THE FAILURE OF FOREIGN POLICY AS SOCIAL WORK: Just how doomed were U.S. attempts at nation-building after the Cold War?

Twenty years ago Michael Mandelbaum published a devastating critique of early Clinton Administration foreign policy. The article, which appeared in the January/February 1996 edition of Foreign Affairs, was entitled “Foreign Policy as Social Work.” It really stung because it was so perceptive, and the title so quotable. I remember that sting well because I had been intimately involved in two of the Clinton Administration’s ventures that formed the basis of Mandelbaum’s charge, the interventions in Somalia and Haiti. Mandelbaum’s new book, Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era, is an updating and extension of that article. . . .

Mission Failure provides a broad survey of U.S. foreign policy in the post-Cold War era, examining in some considerable detail the U.S. approaches to Russia, China, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Israeli/Palestinian relationship, the Arab Spring and the rise of the Islamic State. All these efforts represent, in the author’s view, failures of U.S. policy. They also share several other qualities. First, they all represent some form of overstretch resulting from the emergence of the United States as the world’s only superpower, freed from the normal constraints of balance-of-power geopolitics. This overstretch in each instance took the form of promoting societal change, principally democratization, in societies unready for such a transformation. Mandelbaum also argues that the humanitarian and ideological impulses that drove policy during this quarter-century distinguished U.S. behavior sharply from that which guided the Republic through earlier epochs.

These broad generalizations bear some examination. Most but not all the cases covered in Mission Failure do deserve to be so described. Among the exceptions are Bosnia and Kosovo. “Foreign Policy as Social Work” appeared just as 60,000 NATO peacekeepers were entering Bosnia to enforce the accords reached in Dayton, Ohio. Over the next several years the United States and its allies would end the fighting in Bosnia, liberate Kosovo, nip an ethnic conflict in Macedonia in the bud, promote democratic transformations in both Serbia and Croatia, and bring a decade of Balkan wars to a definitive close.

Mandelbaum argues that Balkan nation-building failed, because Bosnia and Kosovo remain to this day corrupt, poor, and poorly governed. This seems an excessively high standard for foreign policy achievement.

Well, we’ve got two out of three of those happening right here, and the third is looking more and more likely . . . .