangs, the situation will become even more dire,” he warned.
Such a force should support the police, and troops should be provided by what he called a “coalition of the willing for Haiti,” Edmond said.
The problem is that it is just about impossible for the U.S. to assemble a “coalition of the willing” when the U.S. itself is not one of the willing. And as we’ll examine more closely below, history has shown the dire consequences when the world outsources the duty of peacekeeping in Haiti to just any military force that is willing to show up.
One of the recurring themes of this newsletter is that the world has some thorny, complicated, and sometimes downright hellacious foreign-policy problems that can’t be solved from Washington. The Democratic Party’s leaders respond to these problems by declaring they’ve developed a philosophy of “smart power.” Democrats boast that they’re not isolationist like Donald Trump, and they’re not unilateralist cowboys like George W. Bush. They, and their top advisers, assure us that they are right, tough, smart, nuanced, and sophisticated. And every four years, much of the U.S. foreign-policy establishment — think-tank wonks, retired diplomats, columnists and authors, certain retired generals — almost uniformly swoons at these Democratic presidential candidates’ keen grasp of a complicated and dangerous world.
And then something odd happens when a Democratic administration takes office: Things go very badly overseas, and those administrations insist that every disaster for American interests just reflects unavoidable bad luck. The Balkans and Rwanda experience outright genocide, al-Qaeda gathers as a threat, Bashar al-Assad uses chemical weapons against his own people, Syrian refugees flood Europe, Libya collapses, Americans get killed in Benghazi, ISIS rises and becomes a threat to the West, the Taliban takes over Afghanistan again, Russia invades Ukraine . . . hey, none of that could have been avoided, we’re told, even if the president had specifically pledged on the campaign trail that he would ensure it would never happen.
My gripe is not that foreign-policy crises occur during Democratic administrations. My gripe is that foreign-policy crises occur in Democratic administrations and those administrations’ officials insist that there was nothing they could have done differently — that they are actually as smart as they claimed to be, that they have the world all figured out. It’s like they’re allergic to humility.
The situation in Haiti is indeed downright abominable; a former U.S. special envoy to Haiti told the New York Times, “That has always been the U.S. government’s biggest Haitian nightmare, a mass migration event. It’s already upon us; the next step becomes biblical, with people falling off anything that can float. We aren’t that far away from that.”
Gang violence in Haiti has killed nearly 3,000 people so far this year. Cholera is resurgent again. As the Washington Post editorial board laid out last month, what’s left of the Haitian government is running the already-suffering country into the ground:
Largely owing to Washington’s puppeteering, Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry was sworn in in July 2021 after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. His unelected, illegitimate government has been a predictable disaster. It has either enabled or promoted the country’s dissolution into criminal gang fiefdoms allied with the country’s elite. It has made no serious attempt to prepare the country for elections, nor undertaken good-faith negotiations with Haitian political parties and civil society. It has demonstrated its impotence by ceding control of the capital, Port-au-Prince, to mounting violence.
The result is dire. Water and fuel supplies have been blocked, schools are closed, grocery stores are mostly shuttered, and a resurgence of cholera is taking its toll.
But Haiti isn’t just another troubled country, and the history of foreign interventions there is ugly. The U.S. military intervention in 1994 lasted six months before peacekeeping duties were handed over to the United Nation. And apparently everyone involved understood that the work had barely started, and the U.S. military was giving the mission to a less competent and less caring successor:
Ultimately, the mission ended up profoundly disillusioning not only the Haitians but the American troops as well. Back at Fort Bragg, I asked a Special Forces Master Sergeant if he was glad he went to Haiti. “Tough question,” he said. “No carpenter likes to build a house and see it crooked and leaning and ready to fall down the day he leaves. But if he builds a nice house, he’s happy about it, it’s something he’ll be proud of the rest of his life.”
“You don’t think you have anything to be proud of?” I asked.
“No.”
“That’s sad,” I said.
“It is,” said the Master Sergeant. “It is.”
Bill Clinton’s presidential library describes the U.S. intervention as “Restoring a Democracy,” yet another Clinton success story. As you likely know, that wouldn’t be the last time Bill Clinton interacted with Haitians and left them worse off, insisting everything had been on the up-and-up and that he only had their best interest at heart. (It is largely forgotten that Bill Clinton’s slogan for the international effort to help Haiti was “Build Back Better.”)
The Haitans remember the long presence of U.N. “peacekeepers” in their country much differently; year by year, U.N. forces racked up an absolutely appalling record of sexual abuse of the local population:
Girls as young as 11 were sexually abused and impregnated by U.N. peacekeepers in Haiti and abandoned to raise their children alone, according to testimonies from more than 2,000 residents.
So many babies were fathered by foreign peacekeepers that Haitians nickname them ‘Petit MINUSTAH’ — combining “small” in French with the acronym of the U.N. mission, said Sabine Lee, who co-led the study in the journal International Peacekeeping.
Rarely do you find a peacekeeping force that inadvertently fatally poisons 10,000 members of the local population:
Other controversies have also dogged the United Nations in Haiti, including the introduction of cholera to the island and sexual abuse claims.
An epidemic of the waterborne disease broke out after peacekeepers accidentally dumped infected sewage into a river during recovery efforts after an earthquake in 2010 killed more than 300,000 people.
The United Nations has not accepted legal responsibility for the outbreak, which killed more than 10,000, although in late 2016 outgoing U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon apologized to Haiti for the organization’s role and announced a $400 million fund to help affected Haitians.
The headline in that Reuters article above describes the U.N. legacy in Haiti as “mixed.” Admittedly, it was a mix of underage sex abuse and mass poisoning.
Would another international peacekeeping mission in Haiti work any better? I suppose one could argue it could hardly go worse. The Post editorial board opined in August that asking the Haitians to solve their own problems is asking the impossible:
It is high time for a reassessment of the convenient piety, voiced by diplomats, advocates and activists, that Haiti should be left to find a “Haitian-led solution.” The truth is that a “Haitian-led solution” is a chimera, and without muscular international intervention, the country’s suffering will deepen. To ignore that reality is to be complicit in the world’s disregard for Haiti’s anguish.
But the past decades have demonstrated that foreign efforts to fix Haiti’s problems rarely work out well for the Haitians in the long run. There is no good, easy, simple, or unifying solution to Haiti’s cavalcade of crises; sometimes, the world presents us with a situation in which the best we can do is choose the least-bad option.
ADDENDUM: Someone characterized this Corner post as “dunking on” Kari Lake. She’s the one who’s still insisting that an election victory was stolen from her, and apparently the two Republicans who make up the majority on the Cochise County Board of Supervisors are refusing to submit any certified election results to the state because they buy into the claim that Lake is the real winner — effectively disenfranchising the whole county. The Cochise County Board is now hiring lawyers to fight lawsuits over their refusal to certify their own election results.
The board’s certification of the election results is required by state law and is non-discretionary. The county’s attorney refused to take the case, and now the question is whether county taxpayers will be paying for the board’s lawyers.
But hey, much like her role model, I’m sure Kari Lake sees herself as a victim in all of this.