From 1989: The Balkans: Europe\u2019s third world<\/a><\/p>\nWe understand it better now that the American century is over and some of us sound more and more like Serbs. But in 1993 we had just won the Cold War, and we bestrode the world. Democratic enlargement replaced containment as the foreign policy of the new era. America\u2019s grand strategy would be to expand the circle of market democracies around the world by supporting free trade, helping economies liberalize, enlarging NATO to the east, and working through multilateral institutions. It was the foreign policy of globalization. What did a bloody little tribal war have to do with that?<\/p>\n
In the Oval Office on May 6, Clinton told Colin Powell, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and Les Aspin, the secretary of defense, that Balkan Ghosts <\/i>had made a deep impression on him. Aspin returned to the Pentagon and called Lake. \u201cHe\u2019s going south on this policy. His heart isn\u2019t in it.\u201d Christopher got the news in Europe and came home. A travel book based on a travel book had fallen into the young president\u2019s hands, and he changed his mind about Bosnia. Foreign policy makes no sense.<\/p>\n
Vietnam haunted Clinton, who had demonstrated against the war and avoided serving in it. Somalia haunted him too, after 19 U.S. troops were killed by Somali militiamen in Mogadishu in October 1993. If America decided to use force in Bosnia, people would die far outside the control of policy makers in the Situation Room. But people were already dying while America stood by and watched on CNN. The lessons of Vietnam were complex and perhaps the wrong ones for Bosnia. Perhaps, just as getting into Vietnam had been the essential mistake of the Cold War, staying out of Bosnia would be the essential mistake of the post\u2013Cold War era. That was the view of the journalists in Sarajevo\u2014their stories and images carried the opposite message of the Vietnam reporting. Bosnia stood Vietnam on its head. Perhaps ongoing slaughter in a small, far-off place could actually harm American interests. Perhaps the United States had to learn to use force in a limited way, and to rebuild broken countries. Perhaps that was being pragmatic.<\/p>\n
Vietnam did not cast a shadow on Holbrooke. He wasn\u2019t conflicted about Bosnia. Twenty-four hours in Sarajevo had inoculated him against the uncertainty of his former colleagues. And Vietnam had given him a feel for the reality of other countries, of the people caught in the tragedies of history. \u201cMust be engaged in Europe,\u201d he wrote on a scrap of paper. \u201cNeed and desire for US engagement (1947, not 1919).\u201d<\/p>\n<\/section>\n\nIV. In the summer of 1994, Bill Clinton and Warren Christopher reluctantly made Holbrooke assistant secretary of state, and gave him the task of trying to end the Balkan catastrophe, now entering its fourth year. Holbrooke took to recording his own story on microcassettes.<\/p>\n
Tomorrow I leave for Sarajevo. It will be my third trip to the war zone in the last 25 months, but this one will be different\u2014I\u2019ll be traveling with a large official contingent, which will certainly inhibit me greatly. Nonetheless, I\u2019m awfully glad that my previous trips have prepared me for all this. Everything I\u2019m hearing about the region and its problems, plus the political and bureaucratic binds that we\u2019re in, makes me increasingly depressed. Objectively, the correct thing to do is to put military pressure on the Serbs. They are the aggressors, and their irredentist goals threaten the entire region. But I\u2019m not sure the American public or its leadership has the will for it, the British and French are clearly opposed and say they will pull out of peacekeeping operations to protect their own troops, and the risks are enormous\u2014even greater if we\u2019re not ready to follow through. It\u2019s an agonizing problem, and it\u2019s been much worse by its mishandling over the last year and a half.<\/p>\n
Although I remain strongly of the view that the arms embargo is immoral and should be lifted so the Bosnian Muslims can defend themselves, getting there from here is extremely difficult in the present framework. Keeping the Bosnians alive through covert resupply strikes me as a better option, but I haven\u2019t had much luck with that one yet.<\/p>\n
The Europeans will not use NATO force to help the Muslims, and the United States will not put ground troops into the region. The resulting stalemate is certain to doom the Muslims, except perhaps as a rump state. The Muslim offensive in Biha\u0107 triggered the Serbian counteroffensive, which as of this morning is on the brink of total success. Karad\u017ei\u0107 and Mladi\u0107, seeing an opportunity to break the will of their enemies before the winter breaks them in their isolation, have gone for broke, and the West is unable to figure out how to react. The allied response was pathetic. We therefore stand today on the edge of the end of our policy in the region. The search for a new policy is unavoidable, and that new policy will inevitably be at the expense of the Muslims.<\/p>\n
