White House wary of dispatching troops amid turmoil

WASHINGTON — Haiti’s request for U.S. troops to help stabilize the country after the assassination of its leader presents President Biden with a difficult choice: send forces to help a neighbor even as he is trying to pare down America’s military footprint overseas, or refrain and risk allowing the chaos unfolding there to escalate into a refugee crisis.

Thus far, administration officials have expressed caution about any deployment to Haiti, reflecting the fast pace of events since attackers killed President Jovenel Moïse in his home Wednesday and a broader shift in American attitudes toward military interventions as the 20year war in Afghanistan winds down.

Biden administration officials, while sympathetic to the humanitarian misery unfolding 700 miles south of Florida and mindful of a potential mass exodus of Haitian refugees like one that occurred in the 1990s, nevertheless show no immediate enthusiasm for sending even a limited U.S. force into the midst of politically based civil strife and disorder.

The administration has said it will send officials from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security to PortauPrince to assess how they might help assist the government’s investigation into the murky circumstances of Moïse’s killing.

But Pentagon officials were taken off guard by the Haitian request late Friday. While they said it would be dutifully reviewed, there is little appetite among senior military leaders to dispatch U.S. troops.

“We are aware of the request and are analyzing it,” John Kirby, the chief Pentagon spokesperson, said in a telephone interview Saturday, noting that the request was broad and did not specify numbers or types of forces needed.

One senior administration official put it more bluntly late Friday: “There are no plans to provide U.S. military assistance at this time.”

For Biden, the prospect of a deployment of U.S. forces amid the chaotic aftermath of the brutal killing runs against his core instinct to consolidate America’s overseas military presence, not expand it. The request from the Haitians came just hours after Biden delivered remarks defending his withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan after a 20year mission that came to be illdefined and entangled with dysfunctional Afghan politics.