Throughout 1992, Serbian paramilitary forces murdered civilians and terrorized Muslim populations. Bush insisted on working through the United Nations, with predictably absurd and tragic outcomes. For example, the arms embargo imposed on the region mostly prevented the Bosnians from defending themselves against the Serbs, who were well armed already.
On the day after the US presidential election, November 4, 1992, I wrote an editorial for the Wall Street Journal that was essentially an open letter to the US president, old or new. I wrote that I had no doubt that a serious warning from George Bush to Milosevic could have stopped the aggression and bloody ethnic war in Yugoslavia. The entire world had seen the pictures from Kuwait and Iraq showing the effects of the American military invasion, and they knew that the United States could accomplish great military feats if the will was there.
I also made a call for a return to strong moral leadership and ending the hypocrisy of putting stability ahead of democracy and freedom. “Coming global changes require a strong moral leadership, and only the U.S. is powerful and politically creditworthy enough to make the decisions and take the actions indispensable to a new world order…. Pure idealism, you say? Maybe, but I want to believe that yesterday America elected the leader of the world.”
Alas, as we know, America elected Bill Clinton. Clinton’s 1992 campaign had deftly exploited the ongoing recession and the end of the Cold War to paper over his lack of qualifications in the international arena. He made it clear he was of a new generation that wanted to break with the past and all of its heavy responsibilities around the world, and the American people seemed to agree. If any symbolism were required, Clinton’s campaign theme song’s lyrics included “Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow” and “Yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone.”
The horrors taking place in Yugoslavia were reaching the Western media by the time Clinton got into office. Photos of Bosnian Serb detention camps full of skeletal prisoners instantly reminded people of images from the liberation of the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps. Ethnic cleansing was once again taking place in the heart of Europe. Still plodding along with UN and European leaders, Clinton failed to convince France’s François Mitterrand and the UK’s John Major to lift the arms embargo. The new president declined to take unilateral military action without the permission of his NATO partners in Europe.
By the time NATO finally intervened militarily over two years later in the first combat action in its history, an estimated 140,000 people were dead and millions of people had been displaced. Genocide and coordinated rape campaigns were taking place while UN peacekeeping forces were on the ground. You may recall the artillery attacks of the marketplace in the historic center of Sarajevo in February 1994 and August 1995 that killed a total of over a hundred civilians with many more wounded. The images of the second savage attack finally galvanized NATO to launch the air strikes against Bosnian Serb forces. Along with the July offensive by combined Bosnian and Croatian forces that freed Knin and Bihac, the NATO strikes helped force Milosevic to accept the Dayton Accords and bring the war to an end.
Meanwhile, Russia supported its “Serbian brothers” and helped delay outside action, as it would do again in 1999 over NATO intervention against Serb forces attacking Kosovar Albanians. In the case of Kosovo, Clinton acted much more rapidly to intervene with force, even making a powerful televised speech to the American people on March 24, 1999, on why NATO was launching a bombing campaign against Milosevic’s Serbia. Reading it now, I’m struck by how much of Clinton’s address could, and should, apply to what is happening in Ukraine today.
It’s worth looking up and reading in full, but I will excerpt a few key lines:
We act to protect thousands of innocent people in Kosovo from a mounting military offensive. We act to prevent a wider war, to diffuse a powder keg at the heart of Europe that has exploded twice before in this century with catastrophic results. And we act to stand united with our allies for peace. By acting now, we are upholding our values, protecting our interests, and advancing the cause of peace.
Clinton went on to explain—he was always a great explainer—why Kosovo mattered, why this faraway place few Americans had heard of was vital to US interests, and why it was important to act quickly before things got worse. In Kosovo, as with Putin’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, no NATO country was under attack. But, Clinton continued:
If we and our allies were to allow this war to continue with no response, President Milosevic would read our hesitation as a license to kill…. Imagine what would happen if we and our allies instead decided just to look the other way, as these people were massacred on NATO’s doorstep. That would discredit NATO, the cornerstone on which our security has rested for 50 years now….
If we’ve learned anything from the century drawing to a close, it is that if America is going to be prosperous and secure, we need a Europe that is prosperous, secure, undivided, and free.
Again, bravo! Substitute “Ukraine” for “Kosovo” and “Putin” for “Milosevic” and President Obama could repeat it nearly word for word to my great satisfaction. And, again, this powerful statement on the importance of moral leadership and using American and NATO power to protect innocent lives came inexcusably late. The powerful closing paragraph of Bush 41’s book I quoted earlier about America shirking its responsibilities and retreating into indifference was surely a message to Clinton, who was in the middle of his second term at the time it was published. And Clinton, after vacillating over Bosnia and overlooking the 1994 Rwandan genocide of more than 800,000 people, was, in the penultimate year of his eight years in office, finally ready to use America’s unrivaled might to do the right thing without delay.
Seventy-nine days after the NATO air campaign began, Serb forces withdrew from Kosovo and nearly a million people were able to return to their homes. Remember Kosovo when you hear people say sending weapons to Ukraine would only “escalate the conflict” or “lead to World War III” in the popular straw man argument. Of course the scenarios and opponents are different—Russia is not Serbia and Putin is not Milosevic. But the lesson is that much good can come from the decisive application of power, both in the moment and with a deterrent effect, and that waffling has real consequences and fuels future aggression.
The seasonal cycles of history shape and are shaped by human policies and plans. The hard-hearted Cold War strategies of isolation and containment gave way to engagement and an overabundance of caution. Retrenchment allowed threats to grow unchecked and genocides to occur on multiple continents while the overwhelming might of the free world looked on. One of those unchecked threats fulfilled its destructive potential on 9/11, pushing the pendulum back toward intervention and, inevitably, overreaction. The two exhausting wars that resulted helped bring to power a US president with a mandate for, what else, retrenchment and engagement. Obama has fulfilled his mandate to the extreme, as nearly all of his predecessors did before him. Europe has been resting on its laurels for so long that it is struggling just to stand when faced with xenophobia and terror on the inside and an aggressive Russia on the outside. Once again the seasons are changing and new threats have been allowed to flourish and to escape their borders.