Washington Post - February 28, 1999
WHY THE BALKANS DEMAND AMORALITY Robert D. Kaplan
Several years ago, I was at a conference where intellectuals held forth about the moral responsibility of the United States in the Balkans. The Holocaust and humanist philosophers were mentioned in the course of the discussion. It was all very impressive. Then I took a cab back to the airport and the driver asked me, "If there's no oil there, what's in it for us?"
It was a question that none of the intellectuals had answered. Nor, sufficently, has the Clinton administration, even though it has been trying (and so far failing) to negotiate a Kosovo agreement that would put more American troops on the ground in the ex-Yugoslavia. The irony is that there is a good answer to why we are in the Balkans--a reasonable, albeit complex, one that has nothing to do with either the Holocaust or morality.
For years now, there have been two different views on the former Yugoslavia: a high-minded intellectual one and a pragmatic one that knows the limits of what the American public will tolerate. The Clinton White House, with its typical Democratic weakness for wanting to impress intellectuals, has been torn between these two outlooks. The result in the case of Kosovo has been moralistic bluster followed by hesitancy and inaction.
The intellectual point of view on the Balkans goes something like this: The war in Bosnia was brought about not by ethnic hatreds as much as it was by evil men, and it could have been stopped at any point along the way. Indeed, Moslems and Christians in Sarajevo have a long history of peaceful communal relations. There were Serbs fighting on the Bosnian side, and Bosnians fighting on the Serb side. Contradictions and ironies abound, and thus to categorize the fighting in the ex-Yugoslavia as a tribal war is to dehumanize individuals. Moreover, given the legacy of the Holocaust, the West has a particular responsibility to prevent another genocide in Europe. Otherwise, what were World War II and the Cold War really about?
Such a viewpoint is partly motivated by the fact that many in the baby-boomer generation have grown up with the false notion that World War II was fought to save the Jews--or should have been fought for that reason. But saving the Jews as a reason to justify the death of American GIs would not have sustained the Roosevelt administration for even one week of the war. What happened was that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the Nazis declared war on us--only then did we decide to fight. To pursue the line of thought that our mission in the Balkans is a moral one, however emotionally satisfying, is partially wrong and much beside the point. Tens of thousands of words and a shelf of books in recent years about our moral interest in the region do not add up to one sentence of national interest.
Obviously, if you look closely at Bosnia--as well as the Caucasus, Rwanda and other places--you will find that there is a lot more going on than just ethnic disputes. But that does not mean that the ethnic nature of those wars should be minimized. Every war is full of myth-breaking details. Nevertheless, generalizations are necessary or else discussion would be immobilized. It is only from bottom-line summaries that clear-cut policy emerges, not from academic deconstruction.
The fact is, there was a great war in this decade in the former Yugoslavia, and it was fought overwhelmingly along ethnic lines--lines that have a long and rich history. Of course, the war could have been short-circuited more quickly had the United States acted more decisively. But one of the reasons why it didn't--and still doesn't in Kosovo--is that neither the Clinton administration nor the intellectual community has articulated well a crystalline and naked national interest that the millions of ordinary Americans can immediately grasp--people like my cab driver who don't concern themselves with hair-splitting foreign policy discussions.
The media once made fun of James Baker when, as secretary of state, he said that the Gulf War was "about jobs." But Baker was far more successful in communicating a reason for sending American troops into harm's way than the Clinton administration has been regarding the Balkans. Had more of our troops died in the Gulf, the public would have stuck it out with the Bush administration. If 20 soldiers were killed tomorrow in a terrorist bombing in Bosnia, the Clinton administration would have to invent, generally from scratch, a national interest for being there.
The history of U.S. foreign policy on this point is undeniable: Moral arguments will sometimes be enough to get troops abroad, but as soon as they start taking casualties, an amoral reason of self-interest is required to keep them in place. Look at Somalia: Most of the public supported the U.S. intervention to feed starving people there, but wanted the troops home as soon as soldiers started to lose their lives, because no clear national interest had been established. We have had troops on the ground in Bosnia for three years now, and it is likely that we will continue to have troops in the region for years to come, so it is reasonable to assume that the U.S. military will eventually suffer casualties there. The American public has to be able to tolerate those casualties. Otherwise, our troops will be constrained to a point at which they will lose all credibility--if not in Bosnia then surely in Kosovo. With its inability to fully spell out an amoral self-interest--one that would make sense as a reason for putting American soldiers in harm's way--the administration is gambling on the hope that there never will be any casualties.
