Transcript
JAMES DOBBINS: I think it's fashionable today to talk about and to regard the post-Cold War as we call it the New World Disorder, and to look back on the Cold War with some degree of nostalgia as a period which if somewhat tense was also stable and comparatively peaceful.
In fact, the reverse is the case. The Cold War period was an exceptionally violent period. By the end of the Cold War, there were more than 70 civil wars going on at some point around the world.
In the last 15 years, international interventions of a political, economic, or military sort have reduced—have cut the number of ongoing civil wars going on in and around the world in half; and reduced the number of deaths as a result of those civil wars on an annual basis by as much as five-fold.
In the past 15 years, we've seen a gigantic growth in military interventions designed to stabilize and reconstruct war-torn societies. This is true both for the United States and for the United Nations.
During the Cold War, America sent its troops abroad to a new country on the average of once every 10 years. During the Clinton Administration that went down to once every two years. The U.N. launched a total of 14 peacekeeping operations in its first four decades, and then launched over 40 operations in the decade that came after the end of the Cold War.
Nation-building indeed became a highly controversial subject in the 1990s, as the pace of these operations continued. Congress was reluctant to fund this increased pace of U.N. activism and there was a good deal of controversy about America's participation in these missions.
Now the current administration, in fact, came into office pledging that it was going to discontinue the use of American armed forces in nation-building missions. In fact, circumstances have caused the current administration to launch three new operations in its first three years—Afghanistan, Iraq, and back into Haiti—while the United Nations is currently at a high, with a total of 17 ongoing peacekeeping operations around the world, employing some 70,000 troops.
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