UN Peacekeeping, By the Numbers

Mark Leon Goldberg writes the UN and global affairs blog UN Dispatch.

Susan Rice is a powerful advocate for the role of UN Peacekeeping in maintaining international security.  She is particularly skilled at explaining how UN peacekeeping serves American interests.  In testimony to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Ambassador Rice cites a number of statistics that help make the case that UN Peacekeeping is a global necessity that is an overall boon to America’s long term interests.  To wit:

•    UN peacekeeping enlists the contributions of some 118 countries, which provide more than 93,000 troops and police to 15 different UN operations.

•    Over the past decade, UN peacekeeping operations have often included battle-tested troops from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India—by far the three largest contributors to UN operations, together providing almost 30,000 uniformed personnel and accounting for about a third of the UN troops and police deployed in Africa.

•    The United States currently contributes 93 military and police personnel to UN peacekeeping missions—approximately 0.1 percent of all uniformed UN personnel deployed worldwide. Sixty-five countries contribute more than the United States, including the other four permanent members of the Security Council: China with 2,153; France with 1,879; Russia with 328; and the United Kingdom with 283.

•    The total cost of UN peacekeeping is expected to exceed $7.75 billion this year.  Yet, large as this figure is, it represents less than 1 percent of global military spending.

•    The United States contributes slightly more than a quarter of the annual costs for UN peacekeeping. The European Union countries and Japan together pay more than half the UN’s peacekeeping bill.  We estimate that the U.S. share of the Fiscal Year 2009 costs will reach $2.2 billion.

•    According to a 2006 Government Accountability Office analysis, the U.S. contribution to the UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti was $116 million for the first 14 months of the operation—roughly an eighth of the cost of a unilateral American mission of the same size and duration.  That works out to 12 cents on the dollar—money that seems particularly well-spent when one recalls that the arrival of UN peacekeepers in Haiti let American troops depart without leaving chaos in their wake.

[Image from genetologisch-onderzoek.nl]