From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (152 page)

While the Clinton administration struggled to survive, southern Europe seethed with conflict. This time it was Kosovo, the most volatile area of a strife-torn part of the world. The region was populated mainly by Kosovar Albanians who were also Muslims. But Serbs viewed Kosovo as sacred ground because of their military defeat there in 1389 at the hands of the Turks, on which they blamed the fall of their empire. Left out of the Dayton discussions, Kosovo exploded soon after. In 1997, the Kosovars formed a Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) to win their independence and mounted guerrilla warfare against local Serbs. The Serbs struck back with a vengeance, burning villages and murdering those Kosovars they could get their hands on. They moved slowly at first; "a village a day keeps
NATO away" was their sardonic slogan. Their intent was nonetheless unmistakable, the results devastating. An especially bloody massacre at the town of Racak in late 1998 where all adult males were marked for execution again provoked cries for international action. In Washington, the killing gave ammunition to hawks and weakened foes of intervention.
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In early 1999, a still-reluctant administration once more decided to act. The Senate acquitted Clinton of impeachment charges in February. Still leery of a Balkans quagmire, most military leaders continued to resist intervention. Within and outside the government, however, pressures mounted. Advocates increasingly compared the Serbs' ethnic cleansing with the Holocaust. Albright passionately warned of another Munich and derided the military's caution. So important and visible was her role that the conflict came to be called "Madeleine's War."
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In March, the United States along with NATO finally went to war. If memories of World War II pushed the administration to act, more recent and still-haunting recollections of Vietnam dictated the way it fought. Clinton hoped to replicate the Bosnian experience, where modest bombing had forced Milosevic to negotiate. To assuage fears in Congress and among European allies, the administration again relied exclusively on air power. In what proved a major miscalculation, the president even publicly affirmed: "I do not intend to put our troops in Kosovo to fight a war."
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As always, the conflict in Kosovo proved more complex than anticipated. NATO commander U.S. Gen. Wesley Clark, another Rhodes scholar from Arkansas, ran the war from Brussels and faced the unenviable challenge of working out strategies acceptable to seventeen allies and a divided Washington. His greatest problems were with the Pentagon. The allies underestimated Milosevic's determination. The bombing was implemented gradually, and the Serbs stubbornly withstood it, evoking in some quarters memories of Vietnam. But Milosevic also misjudged NATO's unwillingness to lose. Faced with that prospect, the allies at an April meeting in Washington celebrating the alliance's fiftieth anniversary agreed to escalate the war. They drastically stepped up the bombing. More important, they authorized preparations for the use of ground troops. "All options are on the table," Clinton publicly affirmed.
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What U.S. military leaders called the Revolution in Military Affairs worked dramatic results. It was a new kind of high-tech war, virtual war, it
seemed, fought by professional forces with no sacrifice required of the American people and minimal intrusion on their lives. Giant B-2 Stealth bombers that could not be seen from the ground flew fourteen hours from bases in Missouri to deliver large payloads of two-thousand-pound bombs guided by global positioning systems with remarkable accuracy to targets fifty thousand feet below. The bombing devastated Serb airfields and ground forces and eventually Belgrade itself, causing troops to mutiny and political opposition to form. In June, Milosevic conceded.
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A war fought to minimize Western military losses killed an estimated ten thousand people, many of them civilians, turning on their head just-war principles of sparing noncombatants. The high-technology war fought in Kosovo cost the United States alone an estimated $2.3 billion, not the sort of price tag even a hyperpower can afford on a regular basis. The distinguished military historian John Keegan excitedly hailed the outcome as a "victory for air power and air power alone." In some ways it was, but the threat of ground troops and Russia's refusal to back the Serbs also contributed to the outcome.
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The war in Kosovo solved the immediate problem without providing a long-term solution. Milosevic was defeated, a major achievement, and in September 2000—with substantial U.S. assistance—those Serbs who had once cheered his nationalistic rantings voted him out of office. Indicted for war crimes while the fighting raged in Kosovo, he was subsequently tried at the UN's International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and died before the proceedings were completed. Milosevic had used the start of the war to drive Albanians from Kosovo, producing more human suffering and millions of refugees. As the war ended, a vengeful KLA sought complete independence and expulsion of the remaining Serbs from Kosovo, making victims of those who had once been perpetrators and creating new political problems. Although he had gone to war with great reluctance and fought with the utmost caution, Clinton basked in NATO's victory. There was even talk of a Clinton Doctrine under which the United States would employ its power in cases of humanitarian disaster where the costs seemed manageable and prospects for success reasonable. In fact, the president never openly articulated such a policy. There was little public support. In any event, such wars proved not to be the norm in the new world order.
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Ironically, a president who had taken office with a full domestic agenda and little apparent interest in foreign policy ended his second term by becoming a foreign policy president. Frustrated at home by an unrelenting and fiercely partisan Republican opposition, he turned his attentions abroad, traveling to places where U.S. presidents had not gone before, Botswana, Slovenia, South Africa.
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Pushed by war veterans in the Senate, he defied the die-hards by normalizing relations with Vietnam in 1995. Five years later, he became the first president to visit the former enemy. He stayed four days, longer than customary for such visits. In Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, he drew huge crowds. His triumphal visit represented for himself and his nation a sort of closure for a long and painful national experience.
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Clinton also took an active role in international peacemaking, even in such perennial trouble spots as Northern Ireland and the Middle East. He and his special envoy, former Senate majority leader George Mitchell, exerted great effort to broker a tenuous power-sharing agreement between Catholics and Protestants in embattled Northern Ireland. The deal fell apart before Clinton left office, but it marked a small step on the long road toward peace in that war-torn area.

