Pressure To "Do Something":
Media Pressure and the National Interest

The official working view of the new generation of substate conflicts further minimises the chance of a significant intervention. They will have "no immediate, substantial impact upon the interests of the great powers" and "the international response to such crises will rarely be decisive."²⁴

The approach of governments appears to follow a trend to be noninterventionist, regardless of the power of media reporting. The Clinton administration's Presidential Decision Directive No. 25 defines clearly those limits of U.S. national interest beyond which it is highly unlikely that the U.S. will ever commit itself, certainly militarily and on the ground.²⁵ The directive came at a time when most leading European governments were exasperated by what they saw as the lack of both understanding and leadership on the Balkans crisis from the Clinton administration.

Eventually, there was a period when the Clinton administration belatedly tried to portray an image of assertive presidential engagement in foreign crises.²⁶ The high-profile U.S. action on crisis management in Bosnia in the summer of 1995, which led to the Dayton peace agreement, is the primary example. The change of heart and new determination were welcomed internationally. The U.S. commitment was born out of a fundamental reassessment of U.S. national interests at the time, not because of media coverage. Privately, however, senior European officials remained sceptical as to how deep the U.S. commitment really went and how long it would last.

It could be said that in many ways the scepticism was justified. In March 1996, National Security Adviser Anthony Lake announced a seven- point, "tough-love" checklist of national interests that might lead to a U.S. use of force. In contrast to the proactive Balkans policy of mid-1995, Lake's new list barely tilted at the challenges of conflict prevention created by the new generation of substate conflicts. ²⁷

Implicitly, the checklist apparently ignored any emotive power of TV and media coverage. Under the new Lake doctrine, defining a clear exit strategy seemed to carry more importance than any immediate urgency for a U.S. commitment to entering any conflict prevention operation. When it came to U.S. national interest, Lake defined the commitment as follows: "Increasingly our interests require that our military keep peace in the wake of internal conflicts." In other words, a U.S. commitment is likely only when there is peace after a conflict. A commitment that might prevent the conflict from exploding in the first place is most unlikely, whether reported by the media or not!

The Lake principles and the definitions of national interest in other capitals of the world help to explain the negligible response to most media coverage of conflicts, whether the conflict is looming or already being fought. Except in rare and unpredictable circumstances which can occasionally lead to "policy panic,"²⁸ this explains the political impotence of TV pictures, despite any personal emotions that the images create among ministers, government officials, or members of the public with anything more than a fleeting interest in the horrors that they see or read about.

It can be argued that there is a strong measure of political hypocrisy and cant in many government circles. Leading nations publicly espouse an apparent determination to nip in the bud all challenges to stability and regional order. That, after all, is the tone of deliberations and communiqués at international forums like the G7 or the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

But is such rhetoric reflected faithfully in official actions? Governments argue that the new threats to regional stability come not from ethnic fault lines²⁹ but from "extreme nationalists and tribalists, terrorists, organised criminals, coup plotters, rogue states and all those who would return newly freed societies to the intolerant ways of the past."³⁰ The former British foreign secretary Douglas Hurd characterised the same challenge with a different twist. "We have an interest in a world which is not run by a lot of tyrannical, blood-stained crooks" he said.³¹

Thus there may be an interest, but this author argues that except in moments of policy panic³² this interest usually does not translate into a determination to prevent. This underlines the stark limits to national interest. Determined belligerents coldly weigh up limits.³³ They make a calculation to exploit such international lack of interest to their own advantage.³⁴

An example of this occurred during a showing of the vivid TV pictures of the massacres in Rwanda. At a diplomatic banquet in London, Foreign Secretary Hurd described movingly the conflict as a "true heart of darkness" whose details "I can barely bring myself to watch." But for the British government, as with almost all others (except France), such horror and emotion did not translate into a proactive switch in policy designed to end the fighting. The later international response to the cholera catastrophe in Goma was a palliative panic response born out of shame more than a determination to end a policy of systematic slaughter that had already lasted four months.³⁵ Politically, the impact of TV images in particular was at best marginal.

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