U.S. peacebuilding a ‘strategic and moral imperative,’ advocates say at Notre Dame event

WASHINGTON (OSV News) — With American peacebuilding at a “crossroads,” amid global conflict and changes in U.S. foreign policy, a Notre Dame conference March 10 in the nation’s capital examined how to meet new challenges facing international conflict resolution and fostering peace.

The conference, titled “American Peacebuilding at a Crossroads: Lessons, Risks and the Road Ahead,” and hosted by University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs and its Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, in partnership with the Alliance for Peacebuilding, came as the U.S. engaged in new military actions in Iran.

The evening before the conference, in remarks at the House GOP policy retreat, President Donald Trump was unclear about how long the combat operations against Iran in concert with Israel that killed Iran’s longtime supreme leader, 86-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, would last.

“We could call it a tremendous success right now, as we leave here, I could call it, or we could go further, and we’re going to go further,” Trump said.

In remarks at the conference, retired Adm. Gary Roughead, former U.S. Navy chief of naval operations, referenced that conflict, among others, telling the audience, “I could use my time offering thoughts on the wars in Ukraine and the Gulf, which are indeed the future of warfare.”

“But,” the former admiral continued, “we have to be more strategic and forward looking. For the past few years, we’ve known that we were at a geopolitical and security inflection point.”

“I’ve spent my career in uniform, and believe deeply in maintaining a strong defense and deterrence, but I’ve also unclenched the hard fist of military power and extended that hand to relieve suffering and disasters and to help weave the fabric of peace,” Roughead said. “That is not weakness or woke. It conveys the moral strength of a nation. Both hard and soft power, and the uses of that power, demand intention, investment, and collaboration among institutions committed to preventing conflict.”

Roughead, who commanded fleets in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans during his time in active service, argued that the U.S. “faces a strategic and moral imperative to invest deliberately in peacebuilding.”

He further argued that peacebuilding is “essential, not peripheral to national security.”

“To meet this moment, American peacebuilding must evolve, building broader coalitions, forging new partnerships and preparing a new generation of leaders and peacebuilders to collaboratively, comfortably and confidently operate across military and civilian domains, employing public and private initiatives,” he said.

In a panel discussion, former Ambassador Mark Green, who was also previously administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, and is a former Republican member of Congress from Wisconsin, and former Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., also a former U.S. special envoy to the Great Lakes Region of Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo, urged participants to find a bipartisan path forward.

“We have to recognize that there is no monopoly on wisdom,” Green said, citing cooperation by the late Sen. John McCain, a Republican, and late Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, a Democrat.

“They disagreed on damn near everything, but it’s the way they disagreed,” he said.

Feingold urged ways to emphasize the “congressional role in warmaking,” over “unilateral military intervention.”

“It’s up to Congress to assert the authority, and it’s up to the people of the states to demand that they do that,” he said. “They’re not going to do it on their own.”

Green concurred.

“Whether it be the Millennium Challenge Corporation, President (Barack) Obama’s Feed the Future or President (George W.) Bush’s PEPFAR AIDS initiative, they’ve lasted and been successful because Congress took it upon themselves to seriously debate and discuss and hone and sharpen and authorize those important tools,” he said. “And that seems gone.”

Liz Hume, executive director of the Alliance for Peacebuilding, said in remarks at the conference that the challenges facing their cause also presented opportunity.

“As terrible as this has been,” Hume said in reference to cuts to international development programs, “we have to see that there’s an opportunity to rebuild it in a way that we’re centering and prioritizing conflict prevention in our policies, laws and strategies.”

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