Into the shooting gallery.

• Author: Garfinkle, Adam

WHEN I contemplate Clinton administration policies toward the Balkans and NATO, what comes to mind is M.C. Escher's maddening line sketch of flights of connected castle staircases, drawn to produce perfect ambiguity as to whether a pedestrian climbing them would be ascending or descending. Viewed from one angle, the President appears going up, and then suddenly, without any apparent discontinuity, on the next level going down. But always he looks to be a bit lost.

There is a dimensional dementia to U.S. policy in Europe, a chronic inability to gauge the scale of the issues or see the connections between diem. The result so far has been contradictory signals to the warring parties, to allies, and to Russia, as well as political embarrassment at home and squandered credibility abroad. The same debilities may soon produce dead American soldiers.

While the Bush administration saw the Bosnian issue too large, the collapse of Yugoslavia representing an ominous precedent for the Soviet Union, the Clinton administration has seen it too small for the most part, as a moral and humanitarian issue narrowly focused on the nature of the fighting itself. But, for the United States, the war should never have been mainly about Russia or Bosnia; it should have been about Europe.(1)

Given that NATO's most salient raison d'etre had disappeared with Soviet communism, it should have been obvious that the next European crisis, wherever and whatever it was, would raise the question of NATO's future. But the Balkans proved a deceivingly ambiguous place. For America, it was a region beyond its interests, one that for forty years had been marginal to its grand strategy. For European members of NATO, the Bosnian war was more than merely out-of-area, it was a demonic visitation from another century, a nineteenth-century land-grab fueled by Balkan nationalisms long thought suffocated by the sodden pillow of Titoism. For all the allies it was a ghoulish, primitive war, neither so trivial that it could be ignored, nor so important that it compelled decisive intervention at a cost in blood and treasure.

Nonetheless, Bosnia created a demand, however unwelcome, for American statesmen to forge both the rhetoric and the reality of the post-cold War American role in Europe. NATO might have been thrown early on into the Balkan breech, partly to prepare the expansion of the alliance into a more inclusive European security system. That would have risked much but would have had a geostrategic rationale. Or, on the other hand, the allies might have decided to quote Bismarck and ignore the Balkans, at least until the dust settled in Russia and a better defined appreciation of East-Central Europe's future came into focus.

But the opportunity to make a clear choice was missed; the thinking being done about Europe was instead concentrated on the question of NATO expansion and the many serious aspects of Russian opposition to it, most notably the effect rapid expansion might have on the prospects for a democratic and non-imperial Russian future. Bosnia, somehow, was seen through a very different lens. For the Americans, oriented toward domestic issues, bent on affirming...