The war in Bosnia has occasioned the first significant debate over
foreign policy of the post-Cold War period. It has thereby done what
the war against Iraq did not do. The short-lived debate that attended
armed intervention in the Persian Gulf resembled in most respects the
debate attending armed intervention in the last decade or so of the
Cold War. All that was missing was the Cold War itself, and thus the
risk of armed conflict with the Soviet Union. In Congress, an
interventionist Republican party was pitted against a
non-interventionist Democratic party. In the broader public debate,
those urging war against Iraq were those who had supported armed
intervention on earlier occasions, while those who opposed going to
war were those who had opposed resorting to force on these same
occasions.

In the case of Bosnia, the identity of the participants has changed.
In Congress the debate over whether to pursue an interventionist
course has not followed party lines. The Democrats can no longer be
identified with an anti-interventionist position. The same is true of
a number of public figures who had once been reliably
anti-interventionist. Indeed, some of the most insistent criticism of
both the Bush and Clinton administrations for failing to give
military support to the Bosnian Muslims has come from those whose
anti-interventionist disposition had long been taken for granted.
Thus what Senator Joseph Biden has come to symbolize for the liberal
democrats in Congress, Anthony Lewis has come to symbolize for
liberal expression in the media.

The debate over America's course in the Balkans has also aroused the
emotions and passions of participants in a way the earlier debate
over war in the Gulf did not. There is an intensity of feeling over
Bosnia that was not apparent over Kuwait. It may be seen in the
heightened rhetoric that has become almost commonplace among critics
of the American government's "failure" to date to come to the aid of
Bosnia's beleaguered Muslims. For this failure, Leslie Gelb has
written, "Bosnian Muslims will pay with their lives, and Americans
with their faith." The loss of our soul, it is argued, will be
matched by the sacrifice of the nation's vital interests. Albert
Wohlstetter has found in our recent record in the Balkans "the worst
performance of the democracies since World War II-and the most
dangerous." One must go back to the debate over Vietnam to find
statements of comparable intensity.

Although the war in Bosnia has aroused such strong emotions and
passions, it has not evoked comparable appeals for the sacrifice of
blood and treasure. With very few exceptions, those who have called
for American intervention have been careful to emphasize the quite
modest costs they are willing to pay in intervening. While insistent
that the interests at stake in Bosnia are very great, they are
equally insistent that these interests be secured at modest cost.

The debate over Bosnia has thus been marked by a disjunction between
interests avowed and costs rejected. It has also been marked by a
view of the war's origins that must yield a distorted picture of the
interests that are at stake. The conflict is not, as it has been so
often depicted, a conventional case of aggression by one state
(Serbia) against another (Bosnia). The insistence upon seeing its
origins in these terms must distort its true nature, obscure the
objectives of an intervention, and lead to a view of the interests at
stake in the war that is misleading and unpersuasive. It is not the
repelling of aggression as such, nor the maintenance of that
ill-defined abstraction known as "world order," that constitute the
interests at stake in Bosnia. Neither is it the need to appease a
Muslim world that, in the absence of western intervention in Bosnia,
stands ready to succor Bosnia's Muslims. The great interest at stake
in Bosnia is neither more nor less than order and stability in
post-Cold War Europe. If a persuasive case cannot be made on these
grounds, it probably cannot be made at all.

Origins and Interpretations

Despite the complex and tangled history of Bosnia and Herzegovina,
the origins of the war in that republic of Yugoslavia proceeded from
causes that were not inordinately complex. The true cause of the war
was the structure of reciprocal fears that existed within Bosnia on
the eve of the conflict. Each group feared domination by others, and
not unreasonably so. For the Muslims, the prior secession of Croatia
and Slovenia had left them, in effect, as members of a Greater
Serbia, and they not unnaturally feared that their interests would
suffer badly in a rump Yugoslavia dominated by the Serbs. In such an
eventuality, the repressive acts that the Serbs had committed in
Kosovo might be duplicated in Bosnia; and independence appeared as
the only escape from this fearful prospect. The Serbs reasoned in
essentially the same way. As part of Yugoslavia, their interests
would be secure; as a minority in a unitary Bosnian state dominated
by the Muslims, they foresaw a repetition, at best, of the
discrimination they had suffered in Kosovo when its status was
elevated in the 1974 Yugoslav constitution-and, at worst, of the
horrors they had suffered during World War II when Bosnia formed part
of the Nazi supported Croatian Ustasha state.

The Croatians, for their part, wanted out of Yugoslavia for the same
reason that the Muslims did, and wanted out of Bosnia for reasons not
dissimilar to those of the Serbs. Their vote for independence in the
March 1992 referendum, as Alexsa Djilas has observed, did not betoken
support for a unitary Bosnian state; on the contrary, their exit from
Yugoslavia was the means by which they might gain entry into newly
independent Croatia. Their attitude was an ominous portent, because
it meant that a majority of the population in Bosnia and Herzegovina,
and the best armed part at that, was opposed to the creation of this
new state. The Serbs and Croats in Bosnia had the support of the two
nationalities that had traditionally contended for dominance in
Yugoslavia. From the beginning, it was evident that the independence
of Bosnia and Herzegovina could only be secured if it could muster
large-scale support from the international community.

