The incoming Trump administration will be confronting a world on fire — national security challenges ranging from ongoing wars in Europe and the Middle East to potential conflict with China over Taiwan. The last thing they’ll want is to be dragged into a military intervention in Haiti.
And yet, history teaches that it likely will happen. The Trump team needs to plan ahead in order to minimize the U.S. footprint that restoring a modicum of stability may require.
It is the aim of every administration to keep Haiti at the bottom of the national security agenda and to avoid entanglement in its turmoil. This is due to overriding priorities elsewhere as well as to profound “Haiti fatigue” among U.S. politicians and policy-makers, who understandably have concluded that past interventions have failed to effect change for the better. What they don’t fully grasp is that Haiti’s dysfunction is an irremediable condition and as such requires periodic U.S. security engagement.
My experience two decades ago as U.S. ambassador in Port-au-Prince illustrates the point. At a time when U.S. forces were becoming mired in Iraq, intervention in Haiti was out of the question. My mandate was to promote a negotiated solution to an ongoing political crisis and keep a lid on the situation.
And yet, within six months of my arrival, 2,000 U.S. Marines were on the scene to quell spreading anarchy. President Bush’s abrupt decision to intervene was driven in part by political necessity — to stop a surge of migrants from heading to Florida during the 2004 election. It also reflected the untenability for Washington of allowing lawless elements to seize power. U.S. forces quickly gave way to a UN peacekeeping mission that provided Haiti with baseline security until it was withdrawn, disastrously, in 2017.
Like its predecessors, the Biden administration sought to minimize U.S. involvement even as the situation in Haiti deteriorated. After prolonged dithering, Washington finally persuaded Kenya to lead a woefully underequipped multinational security mission. Military planning for a limited U.S. intervention that could have set conditions for the mission’s success was undertaken but never activated. Clearly, the political calculus for the unpopular Biden weighed against the only option that could have rescued Haiti from the brink of total anarchy.
Biden is thus bequeathing to his successor a ticking time bomb — Haiti may finally go over the brink. More than 700,000 Haitians are homeless. Mounting gang violence has disrupted U.S. commercial flights and shut down the airport in Port-au-Prince while forcing humanitarian relief organizations to withdraw personnel. Food and supplies cannot reach the country or be distributed, and hunger stalks the population. Criminal gangs are on the verge of capturing the entire capital city.
It might seem plausible that the Trump administration will prove no less indifferent to Haiti’s agony than the Biden team, and no less eager to wash its hands of the problem. But such a position will become untenable if the Haitian state is completely erased or is seized by criminals. Minds in Washington will surely be concentrated if tens of thousands of desperate Haitians take to the sea heading to the U.S. And if hundreds of thousands of Haitians are dying of starvation mere hundreds of miles from our shores, Americans — led by churches with ties to Haiti — will demand action to alleviate the suffering.
Total anarchy and mass starvation in Haiti will have global impact. Should Washington refuse to intervene, the door would open to an external power such as China to fill the void. Trump would stand accused of abandoning the Monroe Doctrine and surrendering primacy in the hemisphere.
Trump is opposed to endless wars and pointless expenditures of U.S. lives and resources overseas. But he also revels in demonstrations of strength. Repeated experience proves that Haitian street gangs are paper tigers; when confronted with U.S. military force, they crumble.
A Trump-ordered intervention to rescue the population will be brief, successful and applauded. A small U.S. contingent, after freeing key infrastructure in Port-au-Prince from gang control, could rapidly give way to private military contractors who would support the Kenyan mission until the arrival of a full-fledged UN peacekeeping operation. Biden could never sell such an intervention. Trump can — and should.
By JAMES B. FOLEY/Miami Herald Opinion
James B. Foley served as U.S. ambassador to Haiti from 2003 to 2005.
