International crisis management does not evolve in a linear or rational fashion. It develops in fits and starts, almost always in response to specific shocks. Just as the Rwandan genocide and Srebrenica massacre reshaped United Nations peacekeeping in the 1990s, forcing the U.N. to professionalize its management systems and start thinking systematically about protecting civilians, 9/11 led NATO to shift from regional stabilization in the Balkans to long-range expeditionary warfare in Afghanistan. Had U.N. or NATO officials known at the time that, by adapting to these events, they were heading for the quagmires of Darfur and Helmand respectively, they might have balked. Events swept them toward these challenges nonetheless.
The convergence of crises in Ukraine, the Middle East and Africa in 2014 now has the potential to reshape international crisis management equally profoundly. While the course of future conflicts remains highly unpredictable, three trends seem to be clear.
The first, and most widely noted, is that NATO is switching back to a regional security focus to counter Russia now that the alliance’s Afghan mission is winding down. As a result, NATO is likely to invest less time in the sort of nation-building strategies it prioritized in Afghanistan and more on the military hardware and political software needed to track submarines, shadow Russian bombers and rebut Moscow’s beguiling propaganda.