There is nothing mysterious about the calculations of the three
national groups. Each group nursed historic grievances, some more
recent than others, but all of which were felt with passionate
intensity. The utter incompatibility of their respective interests
was such that war was far and away the most likely outcome of
Bosnia's secession from Yugoslavia. Indeed, one needs hardly to
invoke the notorious tribal hatreds and violent propensities of the
Balkan peoples to account for the war, for secession has nearly
always in history been attended with armed violence. It was so on the
two occasions when it was attempted in our own experience as a nation
(in 1776 and 1860). Daniel Webster's famous assertion in
1850--"Peaceful secession, Sir! Your eyes and mine are destined never
to see that miracle"-stated a fact applicable not only to the
American Union but to the normal experience of all states, which
hardly allowed any other conclusion but that secession was and would
ever be an act of war. The experience of the Soviet Union should not
mislead us on this score, for the peaceful breakup of a state is far
more the exception than the rule-a miracle, at odds with the normal
course of events.

The origins of the Bosnian war are thus relatively simple. What is
exceedingly complex is how the descent into savage fighting might
have been averted; still more difficult is how the war, once started,
might have been-and might yet be-stopped. That the policy which was
adopted, in all its twists and turns, has been an utter failure is a
point that need hardly be labored. The role played by the Western
powers in attempting to put an end to the war has many critics but
few defenders. The judgment that historians will reach about the
diplomatic record of the past two years will doubtless be tempered by
the sheer intractability of the problems that were faced, but that it
will be a harsh one seems altogether likely.

In assessing the role played by the United States in attempting to
put an end to the war, attention must first be drawn to the way in
which the American government interpreted the origins of the
conflict, for this interpretation dictated in critical respects its
diplomatic posture. The American government's explanation stressed
that the war was caused above all by Serbian aggression. The
indictment rested fundamentally not on the violations of the laws of
war that the Serbs have undoubtedly committed on a lavish scale, but
on the decision to use force in the first place. In the U.S. view,
the war itself was a crime. Although the Serbs' violations of jus in
bello have been seen to confirm and compound their violation of jus
ad bellum, the presumed existence of the aggression itself has played
a decisive role in shaping the policy of the U.S. government. The
assumption, moreover, that the war has been one of Serbian aggression
has been generally accepted in the United States; the debate over
intervention has not fundamentally turned over the existence of
aggression against an internationally recognized state, but over the
potential costs of U.S. military action to reverse it.

The validity of this widespread consensus rests primarily on the fact
that Bosnia and Herzegovina gained recognition as an independent
state in early April 1992, and that all subsequent support which
Belgrade provided to the Bosnian Serbs constituted an illegal
intervention in Bosnia's internal affairs. Yet the manner in which
independence was achieved and manner in which recognition was
accorded were themselves highly questionable. In holding a referendum
on March 1, 1992, in which a majority voted to secede from
Yugoslavia, Bosnia satisfied part of the criteria laid down by the
European Community and the United States for achieving recognition
(with the West also exacting from the Sarajevo government a declared
respect for minority rights), but the referendum, boycotted by the
Serbs, was itself a violation of the 1974 Yugoslav Constitution.
That constitution, like its predecessors, had conferred a right of
secession but made it dependent on the mutual agreement of the
nations composing Yugoslavia. It was based, that is to say, on the
notion of a concurrent majority of the constituent nations, not on
simple majoritarianism; to move to secession without the consent of
the Serbs was a plain violation of its terms.

If the act of secession was illegal within the terms of the Yugoslav
constitution, was it nevertheless legal from the standpoint of
international law? Is it now, in other words, an accepted principle
of international law that a majority of the population within a well
defined province or constituent republic, if it so wishes, has a
right to secede from an existing state? There is little to conclude
that there is. No charter, treaty, or convention confers such a
right, and for the reason that a great many states (and nearly all
those of a multi-ethnic or -religious kind) would be incapable of
maintaining themselves if such a right existed. References to the
right of self-determination in documents such as the International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights have not been understood as
conferring a right of secession. Were the case otherwise, we would
have the inexplicable phenomenon that a large number of states had
entered a suicide pact when they signed the covenant, and no known
rule of legal interpretation would allow such an absurd construction.

These considerations establish that the recognition of Bosnia's
independence itself constituted an illegal intervention in
Yugoslavia's internal affairs, to which Belgrade had every right to
object. The contrary view may only be asserted on the debased view
that international law is whatever the United States and the Security
Council says it is and that we are free, like an Alice in the grip of
deconstructionism, to have words mean anything we like. These
considerations do not establish that Bosnia's Muslims had no justification for
their secession, but rather that the justification, if
it existed, must be based on grounds other than those of law (whether
municipal or international). Appeal must be made, in other words, to
the natural right of revolution. But as Jefferson wrote in the
Declaration of Independence, this right is not an unqualified one:
only a "long train of abuses & usurpations" can justify a decision to
throw off established government.