I feel sick about being a part of such a policy. I don\u2019t feel responsible, however, as I inherited a terrible hand. Nobody wants to say outright that the war is lost for the Muslims in its current mode and that we should salvage a rump state in the triangular wedge that runs from the Croatian coast up through Sarajevo to the Tuzla plain, to seek a cease-fire and preserve the international status of the state. No one wants to agree to that, and yet no one wants to put enough energy into the effort to make the Muslims win. The effort to save the Muslims now would require NATO airpower and American ground troops\u2014something which is impossible to achieve. I had hoped to construct a policy that would get us through the winter with the status quo, but the Biha\u0107 offensive killed that opportunity.<\/p>\n
Nixon and Kissinger, confronting the inevitable disaster in Vietnam, figured out a way to pretend that it was peace with honor to the American public, even though it was a sellout of the South Vietnamese. They blamed the Congress, they took some very muscular steps and said they\u2019d done everything they could, and they misrepresented the nature of the deal with Saigon. I\u2019m not suggesting we do the same thing. That level of cynicism is unacceptable, and in any case not something that this administration is capable of, since it lacks coherence and discipline. But the fact remains that we must confront our dilemma, we must confront the horrendous situation we\u2019re in, set up some priorities, and see if we can resurrect a strong American leadership role. It\u2019s going to be very hard to do.<\/p>\n
Tony Lake prevents action and yet refuses to take any himself. Warren Christopher is willing to act but only uncertainly and with ambivalence, and only after checking with everyone else. The president seems totally uninvolved. I am under constant attack from Tony and lack support of the seventh floor, except from [Christopher\u2019s adviser] Strobe [Talbott]. That support is shaky because the price is so high for him, and because he doesn\u2019t like confrontation. Yet there\u2019s nothing more to be done except soldier on. I feel like my government career is slowly coming to an end. I don\u2019t see how I can continue under the present circumstances, although I will try. I\u2019m already trying to think of ways to leave with honor, dignity, and a reputation that isn\u2019t destroyed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
V. By 1995 the Croatian army had become the strongest force in the war, and Milo\u0161evi\u0107 knew that the game was nearly up. His objective shifted from establishing Greater Serbia to preserving his own power by getting out from under punishing UN sanctions through a peace deal. He fell to quarreling with his Bosnian Serb allies, because Karad\u017ei\u0107 and Mladi\u0107, intoxicated by years of battlefield success, had decided to seize as much remaining territory as possible before the Muslim and Croat forces could turn the war around. The conflict reached its climax in the summer of 1995, with the Serb massacre of thousands of Muslim men and boys near Srebrenica, and a Croat-Muslim offensive that pushed the Serbs out of territory in Croatia and northern Bosnia that they\u2019d held from the start. In August, just when Holbrooke was getting ready to quit his job, the Clinton administration finally settled on a plan to use American diplomacy, backed by NATO jets, to end the war. Holbrooke was sent to the Balkans to try to negotiate a peace deal among the three warring leaders.<\/p>\nPresident Bill Clinton meets with Richard Holbrooke and other Bosnian-conflict negotiators on a Virginia military base. August 23, 1995. (William J. Clinton Presidential Library)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nAt last he had something to do, far from his agonies in Washington. A metabolic conversion was about to catalyze all his petty and destructive traits into single-minded purpose. The mission would focus the light in his eyes and engage everything he loved\u2014speed, history, America, even a little mischief. He had been waiting all his life for this chance.<\/p>\n
