America should stay out of future Bosnias

BOSNIA is seen as a foreign policy dilemma of unprecedented difficulty. Compared to the Cold War challenges (which Pres. Clinton has described with the benefit of a large dollop of hindsight as "clear and straightforward"), Bosnia is highly complex.

The sense of complexity has overwhelmed the debate about that troubled region. Numerous policymakers have thrown up their hands in despair, concluding that the situation defies rational analysis. Calm deliberation has given way to crisis meetings and to a polarization of policy preferences--at one end, the immediate withdrawal of all UN forces, including the units of the West European powers; at the other, massive reinforcements and strategic bombing. These, in turn, led to the Dayton, Ohio, peace talks and the dispatching of 20,000 U.S. troops to Bosnia as part of a UN contingent of 60,000.

It would be a rash commentator who suggested that any part of the Yugoslav crisis was straightforward. The large and expanding literature devoted to Balkan affairs unanimously attests to the region's complexities, and the Bosnian struggle certainly is no exception.

Nevertheless, that is no excuse for policy planners to abandon sober analysis. The fact of the matter is that we live in "An Age of Yugoslavias," as Jacques Attali titled an article in Harper's in January, 1993. If the U.S. is to avoid stumbling from crisis to crisis, it must be reminded of some of the common elements of the Bosnian conflict and the wider European situation. Three central factors stand out:

* Far from being exceptional, the war in the former Yugoslavia is a drearily ordinary manifestation of intra-communal violence typical of European history. The situation in Bosnia is no more complex, atavistic, or deep-seated than the many other European disputes waiting their turn to step into the spotlight.

* Those conflicts, however, do not pose the sort of direct threat to American security that major past adversaries such as Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, or the Soviet Union did. U.S. military involvement in such post-Cold War European conflicts, therefore, probably will attract little public support.

* Intra-communal problems frequently manifest themselves as civil conflicts, rather than wars between nations. Americans, including policymakers, will find it difficult to distinguish between friend and foe, right and wrong, and aggressor and victim.

In other words, Bosnia is not an aberration. It is the shape of the future in Eastern Europe and many other regions. That being the case, the American approach to European security (with its deep roots in Cold War dogma) needs to be rethought radically.

Current doctrine, evolved during the confrontation with the former Soviet Union, teaches that European security is indivisible--a threat to one state is a threat to all--and that the way to meet any threat is with massive counterforce. Experience in Bosnia has shown the limitations of both of those propositions. The war in Bosnia, terrible though it has been, has not threatened America's security.

Those lessons are not being learned, though. If Bosnia indeed is typical of future European security challenges, the need for rational analysis becomes all the more acute. Failure to draw the appropriate lessons from the Bosnian debacle will cause the U.S. to end up repeating the same mistakes elsewhere in Europe.

There are indications that this already may be happening. Instead of being sobered by the experience in Bosnia, American officials actively are seeking fresh fields for political-military engagement in Europe. They have instituted an ambitious program of extending the scope of U.S. obligations in actual and potential Bosnia-like disputes. The 1994 "Declaration of the Heads of State" from the NATO summit in Brussels, for example, starts by proclaiming that "our own security is inseparably linked to that of all other states in Europe." It then goes on to declare:

"In pursuit of our common transatlantic security requirements, NATO increasingly will be called upon to undertake missions in addition to the traditional and fundamental task of collective defense of its members, which remains a core function. We affirm our readiness to support, on a case by case basis in accordance with our own procedures, peacekeeping and other operations under the authority of the Security Council or the responsibility of the CSCE [Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe], including by making available Alliance resources and expertise."

Given that the CSCE (now the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) includes all of Western Europe as well as the whole of the former Warsaw Pact, the NATO declaration in theory extends potential American commitments well beyond their Cold War limits--even into the Transcaucasus and central Asia. The American people need to understand the implications of "peacekeeping and other operations," for they are far from reassuring. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that an American traveling in Central or Eastern Europe could find a potential Sarajevo in practically any city.

One prominent potential source of trouble is the Hungarian diaspora in Central Europe. After the defeat of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in World War I, the territory of Hungary was reduced by roughly two-thirds. Overnight, some 3,500,000 ethnic Hungarians found themselves residents, not of Hungary, but of sometimes unfriendly foreign countries, principally Romania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Ukraine. Today, there are 1,600,000 Hungarians in Romania (concentrated in Transylvania), nearly 600,000 in Slovakia, approximately 400,000 in the former Yugoslavia (principally in Vojvodina), and 170,000 in the transcarpathian region of Ukraine. Many Hungarians (by no means just extreme nationalists) seem to believe that the government in Budapest is responsible for all 15,000,000 Hungarians, not just the 10,500,000 who live in Hungary.

