Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign seemed to offer prospects for enhanced recourse to the UN to address humanitarian challenges of the sort that were arising in the Balkans and sub-Saharan Africa. But as President, Clinton contributed to the post-cold war decline of the UN by abruptly reversing course on Somalia in 1993 after eighteen Americans were killed in the Black Hawk Down incident. Rather than accept responsibility for that debacle, the Clinton Administration blamed the UN. That Administration also turned its back on UN pleas for a commitment to stop genocide in Rwanda a year later, when a small contingent of UN troops could have prevented the mass murders there. The Clinton security team further sabotaged a Rwanda intervention by threatening to halt US funding for UN peacekeeping operations if the UN took on new peacekeeping commitments.
The Clinton White House expressed only lukewarm support for the UN role in Bosnia, while undermining support for UN action by providing arms to the Croats and Muslims. In Iraq, the Administration undermined and corrupted the UN inspection process by using US inspectors to conduct espionage. Clinton disappointingly celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the UN by delivering an uninspired speech notable for its Wall Street calls for "downsizing" and "doing more with less," and by turning increasingly to NATO to carry out what it deemed humanitarian interventions, culminating in the NATO war in Kosovo and Serbia in 1999. This war on behalf of the Kosovars was notable for the absence of any UN authorization for the use of force and a deliberate US decision to circumvent the UN in anticipation of Russian and Chinese vetoes.
But while the Clinton Administration did serious damage to the UN, the Bush presidency-with its repudiation of even minimal multilateralism, its hostility to existing arms control treaties, its rejection of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming and its efforts to undermine the International Criminal Court-created a pattern of anti-UN diplomacy never before seen in Washington. It represents a view that American power and resources should serve exclusively national strategic interests.
