IT was my honor yesterday to moderate a New York Post Forum on the crisis in the Balkans, which featured Sen. Charles Schumer, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Weekly Standard editor William Kristol in a discussion distinguished by its sobriety and sophistication.
The forum highlighted one of the most perplexing aspects of the war in Kosovo – the fact that where Kosovo is concerned, for the first time since the end of the Second World War, you simply can’t tell which side somebody is going to take on a fundamental question of foreign policy.
Some conservatives support the war, some heatedly oppose it – while many liberals have proved unexpectedly resolute in their belief that Slobodan Milosevic must be subdued by force. Others on the left, particularly in Europe, are beginning to talk about the NATO effort in terms of disgust reminiscent of the hate-America days during the Vietnam War.
And many people who have never seen eye-to-eye on anything before find themselves in odd agreement when it comes to Kosovo.
For example, Henry Kissinger and William Kristol represent opposing camps in the Republican-conservative movement when it comes to foreign policy. Kissinger is the world’s most notable realist. He believes that American foreign policy must be conducted with a strict and disciplined eye toward national interests – that intervening in other countries based on abstract moral considerations may be a noble impulse, but one that can be disastrous.
Kristol is an idealist. He preaches a doctrine of universalist intervention based on the notion that America is, and should be, the policeman of the world – a force for moral order across the globe.
Their disagreements extend to the Kosovo war. Kissinger believes it was a mistake to get involved, that Kosovo is historically a part of Serbia and that, despite Milosevic’s depredations, NATO had no pressing interest in intervening there. Kristol has preached intervention in Kosovo, and military action that would, in the final analysis, bring down Milosevic and end his destabilizing conduct in the heart of Europe.
And yet, two months into the Kosovo war, these antagonists are in full agreement. They both believe that the war must be won. They both believe victory means that Milosevic is forced to bend to NATO’s will – or is driven from power. They both believe that the president’s conduct of the war has been shameful. And they both believe that the conduct of the war so far is weakening NATO’s resolve dangerously, and that if the president does not stiffen his resolve and NATO’s collective spine in the next month, the alliance’s commitment will begin to fall apart.
Strange bedfellows indeed. But then, consider the fact that there could be no stranger bedfellows than Bill Kristol and Bill Clinton. Kristol ran the most sweepingly, unmitigatedly anti-Clinton publication in the world last year. And yet, just a few months after the president survived efforts to impeach him, there was Kristol, offering his support and aid on the Kosovo incursion to the very president he wanted driven out of Washington on a rail.
So divided against itself is the conservative movement that though the magazine he owns, National Review, supports the war, William F. Buckley Jr. has basically decided that NATO’s best option is to cut its losses and pull out of Kosovo.
But liberals are no more clear about where they stand on the Kosovo matter.
In an exceptionally intelligent and thoughtful presentation, Sen. Schumer outlined various reasons why an expansion of the war to the ground would be a mistake. He said the time it would take to assemble an invasion force would give Milosevic an opportunity and a motive to finish the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo. He said it would disrupt and divide the NATO alliance and drastically complicate our relations with Russia and China. He said a ground invasion could compel an American occupational presence in Kosovo for years to come. And, the senator said, the president would be unable to gain congressional support for ground troops.
Despite all this, Sen. Schumer still supports a continuation of the air war – even though one could argue that all of these problems will make themselves known if an air war continues with no conclusion in sight.
Though the senator nominally supports the administration, he does not share Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s contention that Kosovo is the most important thing the Clintonites have ever done. He agreed with Kissinger, which is something he probably doesn’t do very often, that the administration’s effort to impose a political solution on Milosevic at the Rambouillet talks in March was a mistake.
And while he attacked Republicans in the House and Senate for refusing to support the president on partisan political grounds, the senator’s deep skepticism about the mission might have caused him to oppose it outright had the president in question been a Republican rather than a Democrat.
What all this ideological and partisan confusion reveals is that the extent to which the dividing lines that governed the United States and the West during the Cold War really are being redrawn – whether we like it or not. It’s terribly confusing, but then, times of profound transition and change always are.
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