Katharine Swift Gravino, David R. Segal,
Mady Wechsler Segal, and Robert J. Waldman

The transition to the twenty-first century reflects a major change in the
security posture of the world. As with military forces in general, forces
operating under the auspices of regional multinational organizations and,
at a more global level, the United Nations, are increasingly being called
on to play peacekeeping and peacemaking (in addition to war-fighting)
roles, as collective security rather than national security becomes the
central concern of the global order and as the post-World War II bipolar
focus of the world is replaced by a multicentric global organization. At
the same time, the relationship between war-fighting as a vehicle of
peacemaking and military presence as a vehicle of peacekeeping is
becoming more pronounced.

In August 1990, the Security Council of the United Nations, for the
first time in UN history, authorized the use of minimal military force in
support of an economic embargo placed on Iraq after the armed forces
of that country invaded and occupied neighboring Kuwait and took
hostage thousands of non-Iraqi civilians who happened to be in Iraq or
Kuwait at the wrong time. This decision by the UN to use military force
in pursuit of collective security represented a watershed in international
peacekeeping. While Iraq did not continue its military advance across
the Arabian Peninsula into Saudi Arabia in the face of an international
military presence, neither did it yield to international moral, economic,
and political pressure to leave Kuwait.

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