Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 19, 1994 TAG: 9404190129
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By ANTHONY LEWIS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
For 50 years, American power, purpose and resolve have kept the peace in Europe. They faced down the severest challenges, and prevented a third great war.
That age is over now. So we have to conclude from the humiliation in Bosnia. There the United States and NATO, the most powerful military alliance in the world, have allowed themselves to be intimidated by a minor force of ultranationalist Serbs under demagogic leadership.
The reason for this seismic change in the balance of effective power in the world is plain. The United States has in office an administration that does not believe in the commitment of American power, purpose and resolve to keep the peace.
Eleven months ago, a high Clinton administration official, Undersecretary of State Peter Tarnoff, as good as said so. He explained at a background briefing that the United States could no longer afford to lead the world and that we would therefore play a more modest role.
Secretary of State Warren Christopher and others disavowed the Tarnoff Doctrine. There was no intention, they said, of walking away from the responsibilities of leadership.
But we can see now that the Tarnoff Doctrine is in operation. It is in fact the Clinton Doctrine.
Bosnia is a dramatic demonstration of the loss of purpose and resolve abroad. President Clinton has repeatedly seemed to take on the mantle of leadership there, then wavered. As a show of irresolution it might have been plotted by a playwright.
Clinton came to office demanding sterner measures to stop Serbian aggression: lifting the arms embargo on the Bosnian victims and using NATO air strikes against the aggressors. But when the European allies demurred, he gave up those ideas without a fight.
A year of wavering seemed to end in February, when Clinton led NATO to issue an ultimatum to the Serbs to stop shelling Sarajevo. The Serbs drew back. But again the United States wavered, failing to press for a broader Serbian pullback and doing nothing as the Serbs launched an attack on the safe haven of Gorazde.
A week ago, there was another show of strength that seemed to promise resolve: the air strikes on Serbian guns at Gorazde. But when the Serbs renewed the attack, President Clinton assured them that the U.S. had ``no interest'' in changing ``the military balance.'' That is, ``no interest'' in helping the victims of aggression, the Bosnians whom a year earlier Clinton had wanted to arm and help with air strikes.
Administration officials indicated that we would not hit the Serbs again because we might anger them and make them unwilling to agree to a cease-fire. Serbian tanks rolled into Gorazde, and then there were reports that Bosnian Serb leaders had agreed to a cease-fire.
That is Munich, an American Munich. And it can only have the same result that it did when Neville Chamberlain and others gave Hitler part of Czechoslovakia at Munich in 1938 in return for his promise to be good henceforth: to encourage further aggression.
The principle that underlay security in Europe after World War II was that territory could not be seized by force. That is the only principle that can assure peace in Europe after the cold war - that can keep other religious and ethnic conflicts from unraveling security on a far larger scale than Bosnia.
Even many of those who opposed American force in Bosnia thought that, once employed, the United States should not retreat. The public collapse of American will at Gorazde has gravely injured the interests that just 10 days ago the president's national security adviser, Anthony Lake, said were at stake in Bosnia: ``NATO's credibility and our very vision of a post-Cold War Europe.''
In drawing back from the world, President Clinton might say, he is following the will of the American people. That may be. Harry Truman had a different view of political leadership.
Looking at Gorazde, Americans who worry about the consequences of failure to stand up to aggression and genocide in Europe could say what the French Duke of Bourbon said, in Shakespeare's ``Henry the Fifth,'' as he looked at the field of Agincourt after the outnumbered English defeated the French:
``Shame and eternal shame, nothing but shame!''
Anthony Lewis is a New York Times columnist.
New York Times News Service
by CNB