Winter is Coming (9 page)

Even more importantly, victory in the Cold War provided the United States and the rest of the free world with ideological supremacy. Democracy and capitalism had triumphed, totalitarianism and socialism had lost. Again, this all seems obvious and inevitable today, but the ideology of Communism was a serious challenge for many decades in nearly every country in the world. With the collapse of the USSR, the argument was over. Even twenty-five years later, most outbreaks of socialist rhetoric are limited to populist would-be autocrats keen to redistribute wealth to their cronies and with stagnant economies dependent on natural resources.

The Bush team had already begun rhetorical disarmament from Reagan’s unapologetic American exceptionalism and moral leadership. America’s reach and power flashed briefly in the first Gulf War, although even there Bush went to great lengths to make stopping Saddam Hussein’s rampage sound like a pragmatic move by a broad coalition. Bush did speak boldly and eloquently on the importance of American leadership, however. He later wrote about the need for “a new domestic consensus for the American role in the world” to avoid isolationism and protectionism.

Bush continued:

The present international scene, turbulent though it is, is about as much of a blank slate as history ever provides, and the importance of American engagement has never been higher. If the United States does not lead, there will be no leadership. It is our great challenge to learn from this bloodiest century in history. If we fail to live up to our responsibilities, if we shirk the role which only we can assume, if we retreat from our obligation to the world into indifference, we will, one day, pay the highest price once again for our neglect and shortsightedness.

Bravo! This passage approaches the urgency and clarity of Reagan, if not the charisma. Unfortunately, Bush said these inspiring and prescient words in his 1998 book with Scowcroft and not while he was in office. This concluding section of
A World Transformed
likely reveals Bush’s regrets about not pressing this role harder himself as president.

He had passed on the golden opportunity to remove Saddam from power and punish him for his attack on Kuwait. Along with condemning Iraqis to another decade of terror and oppression, it sent a message to other aspiring conquerors. In the summer of 1992, we heard Western politicians’ calls to bring the Yugoslavian dictator Slobodan Milosevic before an international court for his aggression in Croatia and Bosnia. How, when Saddam was still alive and in command?

Which brings us back to Yugoslavia. There, superficially, everything appeared to be clear. Direct American interests were not affected, so there was no reason to send troops. But Bush, whose blind support of the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia invigorated Belgrade’s confidence that it could risk military action, forgot that each innocent victim of the war weakened democracy and lent new power to waning totalitarianism. If, in an era of global military domination by a democratic superpower, we could passively witness the revival of Nazi practices-concentration camps and ethnic cleansing-it meant that Bush’s talk of a “new world order” was empty demagoguery aimed at a naive domestic audience.

Bush played on the fear of a prolonged Vietnam-style involvement in Yugoslavia, ignoring a fundamental change in the world scene. By that point there was no Soviet threat to back up Yugoslavia, so Bush could rapidly have affected events with much less force than would have been needed in the past. As was only demonstrated years later, after many tens of thousands had died, NATO air strikes were enough to undermine the determination of the “Greater Serbian” forces. The destruction by air of Serbian heavy equipment required Belgrade to face a war conducted on equal terms with Bosnia and Croatia. But Bush showed that rote support for “UN policy” meant more to him than saving tens of thousands of lives, and more than presenting a strong stance against aggression.

Yugoslavia also revealed the need for a new policy for the new post-Cold War era, and that the Bush administration had failed to imagine such a policy. When Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger visited his old friend Milosevic in Belgrade in February 1990, he was shocked to find there was no common ground to be found. There was so much good news coming from Europe at the time that the Balkan powder keg was pushed to the background even after Eagleburger returned from his trip warning that “it’s much worse than anybody thought and it’s going to be much bloodier than we thought.”

Bush quickly lost the chance to make amends in a second term thanks to an American electorate that turned its back on foreign policy in the blink of an eye. He lost to a man with no foreign policy experience, a man whose slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid,” efficiently discarded foreign policy and the Cold War from the campaign. (Third-party candidate Ross Perot syphoning his votes away didn’t help Bush either.) Bush was certainly no Winston Churchill, but the way he was turned out of office after the end of the Cold War echoes the way British voters quickly turned against Churchill after he led the nation to victory in World War II.

I was then, as I am now, an advocate for the use of every available tool to stop aggressors like Hussein and Milosevic, including military intervention. In this I have been consistently on the side of those who have suffered from violence and against those who spilled blood first, regardless of their ethnicity or religion. My sympathies were therefore clearly on the side of the beleaguered Bosnians and Croatians, despite Russia’s long-standing support for Serbian nationalism. From 1993 to 1995 I gave a series of charity events to draw attention to and to raise funds for Croatian and Bosnian refugees, including a simultaneous exhibition in the besieged Bosnian capital of Sarajevo in July 1994.

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.