Word: post-cold
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...disarray is clearly not going to be quieted with conciliatory rhetoric - or stand-tough bravado. The challenge facing all members of the peacekeeping team is not only how to bring stability to Somalia but also how to devise successful formulas for undertaking a more active role in post-cold war peacemaking. Even if the Loi furor is smoothed over, the real debate has just begun...
Remember the promise of the post-cold war world? That new world, with a new order, said to have dawned with the fall of the Berlin Wall? Not a perfect world by any means, but at least a world more likely to harmonize might with right. A world in which the U.S. might finally pursue good intentions abroad uncontaminated by considerations of national interest or ideology. Somalia seemed to herald the day. The Marine landing at Mogadishu last December was the most unalloyed, most unprecedented example of humanitarian intervention in memory, perhaps in history...
What went wrong? What happened is that Mogadishu exposed the first post-cold war mirage: in foreign policy, particularly foreign policy at the point of a bayonet, there is no such thing as pure humanitarianism. Once you go beyond relief to policing, you have to shoot...
...fact is that post-cold war, as pre-cold war, the same old rule applies: To do good, you often have to do bad. Sometimes you do indeed have to destroy the village in order to save it. How much better off Cambodia, for example, would have been had the U.S. prevailed in its Indochina campaign and the communists never come to power...
...this post-cold war vision of the U.N. as the new major player on the block is a hallucination. Why? Because the U.N. is a fiction. Yes, it has a Secretary-General, a bureaucracy and a building. But it has no army, no taxing authority, no independent will. Because it is a creature of the sovereign powers that control it, its sovereignty is an illusion...