Conversations with History: Institute
of International Studies, UC Berkeley
This interview is part of the Institute's "Conversations
with History" series, and uses Internet technology to share with the public
Berkeley's distinction as a global forum for ideas.
Welcome to a Conversation with History. I'm Harry
Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies. Our guest today is James
Dobbins, who is Director of the Center for International Security and Defense
Studies at the Rand Corporation. During the Clinton years he was a special envoy
to many of the hot spots -- Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo -- and then in the
Bush administration, to Afghanistan for a brief period. He is the coauthor of
a two-volume set that has appeared over the last two years chronicling American
intervention and comparing that intervention with the intervention by the UN
over the last several decades, the emphasis being on how to explain what
works in the process of democratization.
- Background
- living abroad as a child ... early years in the Foreign Service
- U.S. and Europe
- de Gaulle ousts NATO military ... consolidating effect of Cold War ...
Yugoslav civil war ... 9/11 ... Iraq ... support for European unification
... democratization through EU enlargement
- Institutional Obstacles to Nation Building
- post - Cold War challenges and opportunities ... the learning curve
... lost opportunities to build on lessons learned ... institutionalizing
the knowledge ... getting funding from Congress ... sorting out the responsibilities
- Nation Building and Democratization
- definition ... early case studies: Japan and Germany ... Bush administration
shuns more contemporary models ... nation-building operations have increased
in size and frequency ... the value of a supersized intervention
- Comparing U.S. and UN Interventions
- strong areas of overlap ... who's in charge ... differing levels of difficulty
and success rates ... UN's legitimacy ... measuring the variables: input,
output, outcome ... burden-sharing in Kosovo operation
- Iraq
- special challenges from the outset ... failure to
anticipate predictable outcomes ... failure to learn from past experiences
... blinded by dream of easy victory ... blinded by disdain for Clinton-era
interventions ... hiding potential costs from Congres ...
- Learning Multilateralism
- unilateralist rhetoric ... sobering costs of Iraq ... implicitly altering
course
- Conclusions
- skills of a diplomat ... multilateralism doesn't come naturally to a superpower
... the American patronage system ... avoiding oversimplification
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