America should stay out of future Bosnias.

• Author: Clarke, Jonathan G.

BOSNIA is seen as a foreign policy dilemma of unprecedented difficulty. Compared to the Cold War challenges (which Pres. Clinton has described with the benefit of a large dollop of hindsight as "clear and straightforward"), Bosnia is highly complex.

The sense of complexity has overwhelmed the debate about that troubled region. Numerous policymakers have thrown up their hands in despair, concluding that the situation defies rational analysis. Calm deliberation has given way to crisis meetings and to a polarization of policy preferences--at one end, the immediate withdrawal of all UN forces, including the units of the West European powers; at the other, massive reinforcements and strategic bombing. These, in turn, led to the Dayton, Ohio, peace talks and the dispatching of 20,000 U.S. troops to Bosnia as part of a UN contingent of 60,000.

It would be a rash commentator who suggested that any part of the Yugoslav crisis was straightforward. The large and expanding literature devoted to Balkan affairs unanimously attests to the region's complexities, and the Bosnian struggle certainly is no exception.

Nevertheless, that is no excuse for policy planners to abandon sober analysis. The fact of the matter is that we live in "An Age of Yugoslavias," as Jacques Attali titled an article in Harper's in January, 1993. If the U.S. is to avoid stumbling from crisis to crisis, it must be reminded of some of the common elements of the Bosnian conflict and the wider European situation. Three central factors stand out:

* Far from being exceptional, the war in the former Yugoslavia is a drearily ordinary manifestation of intra-communal violence typical of European history. The situation in Bosnia is no more complex, atavistic, or deep-seated than the many other European disputes waiting their turn to step into the spotlight.

* Those conflicts, however, do not pose the sort of direct threat to American security that major past adversaries such as Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, or the Soviet Union did. U.S. military involvement in such post-Cold War European conflicts, therefore, probably will attract little public support.

* Intra-communal problems frequently manifest themselves as civil conflicts, rather than wars between nations. Americans, including policymakers, will find it difficult to distinguish between friend and foe, right and wrong, and aggressor and victim.

In other words, Bosnia is not an aberration. It is the shape of the future in Eastern Europe and many other regions. That being the case, the American approach to European security (with its deep roots in Cold War dogma) needs to be rethought radically.

Current doctrine, evolved during the confrontation with the former Soviet Union, teaches that European security is indivisible--a threat to one state is a threat to all--and that the way to meet any threat is with massive counterforce. Experience in Bosnia has shown the limitations of both of those propositions. The war in Bosnia, terrible though it has been, has not threatened America's security.

Those lessons are not being learned, though. If Bosnia indeed is typical of future European security challenges, the need for rational analysis becomes all the more acute. Failure to draw the appropriate lessons from the Bosnian debacle will cause the U.S. to end up repeating the same mistakes elsewhere in Europe.

There are indications that this already may be happening. Instead of being sobered by the experience in Bosnia, American officials actively are seeking fresh fields for political-military engagement in Europe. They have instituted an ambitious program of extending the scope of U.S...