Already sickened by the widely broadcast atrocities of Serbian-controlled forces, Secretary of State James Baker was outraged by the massacre in Sarajevo. The carnage was so appalling that Washington, after months of foot-dragging, stiffened its resolve to get tough on Belgrade. Having watched the European Community repeatedly fail to restore order, Baker had come to regard the growing Yugoslav conflict as a test of U.S. leadership in a post-cold-war world. Meeting with his chief advisers, he urged them to keep pushing hard at the United Nations for swift, blanket economic sanctions against Serbia and Montenegro. Baker didn’t have to mention military intervention–everyone in the room knew that if economic sanctions failed, force was the only remaining option.
A year ago, when Yugoslavia first dissolved into ethnic war, the Bush administration saw little need for stepping in. No allies were in immediate danger; no strategic or economic interests were threatened. The Balkan dispute looked like a messy regional affair: by seceding, Slovenia and Croatia had taken matters into their own hands. Besides, no one seemed blameless when it came to shedding blood. Exhausted from the recently concluded gulf war, the administration was content to let the EC take the lead in trying to restore peace. Washington was slow to recognize the breakaway republics, fearful that without negotiations with Serbia, civil war would erupt in Croatia and Bosnia, which both contain large numbers of ethnic Serbs. But Baker failed to anticipate the reactions of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic-who misread U.S. forbearance as a green light to build a greater Serbia.
Even as Serbia advanced on Croatia, the State Department could argue that Milosevic was still trying to hold Yugoslavia together. “But his aggression in Bosnia crossed a new threshold,” says a Baker adviser. Image after televised image of attacks on innocent civilians exposed Milosevic as an aggressor willing to carry his conflict across borders. “It’s pretty clear that he’s going to do the same thing to the [ethnic] Albanians in Kosovo province as he’s doing to the Muslims in Bosnia,” says a State Department official, warning that a widening war could spill over into Y via’s neighbors. Fed up with the dissension among the EC members-Britain and Germany wanted action; France did not-Baker decided Washington had to act.
He decided to take unilateral steps as part of a strategy to elicit the EC’s cooperation through tough talk, arm-twisting and embarrassment. “I don’t think that the world is going to be willing to continue to accept a humanitarian nightmare,” Baker said en route to Europe, where he used every occasion to push sanctions imposed by the United Nations under Chapter 7 of its charter, which also permits military action. The pressure tactics worked: last week the EC voted a partial trade embargo, and the U.N. Security Council imposed more sweeping economic sanctions.
But with the passage of a punishing U.N. resolution, is anyone serious about military intervention? “My sense is, Baker is moving in that direction,” says a senior administration official, cautioning that no discussions between allies have taken place. Military action, say U.S. officials, would have no resemblance to Desert Storm. Rather, it could take one of two far less ambitious forms: a limited show of force to deliver humanitarian aid (as in the relief effort to the Kurds after the gulf war) or military muscle to enforce the sanctions (as a blockade to prevent, say, oil deliveries). The United States, Baker has said, will not act unilaterally; possible options include a NATO operation or a multinational force under U.N. auspices. In the coming weeks, as the sanctions take hold, Milosevic may call Washington’s bluff-and test its willingness to commit to a military operation no one wants.
