Members of the NATO-led peacekeeping force in Bosnia control vehicles at a checkpoint near the disputed town of Brcko, Mar. 5, 1999.

In 1993, newly elected President Bill Clinton got a painful lesson in the risks of nation-building efforts. Clinton inherited an international peacekeeping effort that his predecessor, George H.W. Bush, had joined in Somalia, an African nation where order had collapsed in a hail of bullets from rival warlords.

Somalia needed to be stable so that food could be distributed to the country's starving people. But while the Americans envisioned themselves as humanitarians, the Somalis saw them as something else. "When the United States enters a country with no stable political center, it immediately becomes a faction," New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote at the time. "Politics won't stop because people are hungry." The lack of a clear strategy for nation-building — the United States wavered between an outright military takeover, aligning itself with a single clan, and brokering a peace deal — hampered the mission and ultimately led to the deaths of 18 U.S. Marines in an ambush and firefight in the capital, Mogadishu.

In Haiti, however, the Clinton administration had more success. Clinton took a hard line against the military leaders who in 1991 had overthrown the island's first-ever elected president, a Catholic priest named Jean-Bertrand Aristide. After Clinton, who had United Nations backing, threatened to invade Haiti, the junta agreed to give up power and allow the exiled Aristide to return to office.

The United States then sent troops to the island it had occupied decades before. But this time, they were part of an international peacekeeping force to re-establish the fragile democracy and distribute humanitarian aid — "the Peace Corps with guns," as writer Bob Shacochis called them.

Clinton also contributed U.S. forces to peacekeeping efforts in the Balkans, where the nation of Yugoslavia was disintegrating amid ethnic strife. In 1999, after Serbian violence forced hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians in the province of Kosovo from their homes, the United States and its European allies waged a three-month bombing campaign against Yugoslavia that forced an end to the attacks.

But Clinton's willingness to use U.S. troops to establish order and distribute aid in war-torn, chaotic countries was controversial. Some lauded his willingness to engage in nation-building that had a primarily humanitarian purpose, rather than serving U.S. security or economic interests. His political critics saw it as "mission creep," and said the U.S. military's purpose should be to fight, rather than serve as aid workers, diplomats or policemen. As Condoleezza Rice, then an adviser to presidential candidate George W. Bush, put it in a 2000 New York Times story, "We don't need to have the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten."