The Haiti Conundrum
By 
The situation in Haiti is quite grim.
It’s difficult to overstate the severity of the crises in Haiti, a country where the legacies of colonialism include corruption, endemic poverty and warlordism. Gangs control 80 percent of Port-au-Prince, the capital; they’ve killed thousands with impunity and driven hundreds of thousands more from their homes.
The country’s democratic institutions have been hollowed out. The few hospitals operating in Port-au-Prince are full. Schools are closed and businesses are shuttered; Haitians mostly stay home.
“The challenge that lies ahead is gigantic,” said Romain Le Cour, a senior expert with the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. “You have to rebuild almost every institution from the ashes.”
Long story short, the political, economic, and social situation in Haiti is an absolute catastrophe. The legacies of colonialism and neocolonialism are deeply intertwined in the origins of Haiti’s current dilemma… and also tend to render suspect any kind of foreign intervention to attempt to resolve or manage the dilemma. No one thinks that “hands off Haiti” will work, yet no one can offer a useful account of what exactly the international community can do to improve the situation. Aid cannot be delivered without some security on the ground; security cannot be imposed from the outside without active support from a sufficient fraction of Haitian society; Haitian society finds foreign intervention inherently illegitimate because of the long colonial and neocolonial history.
What Colbert King offers is true without necessarily being helpful:
As a desperate Holly knew more than 100 years ago, and the United States knows now: Haiti needs help — sustained, unwavering support — but not Woodrow Wilson’s way.
Haiti has been socially and politically dysfunctional for longer than I’ve been alive. Interventions don’t resolve the core problems, and refraining from intervention doesn’t resolve core problems. And while it’s far from the most important consideration, the collapse of Haitian social order could have as big an impact on the US election as just about any other foreign policy event, mostly by generating massive refugee flows to the US and elsewhere.
Ideas are welcome.