At Milo\u0161evi\u0107\u2019s palace in Belgrade, Holbrooke was greeted like an old drinking buddy. When the white-jacketed waiter offered glasses of mineral water and fruit drinks, Holbrooke asked, \u201cMay I take two?,\u201d and Milo\u0161evi\u0107 replied, \u201cAmbassador, take three.\u201d He reached one of his thick hands into a pocket of his blue blazer, took out a document written in Serbian, and gave it to Holbrooke. \u201cThis paper creates a joint Yugoslav\u2013Republika Srpska delegation for all future peace talks.\u201d The delegation would have six members\u2014three from Belgrade and three from Pale, the Bosnian Serb headquarters. Its leader, Milo\u0161evi\u0107 himself, would break any tie. From now on he would negotiate for the Republika Srpska\u2014removing the biggest obstacle to getting an agreement.<\/p>\n
Milo\u0161evi\u0107 lit a big Cuban cigar. Holbrooke pressed him. \u201cHow do you know that your friends from Pale will\u2014\u201d\u201cThey are not my friends,\u201d Milo\u0161evi\u0107 spat. \u201cIt is awful just to be in the same room with them for so long. They are shit.\u201dThe talking and eating and drinking went on for eight hours. Milo\u0161evi\u0107 drank steadily, getting buzzed and then sobering up several times, while Holbrooke lifted his glass of Scotch or slivovic <\/i>to his lips and barely sipped. He didn\u2019t stick to talking points\u2014he had no real talking points\u2014but let the conversation run its meandering course while looking for openings. Milo\u0161evi\u0107 digressed about Serbian wine, the Ottoman empire, World War II, his banking days in New York, the economic future of Serbia. Holbrooke let him go on, enjoying the parley, and then always brought them back to the war.So a connection formed, with the tense familiarity of two card-playing rogues. Once, in the middle of an endless session, Holbrooke phoned his friend Leslie Gelb in New York. \u201cHey, man. I\u2019m here in Slobo\u2019s office. I told him you were a Cuban-cigar smoker too, and I asked him if he\u2019d give you some. He said he\u2019d send you a box, but I wouldn\u2019t believe him, because he lies all the time. Don\u2019t you lie all the time, Slobo?\u201d<\/p>\n
Milo\u0161evi\u0107 was even more direct, sprinkling fuck<\/i> all over his so-so English, needling Holbrooke: \u201cRichard Charles Albert Holbrooke. Why do you have all those names?\u201d Or: \u201cWhy is your collar always up? You\u2019re a politician\u2014all you politicians have something like that. With Tudjman it\u2019s his hair; with you it\u2019s your collar.\u201dThomas Mann called art \u201ca very serious jest.\u201d Holbrooke\u2019s diplomacy was theater with mortal stakes. Large groups of reporters began to follow his team\u2019s every move, waiting in the lobby of the Hyatt hotel across the Sava River from Milo\u0161evi\u0107\u2019s office, or outside Tudjman\u2019s palace in Zagreb, and Holbrooke would pause to give them a spontaneous and perfectly crafted paragraph of non-news, careful to keep expectations low, because it did him no good to raise them. He went without sleep for a day or two then crashed for a few hours. He gave the impression of being always in motion, sweeping with his entourage in and out of airports and hotels, crowding each day with meetings deep into the night, always pushing the pace. This created momentum for the next small breakthrough, and each breakthrough added more speed and power. The experience exhilarated him, and when he had to spend a whole day in Geneva conferring with European diplomats and got his first full night\u2019s sleep, in a luxury hotel, he fell into exhaustion and wanted to get back to the Balkans, where the tense, sleepless hours with warlords restored his energy. If he had a strategy, it was this: He set himself in motion and caused others to move, and things became possible that never happened with everyone at rest.In mid-September, after days of NATO bombs falling on Serb positions, Holbrooke forced Karad\u017ei\u0107 and Mladi\u0107 to end the siege of Sarajevo in exchange for a halt to the bombing. He brought the signed agreement to Sarajevo. At the presidential palace\u2014bullet-scarred, sandbagged, nylon sheeting over the windows, doorknobs falling off\u2014Izetbegovi\u0107; his prime minister, Haris Silajd\u017ei\u0107; and his foreign minister, Muhamed Sacirbey (Holbrooke called them \u201cIzzy, Silly, and Mo\u201d), were deeply unhappy with the bombing halt. They seemed to prefer the siege to continue as long as NATO was punishing the Serbs. Sacirbey told Holbrooke that his negotiations had contaminated him with the stench of the Serbs.But when Holbrooke walked outside, a large crowd that had gathered across the street began to cheer. An aide told him to wave. Holbrooke normally used his broad shoulders and barrel chest to dominate a room or a street. His size and energy gave Bosnians an almost physical sense that here at last was a diplomat who intended to solve their problem. But this time he raised his hand slowly, awkwardly. He was close to tears. The siege had lasted 42 months.The Bosnian