FP: Writing in the Guardian newspaper Wednesday, Morgan Tsvangirai called for international military intervention to protect opposition supporters. [Note: Tsvangirai has since disavowed the editorial.] You sounded a cautious note in your op-ed, so under what circumstances would you say peacekeepers are warranted?

PW: Part of it was a skeptical note. The experience with these efforts is, where the views are divided it takes a very long time to get any agreement. And then if there ever is an agreement, you can get some incredibly ineffective forces. Remember, it was under the eyes of U.N. peacekeepers in Bosnia that 11,000 Bosnian Muslims were slaughtered in 1995.

Let me just say, I am not at all trying to discourage thought and attention to what peacekeeping forces might be able to do. [Tsvangirai’s] appeal for protection is a very legitimate appeal and I would hope the international community would take it seriously. Maybe also if they started to look like they were taking it seriously, the goons would back off.

FP: David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, said he would push for more sanctions at the U.N. Security Council. Wouldn’t that make Zimbabweans’ suffering worse? And doesn’t Mugabe benefit from this feeling of besiegement?

PW: It depends very much on what they are and where they’re targeted. I haven’t heard what British officials have in mind, but they may be things like travel bans or other kinds of personally targeted sanctions. Again, there may be some that are useful, but it’s not going to change the basic course of what’s going on there. They are a potentially very important way of making a statement, however, and I think that’s why people are interested in them.

FP: What do you think will be the tipping point when Zimbabweans are strong enough to take matters into their own hands?

PW: In some ways—there are some big differences, too—this reminds me of the experience in the Philippines 22 years ago, early 1986, when Ferdinand Marcos tried to steal an election. I was the assistant secretary of state at the time for East Asia. Some people thought we could simply snap our fingers and Marcos would leave, but we didn’t have that kind of power. But what we were able to do, by the kinds of actions we did take and the kinds of statements we did make, was to do exactly what I hope would start to happen in Zimbabwe, which is [to ensure] that the people who are angry because the election was stolen will feel more emboldened to sustain the pressure, and the guys with the guns who are being asked to kill on behalf of the regime will begin to lose confidence.

At the risk of overdoing the analogy, it certainly didn’t hurt matters 22 years ago that President Reagan offered President Marcos a refuge in the United States, and he left peacefully. I think this is a tougher situation, to be honest. I don’t know where the tipping point is. What I do know is that it seems pretty clear who is the legitimately elected president of the country. It does seem pretty clear who are the people that want to get Zimbabwe onto a positive course.

It’s amazing that this country is one of the very poorest countries in the world, and yet it was once a breadbasket of southern Africa. It shouldn’t be this way. And the more we can get the people who see a better future willing to stand up—and they’re standing up, one has to admire their courage, it’s incredible—and the more we can get the people who are standing in their way to think that maybe it’s not such a good position to be in, we’ll reach a tipping point. You’ll know when you reach it. I don’t think we can sit outside here and put a mark on the wall and say what it is.

Paul Wolfowitz is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He was formerly president of the World Bank and deputy secretary of defense.