Ironically, it has been the advocates of large-scale intervention,
and indeed the Izetbegovic government itself, that have provided the
most persuasive evidence that Jefferson's threshold was not met in
the Bosnian case. For the picture that advocates of intervention have
drawn of the almost idyllic relations that prevailed among Serbs,
Croats, and Muslims before the war severely undercuts the view that
the Muslims had suffered the degree of oppression necessary to
justify the natural right of revolution. It would be more accurate to
say that the Muslims had a reasonable anticipation that they would
suffer such oppression if they remained within the rump Yugoslavia;
they acted, that is to say, against "tyranny anticipated" rather than
"tyranny inflicted" (just as, in fact, the American colonists had
done). That anticipation could not but appear as utterly compelling
to the majority of the Muslims; all that has happened since the war
broke out confirms it. What should draw objection, however, is the
assumption that whereas the Muslims had every reason to fear living
in a state dominated by the Serbs, the Serbs had no reason to fear
living in a state dominated by the Muslims. That assumption is
fundamentally implausible; it is, nevertheless, the unspoken
assumption of the American government's position and of the dominant
consensus in the United States regarding the origins of the war.

Shifts and Reversals

Before considering the consequences this American interpretation of
the origins of the war had on the course of events in Bosnia,
attention may first be drawn to the extremely awkward, and yet almost
entirely unremarked, position in which it placed U.S. diplomacy. By
the spring of 1992, our diplomacy was clearly directed toward the
breakup of Yugoslavian territorial integrity on the basis of
plebiscitary majorities in each of its constituent republics. Having
previously taken the position, as James Baker did in Belgrade in the
summer of 1991, that the United States favored the preservation of
Yugoslavia's territorial integrity, American diplomacy did a sharp
turn and pronounced itself in favor of Yugoslavia's partition. Once
this partition had taken place, however, we once again insisted that
the territorial integrity of the new states was something sacred and
inviolable. Having defiled the principle of territorial integrity,
the American government immediately rediscovered it in all its
purity. Thereafter, any suggestion that these new boundaries be
changed was subsequently met by the insistence, in the exasperated
voice of outraged virtue, that to do so challenged the very basis of
world order.

The reasons for this last attitude are clear. The shift in American
policy toward Yugoslavia took place immediately after the breakup of
the Soviet Union. Concerned primarily as they were with the potential
for violence that this breakup might bring, and thinking of Russia as
they considered Yugoslavia, American diplomatists searched for the
means by which that potential might be mitigated. The parallels
between the two situations, indeed, were eerily exact. Russia had her
"famous twenty nine millions" outside the mother country; Serbia had
a comparable percentage outside its borders. It seemed a sound
approach to adopt the same policy toward both. Whatever the merits of
this approach as applied to Russia, however, it was an unmitigated
disaster as applied to Yugoslavia.

The new found reverence for territorial integrity may well have
played a crucial role in triggering the conflict in Bosnia. It is
undoubtedly the case that the United States and the European
Community encouraged the Izetbegovic government to hold the
referendum on secession in the first place. It also appears to be
true that the United States encouraged Izetbegovic to reject the
cantonization formula that had been agreed upon at Lisbon, under ec
mediation, in March 1992. Izetbegovic's repudiation of this agreement
on returning to Sarajevo was the immediate trigger for the war.
Whether the Muslim leader repudiated this agreement because of
pressure from militants at home, as Glenny has said, or because he
understood America's advice to reject it as an implicit pledge of
military support, remains unclear. Given the distribution of military
power in Bosnia at the time, the only way to make sense of
Izetbegovic's decision is to assume that he did believe that the
United States would make good on his military inferiority; the
support Izetbegovic received from the United States to oppose
cantonization may well have given him the confidence to take this
fateful step. Certainly, the mournful voices coming out of Sarajevo
once the war broke out attest to a sense of deep betrayal on the part
of the Muslims.

The war may have occurred in any event. The Lisbon formula was vague
in crucial respects, and contained no agreement respecting the
boundaries of the three cantons. Extremists on all sides were certain
to raise formidable objections to it. Whatever weight its rejection
is assigned in bringing on the war, however, cannot detract from the
judgment that American diplomats acted in an extremely irresponsible
manner if, as reported, they advised Izetbegovic to reject the Lisbon
formula. If war was to be averted, an agreement respecting
cantonization was the last step at which it might have been. That the
United States both encouraged the Muslims to take the steps that led
toward war, and then subsequently abandoned them once the war broke
out, is a damning indictment of American diplomacy--and one,
moreover, that is likely to receive the assent of virtually all sides
in the debate over intervention. Either we should not have encouraged
them or we should not have abandoned them; it is difficult to think
of a plausible defense for having done both.

Once fighting started, the understanding of the war that attributed
it fundamentally to Serbian aggression had an equally bad effect on
the diplomatic posture the United States adopted towards settling it.
The passions and hatreds unleashed by the war were such that
territorial partition almost immediately became the only basis on
which a compromise settlement might be reached. Yet the United States
consistently opposed all such proposals. A compromise settlement was
ruled out by the terms of the UN resolution passed in late May 1992,
under American prompting, which called for the disarmament of all
irregular forces and the withdrawal of the Yugoslav federal army
(JNA) from Bosnian territory. Only one reading of these resolutions
was possible, and this was that they required as a condition for
lifting the sanctions imposed on Serbia the establishment of the
police power by the Sarajevo government over the whole territory of
Bosnia and Herzegovina. Thereafter, the Bush administration opposed
the interest expressed by London and Paris in a territorial partition
before the August 1992 London conference. The incoming Clinton
administration's opposition to the Vance-Owen plan was of a piece
with this policy. The American interpretation of the war as one of
Serbian aggression has made any compromise settlement vulnerable to
the charge of rewarding aggression. As such, it precluded a
negotiated settlement, and made it inevitable that the war would be
decided by sheer military power.

