Madness in Kosovo
(Not to mention Washington)Day after day we confront these agonizing images from Kosovo. The polite term "refugees" somehow doesn’t quite capture the raw injustice these strangers a world away experience as they are unceremoniously herded across borders to be warehoused while others decide their fate. Gazing at this carnage of civility, it is only natural to wish violent revenge on Slobodan Milosevic and his reign of tyranny. No more diplomatic footsie with evil – let’s make the creep pay for his intransigent brutality. We have a bulging defense budget and we know how to use it.
A thirst for revenge may be an inescapable human reaction to Milosevic’s mischief, but it does little in the long run to civilize the community of nations or stabilize international security. Yet this is what passes for U.S. foreign policy in the late 1990s. The defense establishment is pretty good at dressing it up in the lofty rhetoric of strategic alliances, national interests, containment, and projection of force. But really it’s the same old same old: an indisputably sinister excuse for a leader abuses power, populace, and decency, provoking the U.S. into a frenzy of high-priced retaliatory violence. The testosterone starts flowing at Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon as we unleash F-14s, B-52s, cruise missiles, cluster bombs, attack helicopters, and other war toys. Grown men (it’s almost always men) in starched uniforms with shiny medals hold somber briefings at which they can hardly contain their glee as they display maps and photos and videos to prove that we really can blow up things with a $250 billion defense budget. You get the feeling little kids who like to put firecrackers in model cars are running the show.
But wait, you say, this Milosevic is one very bad egg – a tyrant who would sooner destroy his own people than relinquish control over them. Can we turn our backs on such wickedness? Isn’t military intervention the only available course of action to stop a barbarian with no inclination to listen to reason? The answer is both yes and no, and this is the basic dilemma of foreign policy and global security.
Yes, in the short run, a rogue leader who responds only to force invites a show of force. Milosevic walked away from a deal at the peace table at Rambouillet in February, and scoffed at threats of military retribution by NATO allies. The American motif is strong-arm displomacy backed up by threats of force – classic realpolitik stuff popularized by Kissinger, Reagan, and Bush over the last few decades. As a simple-minded defense strategy it seems to works reasonably well, and it keeps the military-industrial complex humming merrily along.
But as foreign policy seeking to move us toward a more peaceful and secure global community of nations it’s an unmitigated failure. We skip from crisis to crisis, hotspot to hotspot, tyrant to tyrant, playing the same strategic tune and living the same unsatisfying outcome. Lebanon, Libya, Panama, Haiti, Iraq, Somalia, Iraq again, Bosnia, Iraq again, Kosovo – some successes in purely military terms (bombs hitting their targets and all that), and a few catastrophies, but very little in the way of constructive nation-building that expands democracy or human rights.
And it goes without saying, as we traipse from crisis to crisis, that we pick our battles with great care (but little policy coherence). Any illusions that humanitarian concerns motivate U.S. policy are quickly deflated by reminders of Cambodia, Indonesia, Rwanda, Angola, Sudan, Turkey, China, Chechnya, and other recent human rights meltdowns too numerous to mention. The natural security establishment has become really quite adept at manufacturing explanations for why we venture forth with guns blazing here but not there.
In the case of Kosovo, we are told the national interest is implicated because our NATO commitments are on the line. This is national interest manufactured out of whole cloth. Our NATO commitments are on the line because we recklessly insisted on making ill-advised NATO commitments to intervene in the messy internal affairs of a non-NATO state. But hold on, we are told, this is Europe we’re talking about – and Yugoslavia’s instability threatens the alliance and ultimately life as we know it. Again, fantasy. Milosevic may be a schmuck, but he has yet to demonstrate that he is (or has the resources to be) an aggressively expansionist schmuck.
None of this is to minimize the authentic nightmare one very unsavory head of state can inflict on countless humans, or to dismiss the impulse to just do something about it by whatever means available. But where does it stop? Those who would vilify Bill Clinton for interventionist policies that seem improvised and without objective, exit strategy, or moral center would do well to keep in mind that they represent no fundamental departure from those of his Republican predecessors.
It is deeply depressing that the shining promise of international law, multilateral diplomacy and collective security that grew out of World War II has fizzled, half a century later, into a playground planet of bullies and enforcers writing the rules as they go. The Milosevics of the world – ruthless purveyors of savage nationalism – are the bad guys, no doubt about it. Well-intentioned U.S. policies may stop the bleeding now and then, but in the long run they do little to change the rules that guarantee this will all happen again and again. Warplanes are part of successful foreign policy only when they stay on the ground.
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