The Somalia Syndrome and U.S. National Security

Abstract

The unhappy demise of the U.S.—United Nations (UN) humanitarian intervention in the failed state of Somalia in 1993 had a profound impact on U.S. foreign policy in the post—Cold War era. If the Somali intervention had succeeded, the history of many parts of the world might have been quite different. But it did not succeed, and the hopes of those observers who saw Somalia as a possible model for dealing with the disorder and conflicts of the new era were dashed. Instead, President Clinton’s decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from Somalia in March 1994 generated a new foreign policy disposition in Washington—“the Somalia syndrome”—that signaled a deep skepticism of multilateral intervention in civil conflict situations, especially when such intervention risked American casualties. However, according to President George W Bush (2003b), 9/11 was a transformative event that fundamentally changed the strategic thinking of the United States. Declaring an all-out “war” on what was called global terrorism, President Bush pledged to spend “whatever it takes, whatever it costs” (Stout 2002) to win that struggle. Such statements convinced many observers, including former U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright, that 9/11 ended the Somalia syndrome in U.S. foreign policy and what she called “the time of antiseptic warfare” (Albright 2001, 44). On the one hand, the Bush administration recognized the security threat posed by failed or failing states, which initially reduced political concerns about sustaining battlefield casualties in such places.