The effects of this interpretation of the war on Serbia are also
deserving of note. The reaction of Milosevic to the full court press
he confronted from the United States and the international community
was to abandon formally the claim of a Greater Serbia, while keeping
it up in fact. In the hope, apparently, of avoiding UN sanctions,
Serbia and Montenegro accordingly established a new state of
Yugoslavia and simultaneouslyrecognized the independence of Croatia
and Bosnia. The JNA was formally withdrawn from Bosnian territory
while at the same time its weapons, stores of ammunition, and most of
its men passed to the control of the Republika Srpska. These
maneuvers had about them a farcical character. It was easily
documented that Serbia continued to give support to the Bosnian
Serbs; denials of this fact by Milosevic only confirmed his
reputation as a liar. He was forced into this absurd position by the
attitude taken by the international community, which stood foursquare
behind the claim that Bosnia's secession was legal and that
Yugoslavia had no right to prevent it by force. The effect, however,
on the conduct of the war was pernicious. However bad the JNA's
record had been in the Croatian war and in the beginning stages of
the war in Bosnia, it had a better record than that of the Serbian
irregular forces; to disband it was to invite an increase in the
number of vile atrocities that have distinguished the war's conduct.
This decision also weakened the link between Belgrade and the Bosnian
Serbs, and made it more difficult for Milosevic to apply the kind of
pressure on them necessary to reach a settlement.

Perhaps the most paradoxical effect that this understanding of the
origins of the war had was on the prospect that the United States or
the international community might use force to limit Serb territorial
claims. For one thing, it made it much more difficult to reach a
consensus either at the United Nations or within the Western alliance
on the possible limited use of force. Given the objectives that
flowed directly from the definition of the conflict as unadulterated
Serbian aggression, it was evident that any limited use of force
would leave unsatisfied the larger objective of "restoring" Bosnian
territorial integrity, and that after the first drink, to paraphrase
John F. Kennedy, it would be necessary to take another. If the
objective were the disarmament of Serbian militias throughout Bosnia,
it was a moral certainty that the Serbs would resist this through
force, and that the objective could only be achieved through a major
war. Just as the Americans were capable of vetoing diplomatic
measures that pointed toward partition, the Europeans (and Russia)
were capable of vetoing steps that pointed toward such a war. The end
result, of course, was a stalemate at the UN and within the Alliance
in which fervid denunciations of the war were paired with measures
that held out no prospect of ending it on terms conformable to those
laid out in UN resolutions.

The skepticism of the U.S. military toward any intervention in Bosnia
was reinforced by the same considerations. By virtue of the overly
ambitious objectives that the American understanding of the conflict
entailed, every proposal to use limited force was highly vulnerable
to the objection that it would not satisfy the aims American
diplomacy had laid down. For the limited use of force, when paired
with these highly ambitious goals, would have succeeded in ensuring
precisely the kind of objective that the diplomatists had deemed
totally unacceptable. There was no plausible end game in this
scenario. Escalation was written all over it. Even had the JCS been
willing to swallow its understandable reservations toward any kind of
military involvement in the Balkans, it would not and could not
digest the proposition that U.S. military forces be committed in a
way that left a huge gap between the military means proposed and the
political ends embraced.

"Lift and Strike"

In the debate over intervention, the principal alternative to the
course followed by western policy in the past year has come to be
known as "lift and strike"--lifting the arms embargo against the
Sarajevo government and striking Serbian forces with American
airpower. There have been variations in the views of the numerous
adherents to this approach, with some suggesting that Serbia proper
be bombed immediately and others insisting that the first step ought
to be targeting gun emplacements surrounding Sarajevo, while the
threat of escalation to Serbia is held in reserve. Whatever their
overall merits, the various options recommended for the use of
airpower have been relatively clear; this is not true, however, of
the "lift" portion of the strategy. How and where the training of
Bosnian Muslims would take place, who would supply the arms, their
method of delivery into Bosnia--these and other questions, however
critical, have remained generally obscure. This is true not only of
most commentaries in the media but also of the Clinton administration
itself. The Clinton plan called for air strikes in Bosnia proper and
neither disavowed nor threatened further aerial escalation. What it
intended to do beyond lifting the legal prohibition at the UN on
shipments of arms to the Muslims, however, remained unclear.

Whether this initiative, the culmination of months of indecision on
the part of the incoming administration, was seriously meant cannot
be known with assurance. The deliberate manner in which the decision
was reached, the pallid message that Warren Christopher delivered on
his "consultations" with European allies, did not bespeak great
conviction. It had the air of a proposition uttered in an academic
seminar, an opinion among conversationalists in the liberal arts,
that was to be weighed, sifted, analyzed, amended, and indeed perhaps
rejected if sufficiently serious flaws (admitted, of course, to
exist) might be found in it. Clinton's tactics resembled more than a
little those employed by Eisenhower during the Dien Bien Phu crisis
of 1954, when the president used the search for a consensus in
Congress and among the allies as the means of killing a plan of
military intervention. Clinton appears to have followed a similar
tack in the Bosnian crisis, and may indeed (as a careful student of
Vietnam) have had the Eisenhower precedent in mind.

