National Post (National Edition)
BIDEN'S UNSTABLE WORLD Kelly McParland,
SUPPORT FOR HUMAN RIGHTS SHOULDN'T BE A PARTISAN ISSUE.
— ADAM ZIVO
Near the end of the Godfather trilogy, as his attempts to take the family legitimate run aground, Michael Corleone laments: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”
U.S. presidents must feel the same way. Three successive White House occupants — Barack Obama, Donald Trump and now Joe Biden — have laboured to remove U.S. forces from military entanglements launched by a fourth, only to find that abandoning wars is far harder than starting them.
Obama was determined to extract U.S. troops from Iraq, one of the two wars launched under predecessor George W. Bush. Trump, who railed against “stupid” wars — which to him meant virtually all of them — pulled forces from Syria and Afghanistan. Biden announced a plan to complete the departure from Afghanistan by the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
“We cannot continue the cycle of extending or expanding our military presence in Afghanistan hoping to create the ideal conditions for our withdrawal, expecting a different result,” Biden said in April. Maybe not, but that's not to say the White House wouldn't find itself, soon after, mulling whether to send those same uniforms into new fronts deemed potentially important enough to risk U.S. lives.
Haiti has been looking for help from Washington since an explosion of violence that counts as wild even by Haiti's elevated standards. A week after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse it remains unclear who ordered the attack, or why. There are competing claims to take power in his wake, and plenty of links to the U.S. to spice up news reports: one of the attackers was a former informer to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, several others received U.S. military training, there were lots of warnings to Washington that trouble was brewing, yet they were ignored by the Trump administration — which invited Moïse to Mar-a-Lago to pose with Trump, who was a big fan of his corrupt and chaotic regime.
Washington indicated it was taking the request for help seriously enough to send a crew of officials to the island to assess the situation. A spokesperson for the National Security Council — apparently with a straight face — said the delegation met with three local heavyweights squabbling over the spoils and “encouraged open and constructive dialogue to reach an agreement to enable Haiti to hold free and fair elections.”
That would be a rarity, were it to happen. The U.S. has twice before sought to rescue Haiti from itself — for 19 years in the early half of the 20th century, and again in 1994 after a coup against another president — without much sign of progress. A scandal-plagued United Nations mission quit the country in 2017 amid reports of widespread sexual abuse of local women.
Cleaning up foreign messes is the eternal burden of the western world's preferred policing power, another role Trump routinely disparaged. Why should the U.S., he wondered, constantly be expected to rescue other countries from the depth of their crises (even if Washington often helped create them)?
In the case of Haiti, the answer is obvious, if uncomfortable. If it's not already a failed state, it's the closest thing to it. There are concerns enough about Venezuela's slide into the status of a narco-state without adding the potential damage to be caused were Haiti to join it. Add in the outbreak of unrest in Cuba, where the biggest protests in decades have decidedly unsettled the Communist government, and the ongoing inability of U.S. authorities to control their border with Mexico, and the Oval Office can't help but worry about the potential for Latin American affairs forcibly diverting its attention from domestic matters on which it would prefer to concentrate.
The world has a way of doing that. Bush didn't expect to be a wartime president, but felt compelled to respond to the 9/11 attacks. Other countries, including Canada, contributed significantly to those missions, but the U.S. was always the dominant force, with 100,000 soldiers in Afghanistan at one point. The war produced more than 3,500 military fatalities and a total estimated cost approaching US$1 trillion. Yet just a few weeks after Biden announced the U.S. departure, Taliban forces claim to have seized back large swaths of the country and Canada is among those scrambling to rescue Afghan workers who helped western forces during 20 years of conflict.
There are more than 165,000 Haitian Canadians, especially in and around Montreal, with regular pressure on Ottawa to ease the way further for family reunifications. But, as usual, Canada has just a bit part in the drama, lacking the will or the wherewithal to play a more significant role in international affairs. The prime minister uttered his usual platitudes while the foreign minister called for “a dialogue with all parties,” but Canada will mostly watch from the sidelines while Haiti looks to the U.S. for more substantial help.
Biden said Friday that Marines would be sent to Haiti to beef of security at the U.S. embassy, but a bigger force is not on the agenda “at this moment.” Don't bet on that being the last word. No doubt Biden would prefer to stay out of it. But a dangerous and uncertain world keeps pulling the U.S. back in.
HAITI HAS BEEN LOOKING FOR HELP FROM WASHINGTON.