Posted: May 29th, 2015

US and World Affairs

The US has been actively involved in the world affairs since the inception of the United Nations on 24 October 1945 focusing on military assistance, economic assistance and peacekeeping. Also, the essay will show the disparity and differences of US involvement in world affairs particularly during the Rwanda the Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina, Somalia, the Congo, the Middle East (Egypt, Iraq, Afghanistan as well as Syria among others) wars (Hansen, p.103).

US intervention in world affairs

The US did not take the genocide launched by the Hutu against the unarmed Tutsi in 1994. Additionally, the UN watched helplessly as the Hutu militias and Hutu government killed over half a million Tutsi regardless of their gender and age. The US failed to involve itself in offering peacekeeping, military and economic assistance to Rwanda, yet the country was flowing with blood as thousands of corpses lay on the streets. The Hutu deliberately planned genocide to kill all the Tutsi residing in Rwanda. Despite the US being aware of the genocide in Rwanda and Congo, it did nothing to stop the skirmishes yet it had the power to offer peacekeeping, military and economic assistance. It was only France that offered military assistance via the troop that went to protect the Tutsi civilians in refugee camps (Kaldor, p. 93).

It can be said that the US allowed the genocide to occur under their watch in Rwanda, Congo and Somalia among others. The above was attributed to poor American foreign policy towards countries such as Russia and China that restricted the US under the umbrella of United Nations to intervene during the genocides and wars. The Tutsis could not have been killed in such a large number had the US intervened using military and peacekeeping to stop the massacre. In other word, the US was aware of what was happening on the ground in Rwanda, Congo and other countries but decided not to act.

The US provided peacekeeping, military and economic assistance during the Kosovo war- Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda war during the 1990s. According to the UN, the cost of peacekeeping during wars is about $7.06 billion as per the 2015 budget. Interestingly, the US is the top contributor to the United Nations Peacekeeping missions. The US, Japan, France, Germany, United Kingdom, China, Italy, Russia, Canada and Spain contributed 28.38%, 10.83%, 7.22%, 7.14%, 6.68%, 6.64%, 4.45%, 3.15%,2.98% and 2.97% respectively between 2013 and 2015 (Phillips, p.104). The US Presidents have used military intervention to rebuild Somalian society, undertaken military exercises globally, bombed Serbian rebels and insurgents in Bosnia, sent troops to Bosnia, as well as threatened Yugoslavia with war over Kosovo among others. However, the US policy in world activities has consistently failed. For example, reconciliation was a fantasy in Bosnia, US threats changed nothing in Kosovo and Somalia was a disaster. Currently, Iraq remains recalcitrant (Friesendorf, p. 39).

The US has used different approaches when offering peacekeeping, military and economic assistance to countries engaging in war and genocide. The conflict in the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina involved the bitter rivalry among the Croats (Catholics), Serbs (Orthodox Christians and the ethnic Albanians (Muslims). The US delayed in offering assistance leading to over 200,000 deaths (Rosenberg, p. 59).

The Clinton administration took a long time to intervene in the civil war in Kosovo. Finally, it intervened by bombing Serbia and initiating a ground occupation of Kosovo. In practice, the US is prepared to use military force and intervention under the following conditions. First, when those being killed during the genocide or war are white Europeans. Secondly, the US will intervene when the perceived aggressors during the war are not US allies. Last but not least, the US will intervene when there saturation of media coverage of the war and conflict. Indeed, the above factors are true in the sense that the US did not intervene in the Rwanda genocide because the white people were not being massacred (Dobbins, p. 53).

There has been a mass murder in Rwanda, Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Despite taking long to intervene, the US was wrong in military intervention because the war in Kosovo and Bosnia did not threaten the US and its ally. Also, the American interest was not at stake. Similarly, the US learnt a bitter lesson because it did not diplomacy and military intervention. The delay in intervening was prompted by the use of diplomacy to persuade the warring factions (Ploch, p. 12). However, diplomacy failed to end the genocide prompting the US to use military intervention and occupation. According to statistics, the US spent about $12 billion on Bosnia war and occupied the country for more than three years to spur economic growth. After the war, the refugees were unwilling to go back to Bosnia, and there was little economic growth in Bosnia. It implies that the intervention in Kosovo was more perverse. Traditionally, the US has used war as the last resort in world interventions.

The funny thing is that, the US and its partners are willing to tolerate and ignore brutal civil wars, mass murder, and genocide around the globe. The case at point is the Rwanda genocide. On the contrary, the US claims to offer peacekeeping, military and economic assistance to all the countries (D’Anieri, p. 67).

Work Cited

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D’Anieri, Paul J. International Relations: Power and Purpose in Global Affairs. Boston, MA: Wadsworth/Cengage Learning, 2011.

Dobbins, James. After the War: Nation-building from Fdr to George W. Bush. Santa Monica, CA: RAND National Security Research Division, 2008.

Friesendorf, Cornelius. The Military and Law Enforcement in Peace Operations: Lessons from Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. Berlin: Lit, 2010.

Hansen, A. Steven. From Congo to Kosovo: civilian police in peace operations (No. 343). London: Routledge, 2013.

Kaldor, Michael. New and old wars: Organised violence in a global era.NY: John Wiley & Sons. 2013.

Phillips, L. David. Intervention Lessons from Kosovo for Syria. The Huff post-World Post. Web. 29th April, 2015. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-l-phillips/intervention-lessons-from_b_3858228.html 9th March, 2013.

Ploch, Leonard. Africa Command: US strategic interests and the role of the US military in Africa. Cape Town: DIANE Publishing, 2010.

Rosenberg, Jonathan. How Far the Promised Land? World Affairs and the American Civil Rights Movement from the First World War to Vietnam. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2009.