The mysteries associated with this initiative are not exhausted by
whether it was seriously meant by Mr. Clinton. The most peculiar
feature of "lift and strike" was the disparity between the limited
means that were proposed and the stakes presumed to exist. This
disparity has characterized most American commentary on the crisis.
Advocates of intervention have nearly always combined a description
of the crisis that recalled the 1930s with a fastidious aversion to
the use of American ground forces that recalled the 1970s. If this
aggression of the Serbs approached, in sheer evil, the worst crime of
the century, a rather more robust conclusion than "lift and strike"
would seem inexorably to follow. Yet, for nearly all commentators,
and for the Clinton administration itself, it did not follow.

In assessing the plausibility of "lift and strike," it is necessary
to recur again to the objectives to which this two-pronged strategy
would have been married. The plan, or something like it, had been
promised to the Muslims in exchange for their grudging support of the
Vance-Owen plan; the attempt to change the balance of forces on the
ground in Bosnia might therefore plausibly be read as an attempt to
provide the Sarajevo government with sufficient military leverage to
obtain an approximation of the territorial lines that had been
contemplated in that settlement. But since the Clinton administration
had itself made clear on coming into office that it considered Vance
Owen seriously defective, on the grounds that it rewarded aggression,
and since the Izetbegovic government clearly adhered to the same
opinion, it seems fair to infer that the plan of intervention, if
such it can be called, anticipated a change in military possession
well beyond that contemplated in the Vance-Owen plan. The larger
political objective of "restoring" Bosnia's territorial integrity had
not been formally abandoned, and there was strong U.S. support for
arraigning Serb leaders in war crimes trials. As the main precedents
for such action were the war crimes trials after World War II, which
were only made possible because of the complete defeat and occupation
of Germany and Japan, it was not implausible to give a rather
expansive reading to the war aims the United States might pursue.

How far these objectives would have reached is unclear; what is clear
is that the Serbs would have seen this intervention as being highly
injurious to their vital interests and would have fought it
tenaciously. This may appear a less than surprising conclusion, but
it had several important implications. That many of the arms would
have to pass through Croatia (which had by this time repudiated its
former uneasy alliance with the Muslims) was perhaps the least of the
difficulties. Of greater importance was that whatever areas chosen
for the receipt of arms and for training would have become highly
significant military targets. The plan would have ensured that enemy
forces (probably the Croats as well as the Serbs) had a vital
interest in attacking, and no interest in respecting, any safe haven
in central Bosnia. Given their military dominance, a race would
likely have set in between the ability of the Serbs to render these
areas militarily untenable and the ability of the U.S. to prevent
this result. It was almost wholly implausible to believe that this
result might be achieved with airpower alone. Yet the use of U.S.
ground forces to prevent this result, not only in the Clinton plan
but in most such plans, was precluded.

The situation would have produced strong pressures on the United
States to escalate the air war. Attacks on Serbia itself, which a
large number of the advocates of intervention (though not the Clinton
administration itself) had always advocated, would almost inevitably
have followed. Whether these attacks would have reached Belgrade's
infrastructure, as some proposed, is unclear; that this was seriously
suggested is a depressing commentary on the expedients to which the
mismatch between our high objectives and our unwillingness to expose
American forces seems regularly to lead. It does seem clear, in any
case, that carrying the air war into Serbia would not have ended the
conflict, and that its only effective function would have been to
punish the Serbs. Taken together with the stated aims of policy,
"lift and strike" promised nothing so much as a further enlargement of the doughnut
of "Lebanonization", narrowing the inner circle and extending the outer one,
potentially at grave cost to our real interest in European order.

What is at Stake?

It is a striking feature of the debate over the Balkan war that the
critically important issue of interest has only seldom been
seriously addressed. When interest has not simply been
denied or subordinated to humanitarian claims, it has more
often than not been invoked in terms of universal principle.
Thus it has been contended by many urging America's
intervention in the conflict that the vital national interest at
stake in Bosnia is nothing less than world order. On this view,
the principle forbidding aggression is the very basis of the world
order, and it requires that Serbia's aggression against Bosnia be
repelled. The debate over interest has been carried on between
those entertaining radically opposed positions, between those
who find very little at stake and those who find almost everything
at stake, between those who do not see beyond Bosnia and
those who soar over the Balkans and Europe and see the
the world. As a result,  the critical middle ground of interest,
Europe, has been neglected.

The inadequacy with which interest has been considered
in the debate over Bosnia is equally apparent in the
unfolding of American policy.While the Bush
Administration did consistently oppose any partition  
of Bosnia, it made very little effort to clarify the interests at  
stake in supporting Bosnia's territorial integrity. A policy of  
encouraging the Muslims to resist any kind of feasible settlement  
with the Serbs, which necessitated accepting a partition of some  
sort, was attended by the refusal either to give the Muslims any  
active military support or even to assist them in obtaining arms from  
abroad by ending the UN embargo on arms.

The Clinton administration came to office highly critical of its  
predecessor's record, particularly the Bush Administration's  
failure to work toward lifting the arms embargo. It did not appear to  
come to office with a clearer view of the nation's interests in the  
Balkan war. Mr. Clinton's view of the conflict had always been  
marked by a certain confusion. Intent as a candidate on helping the  
Bosnians, he was also determined that we must not get involved in the  
quagmire. This insistence that help must be given but involvement  
avoided has persisted. On the eve of deciding upon the pursuit of a  
"lift and strike" policy in Bosnia, in the spring of 1993, Mr.  
Clinton was still determined that "The United States is not, should  
not, become involved as a partisan in a war."

