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Week of 22 October 1999 Vol. III, No. 11 Feature Article BU prof's critique: when humanitarianism and reality collide By David J. Craig When Americans were blitzed with news reports about the displacement, murder, and rape of thousands of ethnic Albanians in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo earlier this year, President Bill Clinton must have felt as if he had no choice but to attack the Serbian forces committing atrocities. But CAS International Relations Professor David Fromkin, whose latest book is entitled Kosovo Crossing: American Ideals Meet Reality on the Balkan Battlefields (The Free Press, 1999), says that by entering the conflict in Kosovo, the United States set a dangerous precedent. Getting involved in wars that our country has no vital interest in, even to save civilians from ethnic cleansing, Fromkin argues, is misguided. "The campaign in Kosovo accomplished good in that tens of thousands more people would have been killed and uprooted from their homes had we not intervened," Fromkin says. "But this is a situation where we took a risk that we shouldn't have taken and it worked out, so far. We have to say, OK, it's good that we did it, but we shouldn't do it again." A history of helping Kosovo Crossing is the first full-length book published about American military involvement in Kosovo. In it, Fromkin explains the NATO bombing campaign in the context of close to a century of American foreign policy. Since the end of World War I, he argues, the U.S. government's actions have been shaped by an ideal espoused by Woodrow Wilson: that humanitarian principles should drive a new world order. But this frequently conflicts with the realities of international politics. Too often, Fromkin says, the United States carries out military campaigns in the name of achieving a higher good, only to discover too late that the higher good is unclear. U.S. involvement in Iraq and Haiti during the past decade accomplished some short-term goals but left nagging problems that our leaders don't know how to fix, such as Saddam Hussein's continued power in Iraq, despite sanctions that hobble the country's economy and the well-being of its citizens. David Fromkin, a CAS professor of international relations, argues in a new book that using armed forces in Kosovo is a mistake that the United States shouldn't repeat. Photo by Fred Sway Yugoslavia, which Fromkin says has been an unstable boiling pot of ethnic groups scrambling for land since the end of World War I, is a perfect example of the overextension of U.S. goodwill. The NATO bombing saved lives, he says, but rather than resolving the tension between Serbs and Albanians, it set the stage for more violence. Fromkin points out that NATO achieved one of its goals: Yugoslavia's borders, at least for the time being, are preserved. But ethnic hatreds in the Balkans are so deep-rooted, he argues, that Albanians and Serbs never will be able to live together -- a view that earned him the label "pessimist" from a London Times reviewer. "Our military goals in Kosovo were such that we couldn't have complete success, because what we want, which is a Kosovo where the Kosovars can live in safety and enjoy equality -- but which remains a part of Serbia -- isn't possible," says Fromkin. "The Kosovars don't want it and the Serbs don't want it." He believes that Kosovo will eventually gain independence from Yugoslavia or become part of Albania. He blames the Western world for not having prevented through diplomacy the partial dissolution of Yugoslavia earlier in the decade. Once a strong nation splinters into tiny states with imbalances of power among ethnic groups, he says, it's difficult for a foreign country to force warring factions to live together peacefully, as has been attempted before in Central and Eastern Europe. "If this model fails again in Kosovo," Fromkin writes, "then the United States and its allies will have obtained possibly the only outcome worse than letting Milosevic succeed in his monstrous scheme to eliminate ethnic Albanians from Kosovo." A peaceful alternative Some commentators -- most notably columnist Michael Mandlebaum and MIT Professor Noam Chomsky -- have suggested that the bombing led to further atrocities by Serbs and was undertaken to preserve the credibility of NATO, which had repeatedly warned Milosevic. But Fromkin believes that the bombing saved lives and that NATO's intentions were sincere. Still, he argues that a better use of American resources would have been to assist refugees directly. "A real and pure humanitarianism requires sacrifices," says Fromkin. "And if we were really concerned about the plight of the refugees, we could have let them in and given them a chance to start a new life. That might not be something that Americans are going to accept, but that's better than trying to mix up humanitarianism with the politics." Fromkin hopes that the United States will pull out its troops soon and let history take its course. "I think if we stay there for a long time, it will be a great mistake, and it will end up where all sides in the Balkans will turn against us," says Fromkin, "because no one likes to be policed by foreign troops." Because the United States can afford to enter conflicts in which it has no vital national interest, he adds, it must learn to be more humble when considering the exercise of its power. "The United States is more powerful than it or any other country has ever been, and in that situation, you would think that we could do anything we like," he says. "And for what we are seeing in this decade, that is really deceptive. There are a lot of things that we can't do. And there are a lot of things that we can't do with military means."