‘New wars’ and ‘old wars’: a bloody decade
Active great power rivalry may have taken a vacation in the post-Cold War decade and
beyond, but strategic history was all too busy. Peace did not reign supreme around the
world. In point of fact, the 1990s was among the bloodiest decades of the twentieth
century, at least with regard to warfare other than that between great powers. The new
Russia was both understandably self-absorbed and materially unable to exercise much
influence abroad, even in the near abroad of the ‘lost’ republics of the former USSR. It
struggled against an irregular enemy in Chechnya, a would-be secessionist region. Russia
did not accept a Chechnyan declaration of independence in 1991, and Moscow launched
two campaigns to subdue the region: in 1994–6, which was a complete failure; and from
1999 to the present, which remains inconclusive. Russia created the Commonwealth of
Independent States (CIS) in 1991 in an effort to preserve or restore some of the former
authority of the USSR, but as an experiment in imperial re-engineering it proved an
abject failure. Comprising twelve former republics of the USSR, the CIS was intended
to provide a unified military command and to develop a common market. Headquartered
in Minsk, Belarus, it foundered on the clashes of interests among its members (Armenia,
Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan,
Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan).
For its part, the United States was strongly disinclined to military intervention,
especially after its disastrous humanitarian venture in Somalia in 1993. US forces, as part
of a multinational effort under UN aegis (the United States initially provided 28,000 of
the 37,000 UN troops), were obliged to effect a ‘mission creep’ in order to attempt to
enforce order for security in the Somali capital, Mogadishu. The Americans concluded
that progress towards security could not be made until the dominant clan warlord in
Mogadishu, Mohamed Farah Aidid, was neutralized. However, on 3–4 October 1993 a
US effort to capture Aidid and his senior lieutenants went catastrophically wrong:
eighteen American soldiers were ambushed and killed, and some were displayed in gory
detail and in an insulting manner, for the video entertainment of a global audience.
The new Clinton administration, recognizing that the US military commitment in
Somalia was a poisoned chalice bequeathed by the outgoing Bush presidency, hastened
to terminate America’s participation in that UN exercise. Operation Restore Hope, as the
US project in Somalia had been called with inadvertent irony, was swiftly abandoned.
The UN operation as a whole similarly was terminated in March 1994. The grisly
experience in Somalia reinforced the dominant American view that peacekeeping, post-
conflict stabilization and humanitarian intervention, let alone peace enforcement, were
not suitable missions for a superpower. To quote a saying of the period, ‘a superpower
doesn’t do windows’. The truth was, and indeed remains to this day, that the United States
generally is less competent in combating irregular enemies than it is in dealing with
regular ones. Even narrowly, in the military dimension of grand strategy, US behaviour
in Somalia in 1993 affronted most of the traditional principles of war.
It is in the nature of multinational military operations, be they prosecuted under UN
or NATO auspices, that the time-honoured Principles of War are apt to fall early victim
to politics. The protracted strategic incompetence of the UN’s multinational mission to
Bosnia-Herzegovina, UNPROFOR (the United Nations Protection Force), was to reveal
the inherent limitations of collective security. That ambitious concept requires states to
After the Cold War: an interwar decade 225