Serb army was collapsing, and Croatian and Bosnian forces were a dozen miles from Banja Luka, a Serb stronghold throughout the war. Milo\u0161evi\u0107 begged Holbrooke not to let Banja Luka fall. If it fell, another several hundred thousand refugees would pour into Serbia, possibly threatening Milo\u0161evi\u0107\u2019s regime. But Izetbegovi\u0107 saw in Banja Luka the Serbs\u2019 Sarajevo. What justice to pay them back by raining shells on their biggest city! He had not had enough time to get used to seeing the Serbs in panic and defeat.Holbrooke hardly ever looked back, but in the coming years he would have two regrets about Bosnia. By the fall of 1995 all sides knew that a peace deal would create a Bosnian state of two roughly equal entities, one Serb, the other Muslim-Croat. Holbrooke\u2019s first regret was pressuring the Muslims to accept the name Republika Srpska\u2014Izetbegovi\u0107 said it was like a \u201cNazi name\u201d\u2014for the Serb entity. Republika Srpska<\/i> became a curse that the negotiators hung around Bosnia\u2019s neck. The second regret was forcing the Croatian and Bosnian armies to stop short of Banja Luka and accept a cease-fire in early October.By then the map had been transformed on the battlefield: From 70\u201330 in favor of the Serbs, the Muslim-Croat federation now had more than half of Bosnia. The cease-fire ended the shooting, but previous cease-fires had broken down. All the devilish questions that had started and sustained the war\u2014who got what land, how Bosnia would function as a state\u2014remained to be worked out at a peace conference scheduled for several weeks off. Having spent two months shuttling among the Balkan leaders, Holbrooke did not think the chances of success were good.What if he had let Banja Luka fall? It would have been the end of the Republika Srpska. Bosnia today would be a multiethnic state, messy but whole. The war would have had a winner. And there would have been no Dayton.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n\nVI. The obvious place for a peace conference was Paris or Geneva. Holbrooke didn\u2019t want either. Those sparkling cities had seduced diplomats who spent years talking and talking about Vietnam, eating well and sightseeing, while the killing continued on the other side of the world. Holbrooke wanted the United States to host the conference, and on a military base, where there would be maximum American control, no distractions, and no temptation to linger. He wanted the success to be American and he was willing to risk an American failure, and although he was a mere assistant secretary of state, the success or failure would also be his own, because this was Holbrooke\u2019s show and he was going to gamble everything for his country and himself.<\/p>\n
Almost no one else liked the idea of an American venue. Why risk damaging the president just before an election year? But they deferred to Holbrooke, who had brought the talks this far.<\/p>\n
He selected Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, outside Dayton, Ohio, one of the biggest military bases in America: 8,000 acres sprawled across flat farm country, 23,000 employees, an airstrip two and a half miles long. The delegations touched down on the night of October 31, and Holbrooke was the first on the red carpet to shake each arriving president\u2019s hand. Near the entrance to the base were four two-story brick barracks around a rectangular parking lot\u2014the Visiting Officers\u2019 Quarters. These became the temporary home of the national delegations. The Bosnians and Croatians faced each other from the north and south ends of the parking lot, the Serbians and Americans from the east and west; the Europeans occupied a fifth barracks just outside the quadrangle. The housing blocks had long, narrow corridors and cramped rooms, with vinyl trim and shabby furniture, like a $49-a-night motel.<\/p>\n
The only places to eat on base were the Officers\u2019 Club, a short drive away, and Packy\u2019s Sports Bar & Grill, in the concrete-block Hope Hotel and Conference Center, 200 yards across a grassy field from the barracks. Workers laid a winding path over the grass and lined it with ground lights, a modest touch of elegance. But in the history of international diplomacy nothing was less elegant than Wright-Patterson.<\/p>\n
And yet this mix of the outsize and the drab\u2014this American, specifically midwestern atmosphere, at once banal and imposing and earnest\u2014told the gilded palaces of Europe, You have the history and the beauty, but you failed to end this war on your continent<\/i>. Nothing happened until the Americans got involved\u2014until the uncouth, sleepless Holbrooke barged in.<\/p>\n
