ODYSSEY OF IMPOTENCE

Or you could just have the United States bomb the hell out of them and send an assistant secretary of state to draw up the peace terms.

Events in Bosnia over the past six months have demonstrated two enduring facts of international life in the post-Cold War world, facts our most thoughtful foreign policy experts have spent the last decade denying. First, Europe is not now nor can it ever become what Henry Kissinger has called one of six “major powers” in the world. Great Britain, Germany, and France are each medium-sized powers, capable of wielding some influence on their own. But “Europe” is not any kind of power, major or minor. When it comes to carrying out joint military action in pursuit of a common foreign policy goal, as in Bosnia, the Europeans cannot accomplish anything as “Europe.”

As part of the U.S.-led NATO alliance, on the other hand, the Europeans can accomplish a great deal. And that brings us to the second enduring fact of international life: the unprecedented supremacy of American power. What Charles Krauthammer a few years ago called the “unipolar moment” is beginning to look more like a “unipolar era.” If even Bill Clinton can lead a divided, hapless Europe in effective military and diplomatic action, and if Richard Holbrooke can bestride the European continent like a colossus, perhaps it is time to stop clucking about America’s “relative” decline in the world and come to grips with the reality of America’s global hegemony.

Just about everyone else in the world has. Lord Owen may have written Balkan Odyssey to defend his failed effort, with former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, to bring peace to Bosnia in 1993. But his memoirs are more interesting as an account of just how unpleasant it is to be a British diplomat in a world where only American power is feared. According to Owen, international thugs like Serbian president Slobodan Miloseric routinely gave him the Rodney Dangerfield treatment while they looked to the Americans for the final word.

“It was clear when we met,” Owen writes, “that Milosevic had a deep respect for Cyrus, as he always called him. I talked little in these early meetings, measuring up Milosevic and trying slowly to build a relationship with him, knowing it would be a long time, if ever, before I could command the same authority with him as Cy did.” Lesser thugs like Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic also had eyes only for the Americans and felt free to snub both Owen and Vance when it became clear that the real powers in Washington weren’t backing their peace proposal.

The Bosnian Serb military leader, Radko Mladic, believed he could only prove his manhood by standing up to a U.S.-led NATO air campaign. Making a deal with the beleaguered Muslims was “beneath [Mladic’s] dignity,” Owen writes, but after a couple of weeks of NATO bombing, Mladic was proud to surrender to the big boys. As for the Bosnian Muslims, of course, they spent every waking moment trying to attract the Americans’ attention to their plight — much to Owen’s acute perplexity and distaste.

Even in the capitals of the great powers of Europe, it was clear that no peace proposal for Bosnia was worth the paper it was printed on unless Washington gave a nod of approval. In the Bush years, when the likes of James Baker, Lawrence Eagleburger, and Brent Scowcroft were trying hard to pretend that there was no Bosnia, everyone in Europe nevertheless had to read the tea leaves to discover Washington’s attitude toward the evolving Vance-Owen plan. A wriggle of Eagleburger’s nose could make French President Francois Mitterrand “shift his position” from appeasement to confrontation. A raised left eyebrow from a disapproving member of the Clinton transition team could send Vance and Owen scrambling desperately to repair the damage. The pretense that Owen derived his power and authority from the European Community proved as thin as gossamer. Any peace plan he drafted would live or die in Washington, and he realized only belatedly that “our antennae in Geneva should have been more focused on Washington and on picking up the signs of a build-up in negative perceptions” of the Vance-Owen plan.

Owen, not surprisingly, found all this international disrespect thoroughly annoying — imagine a British lord having to compete with Cyrus Vance, of all people, to win the respect of a Serb — and in the very first paragraph of the book he stamps his feet indignantly, fuming that “never before in over thirty years of public life have I had to operate in such a climate of dishonour, propaganda and dissembling.” Owen directs most of his anger at the Clinton administration, which undermined his plan and then lacked the will, until last fall, to put anything else in its place. But he saves plenty of wrath for the Balkan peoples, too, including those troublesome Bosnian Muslims who refused to surrender quietly.

Annoyance at the victims of aggression is a common enough response when one feels helpless to save them. In 1938 Neville Chamberlain and other British leaders grew positively furious at Czechoslovakian president Edvard Benes’s refusal to keep quiet as Hitler prepared to obliterate his country. In Balkan Odyssey, Owen makes all the appropriate declarations placing primary blame for the Balkan horrors at the feet of the Serbs — the purpose of this book is to prove he was not pro-Serb. But Owen’s anger at the Muslims is visceral. While he refers repeatedly to the “pragmatism” of Milosevic, for instance, he finds that the Bosnian Muslim leaders just didn’t seem to take the same pragmatic view of their situation. Believing that the United States would eventually enter the war to save them, they preferred to sacrifice more Muslim lives rather than accept what Vance and Owen had determined was their fate. Of one Bosnian Muslim leader, Owen complains that “his message to America [was] simple — ‘we are the victims’ — and like all good propagandists he [did] not shrink from repeating the message over and over again.” Owen calls this claim to victimhood a “ruthless” strategy by the Bosnian government, on a par, it would seem, with all the other ruthless behavior of this brutal Balkan war. On these grounds Owen feels justified in declaring a pox on all the Balkan houses. How could one be expected to make peace in a place where “nothing is simple” and where “history pervades everything”?

The real problem for Owen, however, was that the Bosnian Muslims were right: The Balkan war couldn’t be declared over until the United States said it was over.

No peace plan could succeed without American support, and the Americans never found the terms of the Vance-Owen plan acceptable.

Why not? Much ink has been spilled by Owen and his defenders pointing out that the Vance-Owen plan would have granted less territory to the Serbs than the agreement signed at Dayton last fall. Thus, although it was widely derided at the time for “rewarding Serbian aggression,” the Vance-Owen plan actually rewarded it less than does the present arrangement. This is absolutely correct, but it is also quite irrelevant. For both the Bush and Clinton administrations, the problem with the Vance-Owen plan was not only that it appeared to reward Serb aggression, but that it was also impossible to implement and incapable of providing more than the briefest reprieve in the fighting. The Vance-Owen plan called for a “decentralized” Bosnian state divided into 10 virtually autonomous provinces. Just as in the Dayton plan now being carried out, all the parties to the conflict were to be demilitarized, all forces were to withdraw into their designated provinces, and in each province a multiethnic government was to be established “to reflect all groups fairly, based on the pre-war census.” Compared with the current tricky plan which NATO troops are trying to enforce, the Vance-Owen proposals were an even bigger nightmare, and military planners at the Pentagon, much as they may dislike implementing the Dayton plan, liked the Vance-Owen plan even less.

This does not absolve either the Bush or the Clinton administration of its sins. The weaknesses of the Vance-Owen plan were less the fault of its authors than a product of the international failure of will, which in turn was caused by the American failure of leadership. The Bush administration tried to let “Europe” solve the Bosnian problem, even though Bush officials ought to have known perfectly well that only the United States could put the necessary pieces together. The Clinton administration claimed to want to do more but proved so inept and so fearful of taking action that another two years went by, and thousands more lives were lost, before it summoned the will. If Owen appeased the Serbs — and, of course, he did — it was chiefly because appeasement was the only route left to someone without the power to back up his words.

The truth, however, is that it hardly matters what Lord Owen did or thought. The question from the beginning of the Balkan conflict was whether the United States would or would not play the role in Europe that it had established for itself a half-century ago. On the broad tapestry of history, the Vance-Owen peace plan will be but a detail, and the role of Lord Owen himself, notwithstanding this attempt at self-justification, will scarcely be visible at all.

by Robert Kagan