The Trump administration, in the personality of Richard Grenell, former U.S. ambassador to Germany, has become intricately and bizarrely involved in Balkan politics. His effort to reconcile Kosovo and Serbia, from which the former seceded in 2008, risks an embarrassing crash after the indictment of Kosovar President Hashim Thaci of war crimes. But Grenell has achieved more success than all the European Union’s diplomats over the last decade.
One of the most perspicacious insights of famed German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck was that the Balkans was not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier. Had his successors in Germany, as well as statesmen across Europe, heeded his admonition World War I would have been avoided. And with it an even worse conflict a generation later, as well as the ensuing Cold War. As Bismarck feared, “it will be some damn foolish thing in the Balkans that sets off” a disastrous human conflagration.
Alas, the US repeated that mistake three decades ago as Yugoslavia disintegrated. What seemed to most attract the Clinton administration was the fact that America had no conceivable security interests at stake in the region. It was the ultimate example of what Michael Mandelbaum of Johns Hopkins University termed “foreign policy as social work.”
Like so many international controversies, the extended Yugoslav civil war always was more complicated than the simple morality play portrayed by Washington’s establishment hawks. The death of Yugoslav dictator Josip Broz Tito in 1980 and collapse a decade later of the Soviet Union, which long threatened Yugoslavia’s independence, set the stage for the latter state’s dissolution.
The US and European governments violently resisted their own secessionist movements but adopted a different position toward Yugoslavia. Germany took the lead in encouraging the Serb-dominated polyglot nation’s breakup. But the allies decided that ethnic minorities newly subjected to the vagaries of ethnic rule, meaning Serbs, should not secede.
Unfortunately, Croatia and Bosnia included substantial numbers of Serbs, who had no reason to trust newly ascendant local ethnic groups. For instance, Croatia’s Franjo Tudjman was an anti-Semite and violent anti-Serb – though he had no love for Muslims either. Although the Yugoslav military and Serbian forces committed the worst war crimes, Croat, Bosnian Croat, and Bosniak militias also were responsible for manifold atrocities.
The only consistency in US policy was that the Serbs always lost. Read the rest of this entry »
MCViewPoint 