In October 1993, Clinton had presided over the signing of the Oslo Accords, an agreement negotiated through Norwegian good offices calling for the PLO to recognize Israel and renounce terrorism and for Israel to turn over the Gaza Strip and the town of Jericho to a newly constituted Palestine Authority. That agreement was supposed to lead to further negotiations on the status of the West Bank and Jerusalem. The Oslo agreement immediately came under fire from extremists on both sides. In November 1995, Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing law student, ironically while making an appeal for peace. Clinton in his last years tried desperately to revive the peace process. In 1998, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, he persuaded hard-line Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu to turn over more of the West Bank to Palestinians. Confronted with staunch opposition when he returned home, the prime minister reneged. During his last year in office, Clinton dragged new Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and Arafat to Camp David for a meeting. Barak seemed flexible, but Arafat rejected any deal that did not provide for Israel's withdrawal from its pre-1967 borders. When war hero Ariel Sharon in September 2000 made much publicized and highly
provocative visits to two of Islam's holiest places in Jerusalem, a new
intifada
erupted in the West Bank. The peace process was dead.
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The Clinton foreign policy legacy is surprisingly full given his administration's early hesitancy and his personal predilection for domestic policy. The United States collaborated with Russia to reduce nuclear inventories left from the Cold War. It opened a diplomatic dialogue with North Korea to check a rising nuclear threat. It enlarged NATO to include some of the former Soviet Union's Eastern and Central European satellites, rewrote the post–World War II peace treaty with Japan, and in 1996 sent warships to help defuse a dangerous crisis in the Taiwan Straits. The administration branched out in new directions. Activist first lady Hillary Clinton also traveled widely abroad, promoting the radical notion that women's rights had a place on the international agenda. In the second term, she gained support from Albright, who instructed diplomats to monitor women's rights internationally.
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In the realm of international politics, as Garry Wills has observed, Clinton was a "foreign policy minimalist, doing as little as possible as late as possible in place after place."
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He apologized for U.S. inaction in Rwanda. In the Balkans, his administration at first stumbled badly, at very high human cost. To its credit, it eventually employed U.S. military power in collaboration with NATO to limit the bloodshed and work out shaky peace arrangements in Bosnia and Kosovo, even though there was little popular or congressional support for such interventions. In all, Clinton employed military forces eighty-four times in eight years.