Given this insistence upon altering the course of the conflict while  
standing aside from it, of becoming involved while remaining  
withdrawn, the president's failure to articulate the nation's  
interests consistently and persuasively in the Balkan conflict is not  
surprising. Occasionally, Mr. Clinton has insisted that our interest  
is strictly humanitarian. Taken by itself, however, it has never been  
clear why this should constitute an interest sufficient to justify  
American intervention, for if this is the basis the number of cases  
in which it ought to be applied is very large indeed.

On only one public occasion has the president given a considered  
statement of the interests at stake in the Balkan conflict. Speaking  
before a World Bank conference on May 7, 1993, Mr. Clinton declared:

The Serbs' actions over the past year violate the principle that  
internationally recognized borders must not be violated or altered by  
aggression from without. Their actions threaten to widen the conflict  
and foster instability in other parts of Europe in ways that could be  
exceedingly damaging. And their savage and cynical ethnic cleansing  
offends the world's conscience and our standards of behavior.

It does not help in assessing the administration's position that  
this statement has since been contradicted, and on more than one  
occasion, by Mr. Clinton's secretary of state. While the president  
in the above quoted address stated that the nation does have  
"fundamental interests" at stake in the Bosnian conflict, his  
secretary of state has declared that the war "does not involve our  
vital interests." The war in Bosnia, Mr. Warren Christopher has  
explained, involves our "humanitarian concerns" only, not our  
strategic interests. Indeed, having decided to distance themselves  
from the war as a result of their failure to persuade the European  
allies to support a "lift and strike" policy, both the president  
and the secretary of state began to characterize Bosnia as a civil  
rather than an international conflict. The change, though not  
consistently adhered to, was indicative of what may yet prove to be  
the complete abandonment of a position to which the president had so  
recently appeared firmly committed.

Mr. Clinton may always reclaim the position he took in May. Having  
changed his position in the past, he may change it again. If he does,  
it will be to embrace a view that was flawed then and remains flawed  
today. It will not do to identify America's interest in the Balkan  
conflict primarily with the prevention of aggression. It will not do  
if only because the war did not arise as a simple case of aggression  
and the endless repetition that it did will neither make it true nor  
persuade a skeptical public. Even if that view of the origins did  
gain more acceptance than might reasonably be expected, it still  
could not be counted on to support the anticipated costs of military  
intervention. It did not do so in the Persian Gulf, where the  
interest in oil was clear and compelling, and it would not do so in  
Bosnia. Nor would humanitarian concerns succeed where a world order  
interest had failed.

If there is a vital American interest at stake in the Balkan war, it  
is to be found not in world order but in European order. The great  
issue of foreign policy Bosnia has raised-or at least should have  
raised-is that of our interest and role in Europe, now that the Cold  
War is over. Earlier circumstances were such as to make our interest  
apparent and compelling. A Soviet dominated Europe, it was believed,  
would seriously endanger the security and independence of the United  
States. It would do so by virtue of the immense resources that a  
Soviet-dominated Europe would place at the disposal of a state that  
insisted on seeing us as their enemy. Beyond these considerations,  
the American interest in Europe extended to the preservation of a  
political and economic order in which free institutions would flourish.

All this ensured that whatever the differences we had with our  
European allies-whether over extra-European issues, over  
burdensharing, over strategy for meeting the Soviet threat, or even  
over what constituted the requisite degree of loyalty to the alliance  
itself-would be overcome by the need that each side of the Atlantic  
had for the other. In the phrase that was often used to characterize  
the transatlantic relationship, Europe and the United States shared  
a "community of fate", and although the phrase surely overstated  
the nature of the bonds between the two sides of the Atlantic, it  
also expressed a profound truth about a relationship of mutual  
dependency that did exist. It may be recalled that only a decade ago,  
during the Euromissile crisis, this truth was put to the test in  
circumstances that were seen by many American and Europeans alike as  
heralding a serious crisis in the alliance, even perhaps eventuating  
in its breakup. But the institution that was judged at the time by  
not a few expert observers as having become an "empty shell"
survived and went on to play a significant role in the concluding  
chapter of the Cold War.

It is a measure of the distance we have come in the very few years  
since the end of the Cold War that an American secretary of state can  
refer to a war that may well have serious consequences for Europe's  
stability as "a humanitarian crisis a long way from home, in the  
middle of another continent." It is perhaps a still more striking  
indication of the change in the relationship that formed the  
principal pillar of the post World War II order that Mr. Christopher  
can characterize America's role to date in the Balkan conflict as  
"proportionate to what our responsibilities are" and to insist  
that "we can't do it all." These statements, taken together with  
a corresponding pattern of behavior, raise the question: is Bosnia a  
portent of a readiness to abandon a once Eurocentric policy? And if  
it is, what is the rationale for so momentous a change? Mr.  
Christopher has said, and the president apparently agrees, that the  
Balkan war is primarily a European problem. But the evidence is  
abundant that it is a European problem that has already had a  
damaging impact on the credibility and integrity of the western  
alliance. It is also clear that the image of the European Community  
has suffered greatly from its failure to resolve satisfactorily the  
war being fought on its doorstep. Nor is it only the collective  
impotence of the Community that must cause concern, for the Balkan  
war has prompted the leading states of Europe to pursue separate and  
often conflicting policies toward the war in a manner reminiscent of  
a past that few wish to see revived.