He arrived nervous and exhausted. He had been crisscrossing the Atlantic and racing among Europe\u2019s capitals for two months, sleeping three hours a night and taking 10-minute catnaps, eating heavy food, grinding through nonstop meetings. His face was pale and puffy. Now he had arranged for the entire Balkan cast to reassemble 5,000 miles away, inside the security fence of an American base.<\/p>\n
I keep thinking of live theater\u2014Holbrooke as a producer-director, an impresario. He refused to sell tickets: The enormous international press corps was confined to a featureless building at the far end of the base and fed a meager diet of daily briefings. He relegated the Europeans to minor players\u2014their lengthy procedural discussions drove him crazy, and he soon handed off their morning meetings to his deputy. He also held Washington at bay, seeing every question or objection as intolerable meddling.<\/p>\n
There were hundreds of extras at Dayton, but the drama was stripped down to half a dozen characters. The set was so intimate that they could see the lights in barracks windows and know who else was awake. The plot advanced in random encounters on the parking-lot asphalt. Holbrooke created this claustrophobic stage as if its emptiness might force the characters to face the truths that he would show them.<\/p>\n
There was no fixed closing date, though he didn\u2019t think the cast could last longer than two weeks at Wright-Patterson. He came without a schedule or a script\u2014this was an improv piece that could shut down at any moment.<\/p>\n
He thought he would probably fail. And yet here he was, thrusting himself into every scene.<\/p>\n
Tudjman, the Croatian president, came to Dayton the winner of the Balkan wars. His entire country was now ethnically cleansed, except for eastern Slavonia, the region across the Danube River from Serbia where the war had begun. Eastern Slavonia was all Tudjman wanted from Dayton\u2014he would go back to war for it if necessary\u2014so he was able to come and go from Zagreb with his obsequious retinue, playing the other two sides against each other for his own gain.<\/p>\nHolbrooke greets Slobodan Milo\u0161evi\u0107 upon his arrival in Dayton, Ohio, for peace talks. October 31, 1995. (Beth Keiser \/ AP)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nMilo\u0161evi\u0107 wanted peace at Dayton. He wanted the Americans to help get him out of what he had started years ago. In Holbrooke he\u2019d found his redeemer, and just setting foot in the United States, where harsh coverage greeted Milo\u0161evi\u0107 as the evil mastermind of the war, was a sort of victory. He wanted to hold on to power in Serbia, and he wanted sanctions lifted. Holbrooke had tried to suspend them before the talks began as an incentive for a deal, but Anthony Lake and Madeleine Albright, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, had blocked him. The ongoing stranglehold made Milo\u0161evi\u0107 vulnerable\u2014he left Belgrade fearing that a military coup might occur in his absence or that assassination might await his return\u2014and at Dayton he started out in no mood to negotiate. But he was ready to go further than anyone else for peace. Karad\u017ei\u0107 and Mladi\u0107 were not among the Bosnian Serbs at Dayton; as indicted war criminals, they would have been arrested by U.S. authorities.<\/p>\n
The Bosnians were the wild card. Izetbegovi\u0107 hated to negotiate, because it required him to make decisions, and any decision would either plunge his people back into war or ratify Serb atrocities. He saw the peace talks as a kind of blackmail, and he found the false niceties of diplomatic chat over meals with people who wanted to destroy him so unpleasant that he withdrew to his quarters. He slept badly at Dayton and woke up in the middle of the night with his heart pounding, as if he were about to have a heart attack. \u201cI felt crucified,\u201d he later wrote. His two top advisers, Silajd\u017ei\u0107 and Sacirbey, hated each other. They were fighting for their political future\u2014postwar Bosnia would not have room for all three leaders.<\/p>\n
No one could be sure of a final position from the Bosnians. They wanted an undivided Sarajevo, and they also wanted the other enclaves, including Srebrenica, now held by the Serbs, and they wanted the land they and the Croatians had recently taken, and they wanted war criminals prosecuted at The Hague. The Bosnians were like an assault victim too traumatized and embittered to watch the perpetrator cop a plea.<\/p>\n
The three sides were so hostile that after the first day of the conference, they held no formal meetings again until the very last day. This was not the United States and North Vietnam arguing about the shape of the table and then repeating their official positions year after year. It wasn\u2019t chess between two grand masters like Henry Kissinger and Zhou Enlai. It was diplomacy in its most human form, the bruising collisions of raw psyches.<\/p>\n