Clinton's administration was the first to deal systematically with what would become the most pressing national security issue of the new century: international terrorism. It responded perfunctorily, normally with sporadic air strikes, against terrorist attacks on New York's World Trade Center in 1993, a U.S. Air Force barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996, embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and the destroyer USS
Cole
on the eve of the 2000 election. The president authorized the killing of al Qaeda terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, scoring one near miss with a missile. But he never seriously considered ground operations against bin Laden's base camp in Afghanistan or going after his host, the Taliban government. Behind the scenes, the administration worked with other governments to foil several major terrorist plots, including one against the Los Angeles airport on the eve of the millennium. It named the indefatigable and
abrasive Richard Clarke as coordinator of counterterrorism operations. But there was no real sense of urgency and thus no strong incentive to take drastic action. "What's it gonna take, Dick?" a terrorism specialist asked Clarke prophetically. "Does Al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon to get their attention?"
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In foreign as in domestic policy, the administration's major claims to success were in the realm of economics.
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A timely bailout loan of $25 billion helped avert economic disaster in Mexico in 1995. By keeping U.S. markets open, the administration also helped contain the impact of the Asian economic meltdown of 1997. During the Clinton years, the United States concluded more than three hundred trade agreements. While the country enjoyed unparalleled prosperity, there was little sign that globalization was advancing prosperity in less developed nations or producing the stabilizing and democratizing results its enthusiasts claimed. On the contrary, by the end of the century it had provoked a strong backlash from labor unions and some liberals at home, and from leaders of developing nations who on the one hand resented the competitive edge enjoyed by the rich nations and on the other feared outside reformers who sought to impose on their shops labor and environmental standards.

The American mood at the end of the century was one of triumphalism and smug, insular complacency. According to a January 2000 poll, Americans ranked foreign policy twentieth in terms of importance. Following the lead of cable television, network news focused increasingly on entertainment and trivia and further slashed its coverage of events abroad. On college campuses, the teaching of foreign languages and area studies declined sharply. Defense spending remained at a remarkably high level through the 1990s—more than $325 billion in 1995. The United States maintained the capability to fight two major wars simultaneously. But the foreign affairs budget was sharply reduced. The United States was deeply in arrears to the UN and the World Health Organization. The State Department closed thirty embassies and twenty-five United States Information Agency libraries, provoking Christopher to protest that we "can't advance American interests by lowering the flag."
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Foreign policy played no more than an incidental role in the 2000 presidential campaign. To foreigners, self-indulgent Americans seemed to revel in their prosperity, a minority of the world's population recklessly consuming a huge proportion of its resources. America was both admired
and feared. Other peoples saw its ability to project its values abroad as a threat to their identities. The awesome display of U.S. military power in Kosovo worried allies as well as potential enemies. German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder fretted about the danger of U.S. unilateralism. A French diplomat observed in the spring of 1999 that the major danger in international politics was the American "hyperpower."
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After another period of stumbling and uncertainty, the new Republican administration of George W. Bush, son of the former president, would use the opportunity created by the devastating terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, to effect the most revolutionary changes in U.S. foreign policy since the Truman Doctrine of 1947.

The younger Bush gave little hint in his campaign of what was to come. Compared to his father's deeply rooted internationalism, his experience and mindset were parochial. A graduate of Yale University and the Harvard Business School, he had traveled abroad very little, worked mostly in business, and in politics served only as governor of Texas. In the campaign, he emphasized the need for humility in dealing with other nations. He distanced himself from the Wilsonian idealist label he sought to pin on the Democrats and especially his opponent, Vice President Al Gore, expressing disdain for humanitarian interventions and "nation-building." "We don't need to have the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten" in the Balkans, added his future national security adviser and foreign policy alter ego Condoleezza Rice, the first African American and first woman to hold that post. The United States must no longer be the "world's 911."
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