The potential for serious friction (attributable to Hungarian aspirations to undo the World War I peace settlement or to discrimination against Hungarian ethnic minorities) between Hungary and all of those countries is considerable. The Hungarian communities in Transylvania and Vojvodina, for instance, would not stand idly by if they were afraid that either Romanian or Serbian nationalism would erode their status. Tensions between Slovakia and Hungary also could erupt into violence. Slovaks blame the Hungarian minority for their country's political and economic malaise, and the Hungarians accuse the Slovaks of oppression. Those are precisely the sentiments the Serbs voiced before the breakup of Yugoslavia.

Elsewhere in Central Europe, Moldova displays many similarities to Yugoslavia. Historically, Moldova was Romania's third province (Transylvania and Walachia were the other two), but, during the Ottoman Empire, it was the subject of territorial haggling between Russia and the Turks. Romania was compelled to cede Moldova to the U.S.S.R. as part of the Soviet-Nazi non-aggression pact of 1939. The historical capital of Moldova, Lasi, is located in modern Romania. Seeking to foment ethnic tensions in the U.S.S.R. border regions as part of a divide-and-rule strategy, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin grafted onto Moldova a thin slice of Ukrainian territory on the east bank of the Dniester River. Today, the leadership of that area is predominantly Russian--despite the fact that ethnic Russians are only the third largest population group after ethnic Moldovans and Ukrainians.

Since the demise of the Soviet empire, Romanian culture has been making a comeback in Moldova; for example, the Cyrillic alphabet is being replaced by the Latin. Reacting to those developments, ethnic Russians have sought independence for a self-styled "Transdniester" republic. To that aim, units from the Russian 14th Army unofficially are assisting the Transnistrians.

The Moldovan government has gone to great lengths to accommodate the aspirations of the Transnistrians and has kept its distance from Romania. Similarly, the government in Bucharest has been at pains not to encourage reintegrationist tendencies in Chisinau. Still, the balance is delicate. In Romania, the nationalist Romanie Mare (Greater Romania) party keeps expansionist hopes alive; in Moldova, the Transnistrian population may seek to split off permanently. Once again, the potential for territorial fragmentation parallels that of former Yugoslavia.

The pattern of intra-communal suspicion is repeated in the Baltic states. Ethnic Balts commonly regard the Russian settlers as colonists. About 1,400,000 Russians live in Latvia and Estonia, constituting 30% of the population in the former and 34% in the latter. Disagreement over the rights of ethnic Russians to participate as full citizens in those states provides constant opportunity for nationalists both in the Baltic republics and Russia to foment mischief.

Crimea provides another example of the vagaries of European cartography. Crimea was conveyed to Ukraine in 1954 by a casual Kremlin decree, ironically enough to mark the 300th anniversary of Ukrainian liberation from Polish-Lithuanian rule. The majority of Crimea's population, however, is Russian. Commentators have described the Crimea as "the next Bosnia." At present, the U.S. strongly supports Ukraine's claim to Crimea.

Farther east, the violent dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan demonstrates the intricate crosscurrents of European history. In 1923, in furtherance of his objective of keeping the outlying parts of the Soviet empire in ferment against themselves, rather than against the center, Stalin transferred the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, then populated mainly by Christian Armenians, from Armenia to the predominantly Muslim Soviet republic of Azerbaijan. As Moscow's influence weakened, open warfare broke out in 1988. Hostilities have claimed more than 15,000 lives on both sides, spilled over into adjacent Azeri territories, and resulted in over 1,000,000 internal refugees in Azerbaijan.

That conflict possesses much of the same potential for a wider regional war that Yugoslavia did, including the fault lines between Christianity and Islam and the machinations of outside powers--in this case, Russia, Iran, and Turkey. There have been covert transborder assistance from neighboring states, rivalries among major international oil companies, and abundant humanitarian horrors. As in Bosnia, the distinctions between right and wrong are blurred to the point of indecipherability. Who is aggressor and who is victim in this tragedy? Reports on the war deliver diametrically opposed interpretations, depending on where they are filed from.

In Georgia, the situation is no less complex. In essence, nationalists who favor a unitary Georgian state are pitted against non-Georgian minorities in South Ossetia and the Muslim-inclined (though far from fundamentalist) Abkhazia region. The resulting violence has caused enormous population dislocation; 100,000 South Ossetians have fled to Russia's North Ossetia Autonomous Region. Russian troops have intervened forcibly to quell the fighting.

