The National Interest
Winter 2000

Extracts from Jumping to Confusions

by Adam Garfinkle

 

. . . "The triumph of democracy in Serbia last week may well rank as the most important international event of the post-Cold War era", Robert Kagan and William Kristol told us on October 8. It constitutes for the United States "a strategic triumph of the first order", for it is now "irrefutable that U.S. intervention in Kosovo, as well as our earlier intervention in Bosnia and the continued presence of U.S. peacekeeping forces were essential factors in the defeat of Milosevic."

If the Belgrade revolution is really such an epochal event, then it follows that U.S. interventions in the Balkans were epochal, too. But as the premise strains credulity, the conclusion suffers in consequence.

It is aesthetically pleasing that Slobodan Milosevic is fallen, but it is still far from clear that the problem he represented ever threatened any significant U.S. strategic interest. The Balkans are not, and never were, at the heart of Europe; anyone who thinks otherwise either cannot read history or a map. The worry that Balkan wars would spread to Central Europe or the Aegean was always exaggerated, and the argument that NATO would have collapsed had it remained passive before Serbian depredations became true only after Western leaders foolishly spoke and acted in ways that made it so.

Most likely, if the United States had let the Serbian dog lie it would be lying still–an ugly, decrepit and slightly rabid dog, true, but not an especially dangerous one for those able to keep their distance. Consider: as the wars of Yugoslav succession slithered on, the Serbian state was shrinking, not expanding, and its ability to jeopardize peace outside of the former Yugoslavia was shrinking with it. It had no ideology that appealed to others. Weapons of mass destruction were never involved. Serbia did not directly menace any American ally. And–contrary to common misuse of the word–there was no genocide in the Balkans, but a very brutal pre-twentieth century-style land grab not unlike many others in this and other parts of the world.

Neither was Milosevic the worst of the Yugoslav lot. He did win fair, democratic election at least once, which makes the claim that his fall has somehow introduced democracy to Serbia a little peculiar. Is a foreign country a democracy only when America approves of those elected? Or when it intervenes massively in the election campaign?

Aside from the exaggeration of the Serbian threat, there is the matter of what U.S. interventions have accomplished and are likely to accomplish in future. Yes, Milosevic is gone from power–though not yet from Serbian politics–and good riddance. But that will make building a viable, multi-ethnic Bosnian state only marginally easier, and it is very hard. It will not make removing Kosovo from its diplomatic suspended animation any simpler either. To the contrary, since it will be harder to deny Yugoslav sovereignty there with a "nice guy" like Vojislav Kostunica in office, NATO forces are liable to become "bad guys" in the eyes of the Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). The KLA being what it is, those forces are also liable to draw not only enmity but live fire. That the KLA has lost recent local elections to more moderate forces makes this not less but more likely. . . .

One should also resist exaggerating trouble. From Israel's point of view, Oslo was a calculated risk. Yitzhak Rabin, never known to be an impetuous man, was faced in 1993 with a choice between an untenable status quo and an uncertain leap into the future. To succeed, that leap rested on the possibility that enough trust might develop between self-interested Israeli and Palestinian leaderships to move away from positions of mutual negation.

It was a risk Rabin took not because he knew it would succeed, but because he knew it did not have to fail. Moreover, even if complete success proved elusive, Rabin believed that Israel would still be better off so long as it made no critical and unrecoverable security concessions. Israel could off-load responsibility for controlling a hostile population, improve its regional and international position, and enhance its own morale and unity in the knowledge that if the process failed the fault would not lay with Israel. That is why he believed that not to try would be worse than failure.

Did Rabin believe that a stable final status agreement was probable, however? Not likely, and if necessary he was ready to impose a "separation", its unilateralism derived from Moshe Dayan and its map from Yigal Alon. But Rabin knew that Israel could not impose separation without some degree of international and especially American acquiescence, and that required Israel to first demonstrate a maximal effort to reach contractual peace with the Palestinians.

In other words, from Israel's perspective the peace process was a calculated exercise in moral realism. It was not a utopian delusion, a case of unilateral withdrawal, a sign of Israel's loss of nerve, or a manifestation of post-Zionist political masochism, as various and sundry detractors now claim. Prime Minister Ehud Barak began his tenure in June 1999 with an attitude similar to that of Yitzhak Rabin, except that when Barak assumed office the utility of Oslo's interim logic had, in his view, come to an end. Three months or so would be enough to find out, he said, whether a stable final settlement was possible–for all the arguments were known and what remained was only the summoning of courage on both sides to make the tough decisions. . . .