The Balkan Limits to Power and Principle.

American foreign policy in the past century has frequently been shaped not by the realities confronted by diplomats and soldiers, but by an idealistic longing to remake the world in the United States' own image. [1] The first American attempt to do so in the Versailles Treaty ended in tragic failure. The supposedly moral peace that concluded Woodrow Wilson's "war to end war" actually perpetuated injustice and set the stage for World War II. [2] At the start of the twenty-first century, the moral imperative in U.S. foreign policy again compels American and allied troops to pursue idealistic goals in Bosnia and Kosovo long after the ideas that underpin those goals have become irrelevant and unattainable.

It is time to fix the problem with U.S. policy, not the blame. The United States and its allies must deal with the Balkans on terms its inhabitants understand and respect: power politics and fair agreements. All of the peoples who live on the territory of the former Yugoslavia deserve to survive and prosper within a just framework. But to create such a framework, the next president must understand that Europeans themselves, rather than Americans far removed from the context, must shape the path to regional stability. Furthermore, the emergence of Vojislav Kostunica as Serbia's legitimate leader poses a new challenge to U.S. and allied policy in the region. European support for Kostunica and opposition to independence for Kosovo under Albanian leadership could reignite war in the Balkans unless the next administration adopts an approach that recognizes the legitimate aspirations of all the peoples that live in the former Yugoslavia.

If Americans and their NATO allies in uniform have learned anything from their experience in the Balkans and elsewhere in the last ten years, it is that diplomatic arrangements made in isolation from the political, social, cultural, and economic realities on the ground result in political objectives without any hope of success. For the next administration, this means recognizing that military power cannot artificially create multiethnic social structures and Western-style political institutions where the foundations for them do not exist and the rationale for long-term U.S. engagement is weak. If nothing is done to redirect the course of U.S. policy, Americans will confront more than violence in Kosovo or an open-ended commitment of U.S. military power. Without abandoning the attempts at social engineering that have dominated policymaking since October 1995, Yugoslavia will remain a catalyst for regional conflict, and the growing European backlash against American policy will further erode alliance cohesion and encourage isolationism in the United States.

The Bosnian Debacle

In 1995 the Clinton administration concluded that American military intervention was indispensable to any resolution of the Balkan crisis. European reluctance to intervene militarily to stop the Yugoslav conflict reinforced this attitude. When the Yugoslav army (Voyska Jugoslavska--VJ) failed to intervene to rescue the Bosnian Serb army from military defeat and to protect the 200,000 Serbs driven out of the Krajina by the Croat army in early August, President Clinton sought a diplomatic solution. The sudden emergence of a Croat military force capable of defeating the Bosnian Serb army on a level playing field at last seemed to offer favorable prospects to an administration that had touted principles of justice in foreign policy since taking office in January 1993, but had avoided involvement in Bosnia. [3]

After the shelling of a Sarajevo marketplace killed scores of innocent civilians on August 28, 1995, Clinton seized the opportunity provided by the Western public's revulsion to employ American and allied air power on the side of the Croat and Bosniac armies. In early September the Bosnian Serb leaders, confronting seemingly unstoppable ground forces and a ferocious allied bombing campaign, signaled a readiness to talk peace. Clinton then suspended the bombing and left resolution of the dispute to the diplomats gathered at Dayton, Ohio. The result was an uneasy truce that ended the fighting before either side could win or lose the war.

This use of American military power in Bosnia is instructive. Power was not employed to win the Bosnian conflict outright or to achieve definitive settlement of disputes before or during negotiations. Rather, the bombing and subsequent occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina by 60,000 NATO ground troops (half of whom were American) had two key objectives: to prevent a resumption of the fighting and ethnic cleansing, and to formalize the creation of a Muslim-dominated multiethnic Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

From its inception, Bosnia-Herzegovina was an artificial structure whose claim to legitimacy depended on the presence of foreign troops and a steady influx of foreign money. Because Bosnia-Herzegovina had never been a nation, its newfound equality with other regional actors ran counter to the historic structure of interstate relations in Europe. In addition, at precisely the time when so many of the Balkan peoples rejected multiethnicity in the context of European cultural and ethnic integration, another myth took root in the minds of the Western public: that of a formerly happy, prosperous, and multiethnic Yugoslavia--as if Yugoslavia had suddenly descended into hatred and turmoil in 1992. It is much nearer the truth that the fraud of Serb political dominance--that is, Tito's world of political gangsterism backed by the Serb-controlled secret police--collapsed into a sea of nationalist discontent that had been latent from the Yugoslav state's inception. But the notion of stopping the fighting and "restoring " a multiethnic status quo ante seized American imaginations and ultimately became the organizing imperative of the Dayton accords. [4]

While Americans harbored alchemical dreams of turning nationalist lead into multicultural gold in the Balkan laboratory, European leaders sought a solution that would end the fighting without changing territorial boundaries in the region. Fearful that Yugoslavia's violent disintegration could set dangerous precedents in other European states with large minorities or even accelerate the exodus of culturally alien Balkan peoples to the prosperous states of the European Union, NATO's Western Europeans continued to insist on the inviolability of the internal borders of the constituent republics of the former Yugoslavia. The result was a decision at Dayton to create the new nation-state of Bosnia-Herzegovina. [5] All ignored the reality that the wars of extermination waged since 1992 by various nationalist leaders seeking to carve out new states for themselves and their peoples had breathed new life into the older ethnic, cultural, and religious traditions that Tito had suppressed for fifty years. These points we re lost on the Western public, which concluded, once the conflict disappeared from nightly television reports, that the nasty ethnic war was over. The settlement reached through U.S. military and diplomatic action and without American casualties seemed a great achievement and became an important feature of the Clinton administration's program to sell U.S.-led operations in the Balkans to Congress and the American electorate. Only American and allied troops on the ground in Bosnia periodically reminded the viewing public of NATO's open-ended commitment there.

Bosnia, Five Years Later

Despite proclamations of progress towards Dayton's goals, ethnic hatreds and organized crime still swirl just beneath the deceptively calm surface and gain strength from disillusionment with the artificial state of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Consistent with the trend since Tito's death, democratic elections in the region have tended to reinforce separatism rather than encourage multiethnicity. In the April 2000 municipal elections that attracted the lowest voter …