Is an American government now to remain largely indifferent to these  
and other consequences of a failure to deal effectively and  
satisfactorily with the Balkan conflict? To respond that the conflict  
is primarily a European problem is to acknowledge that the possible  
consequences of failure do not engage our interest or, at any rate,  
do not engage our interest sufficiently to warrant committing  
ourselves militarily in a manner the American government has so far  
refused to do. But if this is the case, then a momentous change has  
indeed occurred in the nation's foreign policy. It has occurred not  
because our resources are limited and we cannot impose our will  
everywhere, all of which is certainly true, but because we have  
determined, consciously or unconsciously, that what was once our most  
vital interest no longer merits even the modest commitment (modest by  
former standards of the Cold War) that Bosnia might require. It no  
longer merits this commitment, not because the Europeans could  
themselves satisfactorily resolve the problems of Bosnia if they had  
sufficient will to do so, which is assuredly the case, but because we  
no longer have the interest to do so. We are playing a game with  
Europe that we have played before. During the Cold War, that game was  
always won by Europe, since the American interest in the security and  
independence of Europe in the end assured Europe of victory. The game  
has apparently changed, however, and Europe may now become the loser.

Europe would become the loser at a critical juncture in its history.  
In the wake of a bad outcome in the Balkans, one that left the door  
open to a wider conflict in southeastern Europe and that was  
productive of still greater disarray in the alliance, European  
stability would be put at risk. In the recriminations that would  
inevitably ensue, the United States could not be expected to withdraw  
entirely its military presence from Europe but its commitment to  
Europe would almost assuredly be weakened. So too, the EC would be  
further weakened. Having failed to act cooperatively and effectively,  
the major European states could be expected to fashion their own  
separate policies to deal with future instability in eastern and  
southeastern Europe. In these circumstances, the great problem of  
order in a post-Cold War Europe would almost surely be exacerbated.

That problem, at the heart of which is the question of how to  
accommodate German power with the least amount of tension and  
instability, has yet to be squarely addressed. It cannot be postponed  
indefinitely. Eventually, the most powerful state in Europe will  
entertain pretensions to a role and status commensurate with its  
power. In doing so, it is bound to stimulate the suspicions and  
unease of a continent that has not forgotten the past. In the absence  
of the United States, and of a still credible American military  
presence, how would Europe deal with the problem of German power?  
Simply to pose the question is tantamount to articulating the  
principal reason for maintaining the substance of the American  
relationship of the past half century with Europe. The withdrawal of  
America's power from and commitment to Europe would leave Germany  
dominant yet insecure. Indeed, its very dominance might well prove to  
be the principal source of its insecurity, for it could not fail to  
sense the fears others would entertain of its dominant role. A  
familiar cycle might set in, one that in the past has all too often  
resulted in an expansionist policy. That in this instance the  
expansion would take an economic rather than a military expression  
would not thereby render its consequences harmless. The fears of  
others might still prove strong enough to generate a rising  
instability and to deal a setback to European cooperation from which  
it would not recover.

It is difficult to believe that the American government is now  
indifferent to these prospects or that it is unmindful of the need to  
fit German power into a European order in which the constraints of  
the Cold War are no more. The balancing of German power and the  
reassurance of Germany's neighbors cannot be done without the  
continued commitment (and presence) of American power-a power that  
in the course of balancing German power would also serve to reconcile  
Europe to that power. Whether the United States is capable of playing  
this role may well be questioned. It is not one particularly  
congenial to the nation's diplomatic traditions. Nor does it accord  
with America's post World War II experience in Europe. That the  
nation would have to play this complex and difficult role at a time  
when its power in Europe will in any event be declining can only add  
to the difficulty of the task. Still, this is the task that will have  
to be addressed if America's interest in a stable European order is  
to be maintained. Yet it is this interest that the Administration's  
response to the conflict in the Balkans has placed in question. That  
response must raise profound doubt about America's continued  
willingness and ability to remain the ultimate guarantor of order in  
post-Cold War Europe.

It is painfully clear that the war in Bosnia provides an inauspicious  
occasion for reaffirming the continuity of the American interest in  
Europe. The circumstances attending any American intervention in  
Bosnia are such as to hold out the real possibility of failure, one  
that could prove disastrous for America's presence and future role in  
Europe. But passivity must also entail a price, and it is likely to  
be very high. Had American governments never deigned to take serious  
note of Bosnia, the risks of inaction might have been kept modest.  
This was not the course that was taken, however, and now the  
consequences of our previous actions must be faced.

The End Game

The  great defect of American policy toward Bosnia has stemmed from  
the disjunction between ends that were overly ambitious and means  
that were plainly inadequate to the stated objections. The  
alternative to the policy that was followed would have been to  
combine an insistence on limited ends with a determination to employ  
forcible means. An armed mediation conducted on the basis of a  
territorial partition would have had several advantages over the  
course which was followed. By tying the threatened use of force  
against the Serbs to limited territorial objectives, it would have  
offered the Serbs terms that, though falling well short of their  
maximal territorial aims, would nevertheless have respected their  
vital interests and provided them with a strong incentive toward  
reaching a compromise settlement. At the same time, it would have  
made clear at the outset to the Muslims that Western support was  
conditional upon their acceptance of the principle of partition,  
instead of encouraging the delusion-for delusion it was-that  
outside intervention would achieve their dream of establishing a  
unitary Bosnian state. Finally, had the American position been framed  
in these terms, it would have provided the basis for a unified and  
credible NATO strategy.

