The international community and the United States now lean more than ever on the U.N. troops, police and civilians currently working to build peace in 16 conflict zones worldwide. As global violence has increased since 2007, the number of these peacekeepers has spiked by 50 percent, to a current total of 124,000. Their presence directly protects U.S. national interests amid many conflicts or ungoverned spaces, sparing the United States from having to send its own forces. 

As the U.S. government focuses on turmoil in places like Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, it relies on U.N. peace missions to contain and reduce violence in Haiti, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and elsewhere. But many such U.N. missions risk being overwhelmed by the same challenges facing U.S. troops abroad. They confront complex threats that combine religious extremism, organized crime, cross-border sectarian insurgencies, and weak or illegitimate governments. The traditional principles of a U.N. peacekeeping system created in 1948 are now grossly inadequate. 

Those traditional rules require U.N. forces to operate with the consent of all parties in a conflict, to remain impartial, and to use force only for self-defense or to carry out a specific mandate. But consider the conflict in the West African state of Mali: More than 11,000 U.N. personnel struggle to stabilize the country in a terrorist milieu with no authority to fight extremist groups or organized crime. This force, drawn from 49 countries, lacks essential training, equipment and intelligence resources. More than 40 U.N. peacekeepers have been killed and more than 100 wounded since their mission began in 2013. 

In June, an expert panel formed by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon recommended specific steps to strengthen U.N. partnership with other global and regional organizations, and to make U.N. peace operations faster and more effective and accountable. These experts urged the United Nations to interpret its traditional peacekeeping rules more flexibly. They called for using force proactively (not merely in self-defense), and using peace operations to protect civilians and revive negotiations in conflicts where such peace talks have broken down. 

In September, President Obama gathered more than 50 U.N. member states for a conference at which they pledged new contributions to U.N. peace operations—40,000 additional troops and police, intelligence units, airlift capacity, field hospitals, engineers and surveillance drones. These essential reinforcements are a commendable start to fixing the peacekeeping system. Still, the conference left largely unaddressed how those commitments will be realized, and how the United Nations might undertake the basic reforms proposed by the U.N. expert panel.  

U.S. leadership now will be vital in forging the needed political consensus at the United Nations to reform the way that peace operations are organized and supported. U.S. leaders could build pressure and agreement for those reforms with two steps: by convening policymakers, diplomats, scholars and non-government organizations to discuss ways to accelerate reform, and by scheduling a follow-up summit next year to Obama’s September meeting to track progress – or the lack thereof. 

While U.N. operations are periodically a matter of U.S. political debate, a repair of United Nations peacekeeping is an issue bigger than partisan politics. With U.S. troops heavily engaged abroad since 2001, American administrations of both political parties have actively sought the new U.N. deployments that now are making unprecedented demands on the system. The U.S. need for U.N. peacekeeping will continue no matter who wins the presidency a year from now. 

The United States must lead in repairing and reinforcing this basic, global tool for managing crises and protecting international, and U.S., security. Europe is and must be a strong ally given the vital stakes in sustaining U.N. peace operations against a global set of conflicts that threaten regional and international security.  Failure to accomplish this will only increase the likelihood that the United States and its military will be drawn into more conflicts as the world’s police force.

Reposted with permission from The Hill, Source: “Saving U.N. peacekeeping: High stakes for the US"