Right now, there are two choices in the Balkans--imperialism or anarchy. To stop the violence, we essentially have to act in the way the great powers in the region have always acted: as pacifying conquerors. The kind of moral solution that many yearn for is one that the Romans and the Austrian Hapsburgs knew well how to provide, one motivated by territorial aggrandizement for their own economic enrichment, strategic position and glory. Instead, in the Western Alliance, we basically have a bunch of people acting like labor lawyers, arbitrating a dispute between two sides so that everything will be perfectly clear on the ground, so that nobody will ever want to kill an American soldier. Because if that happens, our confidence-game-of-a-policy unravels. A moral solution to Balkan violence, like most moral solutions throughout world history, can only be provided by amoral interest. And that, I believe, exists. World Wars I and II both could have been stopped sooner, saving us countless lives and millions of dollars. The same is true in Bosnia, saving us the risk and expense of putting troops on the ground there. But Kosovo's violence could lead to something far more costly in terms of money and the lives of our soldiers: You see, Kosovo is smack in the middle of a very unstable and important region where Europe joins the Middle East. In fact, Europe is redividing along historic and cultural lines. Dangerous new alliances are forming, like before World War I. Preventing their growth means pacifying Kosovo.
Following the admission of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into NATO, there are two Europes now. There is a western, Catholic-Protestant Europe and an Eastern Orthodox Europe, which is poorer, more politically unsettled and more ridden with organized crime. That Orthodox realm has been shut out of NATO and is angrier by the day, and it is fiercely anti-Moslem. Greece and Turkey stare at each other through the eyes of missile guidance systems, each part of a dynamic and dangerous new cultural alliance. Theater war that fuses Balkan and Middle Eastern hatreds is not out of the question. Russia, which is pro-Greek, pro-Serb and anti-Turkish, bristles with irrationality and loose nuclear weapons. It could be drawn into any conflict. Greece is still a member of NATO, yes, but if the security situation in the Balkans deteriorates, it could be pulled further into this unacknowledged--yet psychologically real--Orthodox alliance.
Such dangers are, of course, hypothetical--just like many of those before the two world wars. Let's keep them that way by staunching the flow of blood in Kosovo.
If fighting continues there, it will probably destabilize neighboring Macedonia, which is ground zero for the age-old battle between Greek Orthodoxy and Turkish Islam. But Kosovo is crucial for a bigger reason. Healing the emerging divide in Europe--one that is potentially worse than the division of the Cold War because it is based on religion and culture--means taking at least one more Orthodox country (such as Romania or Bulgaria) into NATO. But that is impossible as long as Kosovo remains violent. In fact, fighting in Kosovo has geographically stranded Bulgaria because so much of Bulgaria's trade travels overland through southern Yugoslavia. Worse, both Romania and Bulgaria are fighting incursions of Russian-backed criminal groups: the Red Army of the post-Cold War world. Romanian and Bulgarian elites are deciding whether to pitch their tents with the Americans or the Russians, depending on which one seems to have more staying power in the region.
With the Middle East increasingly fragile, we will need bases and fly-over rights in the Balkans to protect Caspian Sea oil. But we will not have those bases in the future if the Russians reconquer southeast Europe by criminal stealth. Finally, if we tell our European allies to go it alone in Kosovo, we can kiss the Western Alliance goodbye.
It could be said, too, that occasional small wars and occupations are good for us. They allow our military and NATO to improve by experience, honing their skills for any truly major catastrophes ahead. (Eisenhower honed his analytical skills for World War II by helping to reorganize the Philippine army in the 1930s during our occupation there.) Without the Red Army in Europe, the various national contingents of NATO must now acquire common memories of serving together, or the alliance will dissolve. And NATO is still important because Europe and beyond are less secure than many believe. Besides, we are not bearing the burden of Bosnia and Kosovo; we are sharing it with our allies. The post-Cold War is about multilateral operations precisely because there will be reasons to intervene that are not quite persuasive enough for any one power.
President Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and U.N. representative-designate Richard Holbrooke are all such good communicators that I am sure they can condense a lot of this into folksy shorthand. But speaking and writing for an elite audience is not enough. They will have to speak again and again to average Americans via the mass media. Because when troops take casualties, the whole country suddenly becomes involved, not just the policy elite. This is far more complex than the reasons for the Gulf War. But in foreign affairs, moral reasons rarely suffice to achieve moral ends.
Robert Kaplan, a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, is the author of "Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History" (Vintage).