Harlan Cleveland: Coalitions Are Popular if They’re for Real

[Harlan Cleveland, political scientist and public executive, a Princeton graduate and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, is President Emeritus of the World Academy of Art and Science. In government he has been a high official of the Marshall Plan, Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs and U.S. Ambassador to NATO. In academia he has served as dean of two graduate schools of public affairs (the Maxwell School at Syracuse University and the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota) and as President of the University of Hawaii. He has authored 12 books and hundreds of articles in journals and magazines, mostly on executive leadership and international affairs.]

The clumsy unilateralism of the Bush administration has had a curious side-effect: It has enhanced the popularity – both at home and abroad — of building coalitions.

Since our embarrassingly unilateral war in Vietnam, Americans seem to want to act in international affairs with credible partners. That’s why NATO was always popular enough to frustrate the perennial effort of Senator Mike Mansfield, Democrat of Montana, to remove the U.S. sword and shield from Europe.

It’s hard to pinpoint just when we crossed that invisible line. For the bulk of our history, operating abroad under the American flag was the most popular thing to do. By contrast in the modern era, peacekeeping under “many flags” – the United Nations, NATO, or the Organization of American States – seems the best way to avoid domestic trouble about overseas commitments.

We have crossed that great divide for sure and certain. It has become as important at home as abroad for the U.S. government to consult, and to be seen consulting, with others who could join in bearing troublesome burdens in international emergencies.

A decade and a half ago, the first President Bush at first built a quick American consensus, and an international coalition which defrayed much of the cost, to counter Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. A key block in the play was the willingness of the UN’s Secretary General to shuttle to Baghdad in a fruitless effort to get Saddam Hussein to take seriously the UN Security Council’s clear determination to stop Iraq’s aggression southward.

Our Desert Shield contingent – nearly a quarter of a million strong from all the military services – was enough, with Saudi forces and help from half a dozen other countries, to turn off any ambitions Saddam Hussein may (or may not) have had to cross another border, into Saudi Arabia.

But as the winter of 1990-91 approached, a very large Iraqi force was still in Kuwait. Two options for throwing them out were considered by the coalition’s leader:: collective patience or unilateral impatience. The architect of the grand coalition chose to got it alone (”I’ve had it”), and ordered almost a doubling of the U.S. forces in the Gulf.

Why didn’t he consult either our international partners or the U.S. Congress about this sudden escalation? He was in a hurry and his military advisors (led by Gen. Colin Powell) were telling him that we needed lots more troops deployed to get the job done. The larger force would have to be ready to move after Hanukkah and Christmas but before Ramadan. The corrupt old “need to know” principle was conveniently at hand: those likely to raise awkward questions needn’t be consulted about your action until after you act.

At home, the polls plummeted. Abroad, coalition partners started to take cover. Then the U.S., sensibly if belatedly, returned to the UN and to multilateral diplomacy. So pushing the Iraqi forces out of Kuwait (the “Gulf war”) went down in history as a multilateral success.

Not so in the administration of George W. Bush: the main event is neither multilateral nor a success. The reporting from Iraq routinely uses “coalition forces” to describe U.S. Army and Marine encounters with “the enemy.” But most of the “enemy” are Iraqis in partisan militias fighting other partisan militias. And our only substantial ally is a British force of some 7,500 assigned to Iraq’s south.

The other coalition elements are mostly bought and paid for, according to Patricia Weitsman, a political scientist writing in The New York Times last month. These smaller units are subsidized from a $200 million “Coalition Solidarity Fund” created last year to help support contingents ranging from Poland’s 2,400 troops to Albania’s 120, the Czech Republic’s 100, and Estonia’s 40. (The Czech unit may be pulled out of Iraq this year, and the Poles may be withdrawn next year.)

I wouldn’t want to denigrate as a “symbolic presence” even the smallest group of citizen-soldiers from the smallest country willing to help clean up the mess that our government’s amateurish planning has made of postwar Iraq. But it is all too evident that the resulting mix of forces falls far short of any reasonable definition of “coalition.” For less and less better and increasingly worse, this is an American war — and consequently unpopular both at home and abroad.