Western Meltdown Over Bosnia? : Congress may draw its own lessons from European policy

Haiti is on the foreign-policy front burner now, of course. On the back burner, Bosnia simmers on and may come to a brief boil in mid-October. But the unwatched pot that may yet boil over is NATO.

The Clinton Administration is now caught between the Bosnian preferences of Congress and those of our major European allies. Britain and France, in effect, see the creation of a new “Serboslavia” as the path to stability in the region. They furiously oppose the majority in Congress that wants the United States unilaterally to lift its arms embargo on official Bosnia-Herzegovina. The German foreign minister, Klaus Kinkel, has lately joined his British and French colleagues.

Since rejecting the peace proposal set forth by the United Nations, the Bosnian Serbs have ferociously escalated their “ethnic cleansing” of northeast Bosnia. The astonishing European response to this new aggression has been a campaign, initially successful, to begin easing up on economic sanctions against Serbia.

Though Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic publicly opposes the Bosnian Serb rejection of the United Nations’ peace plan, his country continues privately to supply and otherwise assist the Bosnian Serbs. Rather than expose Milosevic, however, the “contact group” of four European powers (Russia is the fourth) plus the United States recently chose to provide him the cover of token international monitoring of the Serbian-Bosnian border: 135 monitors, far too few to cover the long border, and all under tight Serbian supervision.

As a reward for Milosevic’s “cooperation,” the contact group will ask the U.N. Security Council to end all economic sanctions on Serbia. When the Security Council complies, as it almost surely will, Bosnian Serb aggression will only escalate--though possibly under cover of a token acceptance of the peace plan.

Congress’ view that Serb aggression must be halted by the stick rather than the carrot, by strengthening the Bosnian military deterrent rather than by enriching the Serbian economy, is far more realistic. However, realism also dictates that the United States not pursue a European policy in defiance of our three most powerful European allies.

The Administration has set Oct. 15 as a deadline for the Bosnian Serbs to accept the peace plan. When that date comes the Administration will most probably ask the 15-nation U.N. Security Council to lift the embargo.

Seven members of the council--France, Britain, China, New Zealand, Spain, Argentina and the Czech Republic--will abstain. Veto-wielding Russia will oppose. The United States’ request will be denied, and Congress will not muster a two-thirds majority in both houses to force President Clinton to take unilateral action.

Thus will Europe have won in its struggle with the U.S. Congress. But Congress may be prepared to make virtue of this necessity. The moral that Congress may draw from the Bosnian rebuff is that a U.S. withdrawal from formal European collective security may be an idea whose time has come. A growing number in Congress may say: Yes, let France, Germany and Britain handle post-Cold War Yugoslavia on their own. But let them also handle post-Cold War Russia on their own. They have all the money, troops and weapons they need for the job.

Europe will not, in a major way, assist the United States in handling North Korea or Cuba or Haiti or other security problems defined as Washington’s and Washington’s alone. Congress may conclude that it is time to introduce a kind of parity.

European, particularly British, comment on U.S. solicitude for the Bosnian Muslims has typically faulted it as moralism from afar and on the cheap. But the U.S. appetite for the role of world moralist, much less world policeman, is smaller than such commentators think. The risk is that Europe’s attitude toward Bosnia may yet become America’s attitude--toward Europe.