The Issue in Bosnia: NATO
Garfinkle, Adam
The Issue in Bosnia: NATO by Adam Garfinkle Is the American mission about peace in Bosnia, or is it about preventing the next European-sown world war? Neither, in truth. The real issues at stake...
...But Bosnia and NATO expansion have everything to do with each other: How could a major American commitment in the Balkans not have a profound effect on prospects for expansion...
...So are the Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, and even the Romanians, who have struggled to get token forces involved in the mission...
...If NATO can pull Bosnia out of a war, many will conclude that surely it can guard the states of East-Central Europe from falling into another one...
...But despite its recent airy rhetoric, one looks in vain for evidence that anyone in the Clinton administration really understands this...
...In this light, sending U.S...
...But the administration, somehow, cannot find the words realistically to discuss a connection that its own deeds manifest daily...
...The literal risks in the Bosnian theater proper, though hardly insignificant, pale beside the true gravity of the issue...
...It first overestimated, and now may underestimate, the difficulties of expanding NATO outside of Western Europe...
...Recent U.S...
...Those who oppose NATO expansion either do not credit such concerns or else fear the price of dealing with them in the face of possible Russian hostility...
...NATO's failure to do that is what is truly dangerous to European security in the years ahead...
...experienced analysts with strong arguments differ, as well suits what is by far the most significant question of European policy before us...
...But if, on the other hand, NATO is bloodied militarily and denied diplomatically in Bosnia, it will demonstrate all too vividly the potentially staggering costs of accepting a clutch of new countries into the alliance, all of them more like Bosnia in history and geography than current alliance members...
...But unless it is exorbitant, it is worth paying a price for a NATO role in stabilizing East-Central Europe...
...Though the "threat" is obviously different, the alliance's guarantee of Bosnia's borders and its sovereign integrity is not generically different from the shield NATO has provided its weaker members for more than 40 years...
...Though proponents of expansion deny it, moving NATO eastward means managing the ethnic conflicts in which East-Central Europe is so rich, like it or not...
...Adam Garfinkle is executive editor of The National Interest...
...Many believe NATO would be better off if it did not expand, and their concerns are not trivial...
...It's not a failure to intervene in Bosnia that risks European calamity, as the administration claims, but the failure of an intervention that would keep NATO from evolving into a more inclusive European security system...
...Most alarming, however, it has managed to discuss these issues as though they have nothing to do with one another...
...No attempt to design rules of enlargement to avoid such a task can succeed...
...The Clinton administration at first underestimated, and now overestimates, the stakes of the Bosnian war...
...The true test of the mission's success is whether NATO emerges stronger from it and whether, as a result, the alliance's expansion eastward will then proceed...
...Yet the most basic connection is obvious...
...Indeed, until Secretary of State Warren Christopher alluded to the issue in remarks last week, it had not discussed the matter publicly at all...
...But this is as it should be because, properly understood, NATO expansion is not mainly about deterring Russia militarily but about stabilizing East-Central Europe...
...It is therefore mysterious, if not frightening, that even as administration principals speak of the broader implications of the Bosnian war, they understate the link between the military mission at hand and the alliance's expansion...
...otherwise the region could well become a platform of Russo-German intrigue that could end by pulling Germany from its European Union moorings, souring U.S.-German relations, and shrinking American influence on the continent...
...It will seem a very exorbitant price, however, if a parade of bodybags and reams of stomach-churning full-color war-footage are what comes home from Bosnia...
...policy in Europe has foundered most of all on its inability to gauge the scale of issues or see connections between them...
...Even the Hungarians, whose country is being used only as a staging ground for the Bosnian theater, are convinced that the current mission will bring them closer to NATO membership...
...Putting NATO at risk in order to pacify Bosnia, for the sake of repaired reputation rather than inherent interests, is a huge commitment that bears directly on the definition of NATO's future scope and mission...
...What is this mission, after all, if not a qualified and temporary extension of NATO membership to Bosnia...
...The real issues at stake in the Bosnia incursion are the future vitality and the future scope of NATO...
...They want to save NATO by using it to intervene in Bosnia, but they seem unable to articulate what they are saving it for...
...ground forces into Bosnia is a strategic gamble of the highest order...
...Admittedly, NATO expansion is a contentious matter...
Vol. 1 • December 1995 • No. 14