Whether the general elements of such a strategy can be reconstituted  
today may well be questioned. The disarray within the Western  
alliance, the contempt with which the Serbs have learned to treat  
Western threats of intervention, and the general deterioration of  
Muslim defenses have combined to produce a precarious situation on  
the ground. Nevertheless, there are changes in the American position  
that could make a real difference in the Bosnian end game, and that  
ought to be vigorously pursued.

The first is strong American support for the principle of territorial  
partition. No useful purpose is served at this late date by repeating  
the undoubted truth that partition sets a bad example and ought to be  
resisted wherever possible. For the more relevant truth is that it is  
the worst of solutions except when it is the only one. Given the  
ferocity of the fighting that has occurred, it is against nature to  
expect that the three nations can restore at any time in the near  
future the decent relations that once existed among them. With few  
exceptions, they cannot live side-by-side and must be separated.  
Resistance to partition also carries with it the signal disadvantage  
of weakening the connection between the Bosnian Serbs and Croats and  
their co-religionists in Belgrade and Zagreb. It would be far better  
from the standpoint of enforcing a settlement if the Serb and Croat  
entities in Bosnia proposed under the Serb-Croat partition plans were  
abolished and the territories they received in a settlement absorbed  
by the mother states. Any workable settlement must rest on the  
ability and willingness of Serbia and Croatia to rein in their own  
extremists; the establishment of separate Serbian and Croatian states  
within Bosnia works strongly against this criterion.

A territorial settlement that left the Muslims at the mercy of their  
enemies would evidently not constitute a satisfactory long-term  
solution. It should therefore be a basic objective of Western  
diplomacy to get for the surviving remnant of Bosnia as much  
territory as we can while providing it with credible military  
guarantees. Although it is difficult to speculate on the form these  
boundaries might take, a few guidelines are apparent. The Muslims  
ought to be accorded between 30 and 35 percent of Bosnian territory  
in east central Bosnia and Bihac, and they ought to be given  
Sarajevo. As the Serbs are a largely rural population and worked  
nearly 60 percent of the land before the war, it is not unreasonable,  
quite apart from their existing position of military dominance, that  
they be given a larger territorial share. Nor ought they to be denied  
a defensible corridor in the north linking Serb territories. By the  
same token, however, the largely urban character of the Muslim  
population, together with the success of the collective presidency in  
maintaining a multi-ethnic coalition, gives the Izetbegovic  
government a strong claim to Sarajevo, whose division would in any  
case provide a fertile ground for future controversy. On the  
indispensable condition that the Izetbegovic government accepts a  
territorial compromise, the United States and its allies should hold  
out for these terms and should be prepared to go to war if the Serbs  
and Croats will not agree to them. Such a threat cannot be confined  
to air strikes but must include a willingness to introduce  
substantial NATO ground forces into central Bosnia.

A settlement among the parties obviously provides the most desirable  
outcome of the Bosnian war. It should be that settlement at which  
U.S. diplomacy is primarily aimed even while we accept war against  
Bosnia's Serbs (and possibly against the Croats) as a possible  
outcome of our diplomatic posture. No such settlement is likely to be  
reached, however, in the absence of a willingness on the part of the  
Western powers to guarantee it. That such a settlement must include a  
definitive territorial resolution of the Serbo-Croatian conflict and  
the end of economic sanctions against Serbia seems clear. If it is to  
be politically effective and morally tolerable, it must also make  
adequate provision for the critical period of transition. It is in  
the first stages of a partition that the dangers to human life are  
greatest; the beginning stages of the agreement's implementation  
therefore require a large scale commitment of allied forces. Once the  
lines have stabilized, this force might be drawn down substantially,  
and its mission would change from ensuring the rescue, protection,  
and resettlement of civilians to policing clear borders. People would  
enjoy the right of going to, or staying in, the territories in which  
they felt safest.

However strong the case for American intervention, it remains a  
distressing fact that the kind of intervention that is most justified  
is also the one the United States seems least inclined to undertake.  
The most insistent advocates of intervention want a war of righteous  
indignation to "restore Bosnia" and punish the Serbs, a crusade  
that could only be carried out in defiance of our NATO allies. It  
would be supremely ironic were such advocacy to badly prejudice the  
possibility of containing the magnitude of the catastrophe befalling  
the Muslims, but such has been the record thus far. The maximalists  
on Bosnia imagine that their vehemence can do no harm if it pushes  
the government forward with a plan of intervention; they neglect to  
consider that the prospect of a war informed by maximalist aims  
inevitably provokes the passionate opposition of states with whom-
given the interests at stake-we ought and need to act in concert.  
Their heated rhetoric retards, rather than advances, the prospect of  
an intervention, and it has done so from the beginning.

Clinton's policy, by contrast, works within the constraints set by  
allies who despise the maximalists and maximalists who despise the  
allies; hence both its desire to key its threats of force to the  
lowest common denominator-the continuation of the humanitarian aid  
missions-and its unwillingness to embrace the principle of  
partition. Unfortunately, a policy so constrained is likely to  
succeed only in perpetuating the war through another winter. The  
American government badly needs to break the mold it has set for  
itself and pledge its power to a definitive settlement.