Haiti's Brutal Truth
by Anthony Arnold
July 2021
From the moment the President of Haiti was assassinated last week, it was clear that President Biden would soon be faced with a familiar problem. Should the United States engage in yet another round of humanitarian nation building; or allow there to be an increase in immediate human suffering? This is the same problem that all progressive politicians face when dealing with the complicated realities of foreign policy.
For conservatives, the calculation is much simpler. By only seeing things in terms of “good or bad for America,” it makes such decisions easier. Take Haiti for instance. There’s no self-interested reason to intervene in the events taking place there. Our economic policy doesn’t depend on it. Haitians are not lifted up as an important constituency in terms of voting; and they aren’t the type of useful ally whose collapse would pose a real danger to any of our strategic goals.
But for progressives, there’s a few additional questions. Should we intervene on humanitarian grounds? Could our presence, at least in the short term, do some good? Can we help them, even if it does nothing for us?
The answer there is unclear, which may be why President Biden is closely monitoring the progress on this island.
Bill Clinton faced similar questions in his first term.
In 1991 there was a coup in Haiti. Following its first democractic election, the supporters of the Duvalier family, known most infamously for the actions of Francois “Papa Doc'' Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, overthrew the elected president. The exact reasoning for the coup is unclear, but the result was not. Haiti became a military dictatorship, and whatever dreams of freedom or progress existed were quickly crushed.
Violence, mass arrests, a media crackdown and a refugee crisis began immediately. It was, in every way, a return to dictatorship. One with all the human rights tragedies that come along with military juntas.
President Bush, while initially supportive of a return to democracy, quickly softened. There were trade embargoes, and the standard saber rattling, but not much else. Economic sanctions had the same problem then that they do now. The people who suffer the most aren’t the elites who typically drive the politics and hold the power, but the working class and impoverished masses.
But newly elected President Bill Clinton felt differently. In part due to a desire to separate himself from his predecessor, President Clinton wanted to engage in a more forceful intervention. So began Operation Uphold Democracy, a United States led international effort designed to restore democracy in Haiti and put it back on the right path.
It succeeded, of course. If the story had stopped there, with the restoration of Jean-Betrand Aristide to power and the flourishing of Haiti following, then it would be a happy tale, at least from the American perspective.
But that wasn’t the end. Because while Aristide had bold ideas, and did seemingly deliver on some of his promises, restoring a country from within is difficult. And nation building from the outside is harder.
Aristide would rule, as a democratically elected leader, until 2004. But dissent was common, backsliding was inevitable, and by the time Clinton left office, it was obvious that Haiti was no closer to greatness than it had been when the United States first intervened. When Aristide was overthrown by another coup in 2004, that indicated a return to the broken, fragmented, and frequently despotic politics that had defined it for decades before his time in office.
All of which led us to last week, when the latest President, Jovenel Moise, was assassinated.
It’s still too early to speculate about exactly who, or what, was behind it. But it’s not too early to speculate about what comes next. Already, there are reports of asylum seekers chanting Joe Biden’s name, and of a nation teetering on the edge. And there’s no doubt that the U.S. could, if it wanted to, use its power to temporarily stabilize the situation, by injecting cash, and sending troops. The U.S. could prop up some facially democratic leader, and that would certainly help people right now.
But as we withdraw from Afghanistan, after 20 years of mixed results, it’s worth asking “Can America afford to spend another 20 years stabilizing another nation?”
What can our power accomplish? Can it save a nation? Can it repair something that’s truly broken? Or does it merely stall the inevitable?
These are the tricky questions that keep leaders up at night.
While it may be morally justifiable to intervene and save people in the here and now, it might be politically unwise. It could trap us in another boondoggle, throwing money and people at a problem we can’t solve.
And it may not be in the best interests of Haitians.
The brutal truth might be that at some point a nation has to stand on its own two feet. Because eventually outsiders always leave, and the task of holding it all together sits squarely on the shoulders of the people who live there.