The Chomsky Documentation Project

[Brad DeLong]

Yes. But here the--bizarre--accusation is of both incompetence and 
evilitude. You can try to explain strange and bad things that happen 
as the result of incompetence. You can try to explain them as the 
result of evilitude. But by the time you need *both* incompetence and 
evilitude, you've gone a bridge or two too far...

And I still want to know what the "cynical reasons" were supposed to 
be? Back in the 1993 the "Realpolitiker" faction on the National 
Security Council was desperate for Murka to keep its nose *out* of 
the Balkans--for the Yurpeens to handle it as they see fit--for six 
Realpolitikisch reasons:

1. Sticking our noses into the Balkans might--vastly--mess up 
our--much more important--relations with the Russians.

2. Sticking our noses into the Balkans might lose us New Democrat 
types votes as Murkan soldiers died.

3. Sticking our noses into the Balkans might lose us New Democrat 
types votes as Murkan soldiers anxious not to die wasted Balkan 
civilians.

4. Sticking our noses into the Balkans would disrupt army training 
schedules and reduce army (but,curiously enough, not marine) 
readiness.

5. Sticking our noses into the Balkans would cost money, and any 
extra money we could find needed to be spent on domestic initiatives 
so that we could open at least a small amount of daylight between 
"New Democrat" and "Eisenhower Republican".

6. An imperial power can enforce peace in a peripheral reason only if 
all the thugs-with-guns in the region think that the imperial power 
has a *long* memory and never forgets an insult. Everyone in the 
world knows that the Murka has a short memory, and that consistency 
of foreign policy is unlikely given that foreign policy's principal 
use is as a domestic political football. Hence Murka sticking its 
nose into the Balkans is unlikely to improve matters.

Against these Realpolitiker arguments made by the Realpolitikisch 
faction, there was only the counterargument that--maybe--Murka could, 
by intervening, keep a few more people from getting shot or exiled by 
Milosevic, Tudjman, and company.

All in all, I'm still amazed we went into the Balkans in the 1990s: 
the cynical great power arguments of the Realpolitikisch faction 
seemed damned convincing at the time. Moreover, they may well have 
been right. I don't have a good enough counterfactual vision of what 
would have happened otherwise had Murka kept its nose out.

Brad DeLong