That list of potential flash points is by no means exhaustive. No mention has been made of Chechnya, for example, or of the other non-Russian enclaves inside Russia. The Institute of Geography at the Russian Academy of Sciences has identified 160 border disputes within the territory of the former Soviet Union, and the Stockholm International Institute for Peace has listed 30 current feuds in the Caucasus region alone.

Of course, not all the disputes necessarily will explode the way Yugoslavia did. In some areas, there are encouraging signs. The Romanian, Hungarian, and Moldovan governments are fully aware of the risks of ethnic tensions and are seeking to defuse potential flash points. Russia and Ukraine are negotiating constructively about Crimea's political status.

In all too many instances, though, armed conflict has broken out or lurks just beneath the surface--with grievances that are chronically vulnerable to inflammation by agitators. Washington's policymakers must analyze prudently and realistically how and where the ongoing or potential disputes fit into America's security calculations.

The indivisibility of security myth

When assembling the components of the 1947 Truman Doctrine, Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson spoke of Europe as a barrel of apples in which a single rotten one could contaminate the rest. The 1994 NATO summit declaration indicates that a similar, all-encompassing acceptance of the indivisibility of European security still predominates.

That point of view is increasingly obsolete. The former Soviet Union presented the U.S. with a threat that derived, in Pres. Dwight Eisenhower's words, from a "hostile ideology, global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method." Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's comments in 1961 made clear the wide-ranging nature of the threat. The victory of communism, he said, would be obtained by a series of "national liberation wars" in Africa, Asia, and Latin America that would act as "centers of revolutionary struggle against imperialism."

Given the intense and multifaceted nature of the Soviet challenge, there was credible evidence that security really was indivisible. Soviet probes--first in Greece and Turkey, then later in Angola, Afghanistan, Grenada, and Nicaragua--had a hostile global purpose that transcended the particular country in which they took place. The U.S. took action in those areas not because of their intrinsic importance, but because American officials concluded they represented the outlying skirmishes in a war that one day directly might threaten America's survival or independence.

The same political importance can not be attached to Bosnia and Bosnia-like conflicts, in spite of the enormous human suffering caused by such wars. Those struggles do not "matter" to the U.S. in the same way Cold War-era conflicts did. To pretend otherwise places policy formation on an unstable base. For instance, it has little effect on the U.S. which of the warring parties in Tajikistan--the Khojent, Kulab, Garm, or Pamir--comes out on top.

Today's ethnic conflicts are not being fought between two armies equipped with the latest technology. They are being fought village by village, street by street, door by door. Ask any Russian soldier who, despite total technological domination, finds himself fighting for his life in the back streets of Grozny.

Today's intra-communal struggles are uncivilized; cowardly tactics are the order of the day; no distinction is made between combatants and civilians; and the Geneva conventions do not apply. Under such circumstances, technological preeminence counts for little, and reliance on it is a cruel illusion.

Does the U.S. wish to enter today's conflicts on the terms in which they actually are being conducted? If so, the military's first consultants should be the police departments of some of America's more violent inner cities, for that is the kind of environment into which U.S. soldiers would be stepping. Helicopter gunships and advanced fighter aircraft have little value for persuading the gangs of south-central Los Angeles to coexist peacefully. It is doubtful that such sophisticated equipment will be any more successful in reconciling Serbs and Muslims, Hungarians and Romanians, Georgians and Abkhazians, or any other of Europe's feuding communities.

For all those reasons, American post-Cold War security policy in Europe finds itself hamstrung. Both doctrine and instruments are out of touch with the requirements of the real world. The doctrine is the old-fashioned indivisibility of security that is untenable in substance and unsupported by public opinion. The instruments are too modern. They are designed to fight a high-tech, 21st-century war when, in fact, the demands are much less sophisticated. Given that there are many more Bosnias lurking on or just below the horizon, the U.S. urgently needs to find a way out of its strategic confusion.

Washington's policymakers must return to basics. Americans always have been willing to support overseas intervention to combat a real threat to national survival and prepared to provide the human and financial resources needed to win. Conversely, they have shown little readiness to involve themselves in conflicts that lack a direct American security interest and have marginal prospects of clear resolution.

Bosnia and the Bosnia look-alikes fall into the latter category. American policymakers should not shirk from drawing the necessary conclusion that, without deep, long-lasting public support, American involvement in such conflicts, when it occurs at all, strictly should be limited and probably confined to offering background support to regional powers.

Such a policy of restraint would be wholly consistent with American diplomatic traditions and strategic calculations. It also would bring much-needed clarity to international conflict management. The current approach is based on the premise that the U.S. will act as omnipresent guarantor of global security. That expectation enables other powers to evade their responsibilities for policing their own regions. To avoid repeating the Bosnian experience, we need to face the world as it is, not as we might wish it to be.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Society for the Advancement of Education
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group