(Estimated Pub Date) the Challenge of Ethnic Conflict to National and International Order in the 1990S: Geographic Perspectives- October 1995

Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268
Ethnic Conflict and US Policy
Wade Hinkle-» ---~——
Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense
for Policy Planning Department of Defense‘
My task in the next eight minutes is to discuss ethnic
and national conflict and the US policy response to it.
Let me tell you what a difficult task it will be; it took
more than eight minutes for the conference coordina-
tors to describe to me what it was they wanted me to
cover. Nevertheless, let me take a shot at it.
Clearly, the last four years have been an exciting time
to be a planner in defense and national security strat-
egy. I subscribe to what Dr. Gundersen said about the
end of the Cold War being, in a military sense, the end
of a very comfortable period of time, when the uni-
verse and its problems were well understood and well
bounded. I think, however, that we have made some
progress in the last four years in thinking through
these issues in the perspective of US national security.
I also think that Secretary of Defense Les Aspin made
a good start in his conceptualization of this problem
by talking about what he called the four dangers to US
national security in the post—Cold War era:
' The new nuclear danger. Partly an artifact of the
Cold War, this involves the security of the 30,000 to
45,000 nuclear weapons that were present on former
Soviet territory when the Soviet Union broke up.
Also it involves the possibility of weapons of mass
destruction proliferating throughout the world.
~ The danger to democracy. This is the possibility of a
failure of refonn in the former Soviet Union.
- The new economic danger. The Clinton Administra-
tion believes that, without a robust and growing
economy in the United States, the United States will
not be strong domestically and will be unable to be
an effective actor internationally. This danger also
‘ Dr. l-linkle has since left the government and is now a member of
the Institute for Defense Analyses.
involves an understanding that the notion of eco-
nomic prosperity abroad is an important component
of US national security.
' Ethnic and national conflict. Mr. Aspin clearly sees
this as one ofthe principal challenges to US national
security in the post—Cold War era.
The United States is in the process of making substan- I
tial reductions to its military forces and military bud-
get. By the time the reductions envisioned in the
Clinton defense program have been implemented, we
will have eliminated over l million people in uniform
and another quarter of a million civilians from the
Defense Department. We will have eliminated one-
quarter to one-third of our military forces, and defense
spending by the end of 1997 will be down to below
3.5 percent of gross domestic product—the lowest
level since 1939.
'
Prom the perspective of the defense planner, one of
the main concems in making reductions of that scale
is the possibility that ethnic and national conflict may
occur in ways that will challenge American and
defense interests. Some debate has occurred in my
field of conflict studies, about whether the demise of
the Cold War has increased or decreased the possibil-
ity of ethnic and national conflict.
George Kohn’s database on conflict shows that there
have been about three large-scale ethnic and national
conflicts per year since 1945. This rate did not tail off
as a result of the end of the Cold War. In terms of non-
state conflict, there have been about nine serious eth-
nically motivated coup attempts each year since 1987.
But whether ethnic and national conflict is increasing
or simply remaining at high levels, it clearly poses a
danger not only to participants and nearby neighbors
but also to us. This is either because the conflict is
occurring in critical areas—as with the case in the
Persian Gulf—or because some of the participants
are gaining access to increasingly deadlier and more
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Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268