A gulf profound as that Serbonian bog,
Betwixt Damatia and Mount Casius old,
Where armies whole have sunk. . . .
--John Milton, Paradise Lost II, 592-4
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 them. 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.
