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New York Times
May 16, 1999 OWEN HARRIES
First Kosovo. Then Russia. Now China.
By OWEN HARRIES
Last week, President Clinton attempted a comprehensive defense of his Kosovo policy. Heavy on Balkan history and light on serious analysis, it did little to remove the sense that we are experiencing a foreign policy debacle, one in which bombs are serving as substitutes for thought.
The Kosovo crisis began as one of those small but nasty local disputes that happen regularly all over the world. Usually they are left alone to play themselves out. In this instance, however, we intervened, and an issue that was initially of little geopolitical significance has been elevated into one that threatens to destabilize the whole structure of American foreign policy. Now, three of the most important components of that policy -- NATO, United States-Russian relations, and United States-China relations -- are all in serious jeopardy.
Madeleine Albright's protestations to the contrary, in all but the most dire of circumstances, some strategic assets are better possessed than used. That applies to armies, and it also applies to alliances. Over 50 years, NATO thrived and became the most successful alliance in history by being inactive. It won the cold war, acquired authority and an aura of irresistible power without firing a shot in anger. Its whole point was to render its own use unnecessary. True, some knew that it was much less formidable and efficient than was claimed, but they were few.
Then in March this alliance called its own bluff and insisted on putting itself to the test against a minor state and on a peripheral issue. It is true that Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic cleansing is a barbaric thing. But contrary to what President Clinton now claims, until things seriously deteriorated after NATO's intervention, it was no worse than what he and other Western leaders had been able to bear with comparative equanimity in Turkey, Kashmir, Sudan, Rwanda -- and Croatia. In any case, after seven inconclusive weeks of half-hearted bombing, and of showing much more solicitude for the safety of its own troops than for that of either Kosovar or Serb civilians, NATO has utterly failed to make its will prevail.
Prestige and credibility are important in international politics. Properly cultivated and used, they can be an effective substitute for the actual use of force. But in Kosovo they have been dissipated and squandered, with the result that instead of prestige being an effective substitute for force, increasingly the use of force is being justified by the need to restore credibility.
But in that respect the damage has already been done. The secret of NATO's nervous, tentative and incompetent character is out, and its authority is significantly impaired. So too will be the readiness of NATO members to engage in strategically more valid and urgent ventures in the future. And, most dangerous of all, so will the deterrent power of NATO's leading member, the United States. With its ability to overawe diminished, the United States will have to resort to force even more often. The dangers of miscalculation will multiply.
Over the last decade, we have been assured that old-style power politics is dead and that a new world order, reflecting the realities of both globalization and American leadership, is emerging. But for any such order to be meaningful, the cooperation of Russia and China will be essential. Unless co-opted, their potential as troublemakers is huge. But as a result of Kosovo, both those countries have been alienated, the fires of virulent nationalism and anti-Americanism have been stoked, and the political moderates there have been undermined. Further, and this is no mean feat, these countries have been driven closer together than they have been for decades.
As far as Russia is concerned, the Kosovo intervention resulted from the same mind-set that -- in betrayal of earlier promises and of geopolitical sense -- expanded NATO up to the Russian frontier. It is a mind-set that tends to treat Russia with the contempt reserved for a client, dependent and defeated enemy. Thus in the case of Kosovo, no weight was given to the close historical association between Russia and Serbia. Even when the need was felt for Moscow's services as a go-between, it was treated more as a carrier of messages than as a negotiating principal. Given its internal problems, Russia is going to be a difficult and dangerous presence in the world in any case; in almost every way, recent American foreign policy has made the problem worse.
In the case of China, the United States was admittedly the victim of very bad luck with the embassy bombing, though it is the kind of bad luck that tends to accompany gross incompetence. But that apart, military intervention in the internal affairs of a sovereign state, in support of the armed liberation movement of an ethnic minority, had to be deeply disturbing to China (and to any country with a substantial ethnic minority). On the eve of this crisis, American policy toward China had been established on sound lines, even if it was being oversold as a "strategic partnership." Now it has received a severe blow from which it is unlikely to recover any time soon. For those determined to designate China as our next great enemy, this will be good news; for others it will be deeply disturbing.
It is not necessary to deny the horror in Kosovo to find it grotesque that a territory, smaller than Connecticut, has been allowed to distort American foreign policy to this extent. Why and how did it happen?
The easy (and, since it is coming to an end, the reassuring) answer is that it is all the fault of the Clinton Administration. And there is substance to that answer, for this Administration's foreign policy team is surely the weakest in 60 years. Its failure to set and keep priorities, to bear fully in mind the interrelatedness of things, to steer a steady course, to relate rhetoric to substance, has been dismaying.
But blaming the Clinton crowd may be too easy.
Many of the faults and weaknesses listed above have a familiar ring. They were the weaknesses that George Kennan and Walter Lippmann castigated Americans for half a century ago. For decades these weaknesses were held in check by the discipline and sense of reality imposed by the cold war. But in the last few years they have come creeping back, some of them lightly disguised as the new globalism.
There is to begin with the penchant for moralism. Let us be clear: what is wrong is not the impulse to give foreign policy a moral content, but the presumption that doing so is an uncomplicated business, one not requiring calculation and compromise but merely purity of intention. Cheap moralists are as dangerous as cheap hawks -- indeed they are often the same people.
Then there is the lawyerly approach, the inclination to see foreign policy as a series of discrete cases to be settled in isolation one by one, rather than as a continuing process in which everything is connected to everything else, and in which context is all.
Again, and this has been the most blatant weakness of all in Kosovo, there is reluctance to accept that large ambitions -- and some American officials now have huge ambitions for the "indispensable nation" -- cannot safely coexist with parsimonious means. Talk about the obsolescence of war as an institution and about smart weapons that will do the job without human cost has fed this reluctance. But it has taken a state of only Serbia's weight to prove it wrong. Perhaps the only good thing that will come out of the Kosovo venture is a salutary reminder that it is still true that he who wills the end must also will the means.
Owen Harries is the editor of The National Interest. |