On the first night,<\/span> Holbrooke took Milo\u0161evi\u0107 to Packy\u2019s, the sports bar in the Hope Hotel. Haris Silajd\u017ei\u0107 and an American diplomat were sitting at a table near a wall of wide-screen TVs. Silajd\u017ei\u0107 was a Sarajevo academic, just turned 50, with a modern vision of multiethnic Bosnia, but he was moody, given to sullen glooms, rages, and vengeful hard-line stands. Holbrooke, always formal with Izetbegovi\u0107, could deal with Silajd\u017ei\u0107 as an equal. Since Izetbegovi\u0107 was an unwilling negotiator, Holbrooke knew that Dayton would come down to getting these two men, Silajd\u017ei\u0107 and Milo\u0161evi\u0107, to talk.<\/p>\nBut at Packy\u2019s they ignored each other, barely shaking hands. Milo\u0161evi\u0107 was in a foul temper over sanctions. He told Holbrooke that his whole approach to the negotiations was stupid. \u201cYou don\u2019t understand the Balkans.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m sure I don\u2019t, Mr. President, but we\u2019re here to make peace, and I hope you\u2019ll help us.\u201d<\/p>\n
The bar food, Milo\u0161evi\u0107 declared, was \u201cshit.\u201d After that first night he reserved a table at the slightly more upscale Officers\u2019 Club and held forth over Scotch and lobsters flown in from Maine by an American sympathizer. He went shopping at a mall across from the base and bought a pair of Timberland shoes for his wife, and seemed prepared to stay in Dayton forever.<\/p>\n
The symbol of the war<\/span> was Sarajevo. The Bosnian Serbs wanted to carve up Yugoslavia\u2019s most mixed city into ethnic districts, like Cold War Berlin or East and West Jerusalem\u2014Karad\u017ei\u0107 even proposed a wall. The Muslims wanted it as Bosnia\u2019s undivided capital, in federation territory. Holbrooke was adamant that there could not be another Berlin Wall at the end of the 20th century in Sarajevo; the Americans proposed a third, federal model, like the District of Columbia. The discussions went in circles.<\/p>\nOn Saturday, November 18, Holbrooke took a walk around the parking lot with Milo\u0161evi\u0107 and threatened to shut everything down. The talks had gone on for almost three futile weeks. \u201cSarajevo must be settled at Dayton,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cOkay.\u201d Milo\u0161evi\u0107 laughed. \u201cI won\u2019t eat today until we solve Sarajevo.\u201d<\/p>\n
A little later, Milo\u0161evi\u0107 came into Holbrooke\u2019s suite. \u201cOkay, okay. The hell with your D.C. model. It\u2019s too complicated. It won\u2019t work. I\u2019ll solve Sarajevo.\u201d<\/p>\n
Holbrooke was stunned. Milo\u0161evi\u0107 was going to give up the Bosnian capital. That was how much he had come to despise his Bosnian Serb clients. They are shit.<\/i> He told Holbrooke not to breathe a word to the Bosnian Serbs in his delegation\u2014Milo\u0161evi\u0107 had completely shut them out, refusing to show them a single map. Crucial boundary lines remained to be drawn, but the whole city, including its Serb-held districts, would go to the besieged. \u201cYou deserve Sarajevo because you dug a tunnel and went in and out like foxes,\u201d Milo\u0161evi\u0107 later told Silajd\u017ei\u0107. \u201cYou fought for it and those cowards killed you from the hills.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sunday dawned cold. <\/span>Despite Sarajevo, no one believed there was time and will to resolve everything, and a sense of imminent failure set in. Holbrooke, who was going through cycles of collapse and recovery, told the Americans to pack their bags and take them out to the parking lot, in full view of the other delegations, for transport to the airstrip. It was a bluff, and it failed miserably. By evening the bags were back in the rooms.<\/p>\nMilo\u0161evi\u0107 found Holbrooke in his room. \u201cYou tricked me!\u201d he yelled. \u201cHow can I trust you?\u201d<\/p>\n
John Menzies, a U.S. diplomat, had put together a pair of charts on poster board to show the Bosnians all they had gained thus far at Dayton. Holbrooke let the Bosnians keep them, and when Milo\u0161evi\u0107 came to talk to Izetbegovi\u0107 in his suite on Sunday afternoon, one chart was propped up between the couch and a side table, with a single line visible at the top: \u201cFederation Gets 58% of the Territory.\u201d Milo\u0161evi\u0107 hadn\u2019t realized how much he had given up, and whenever he tried to find out, Holbrooke\u2014who had access to a computerized military map in a secure room across the hall from his suite\u2014avoided telling him.<\/p>\n
Milo\u0161evi\u0107 hurried out of the Bosnian barracks to the American quarters and found Holbrooke in his room. \u201cYou tricked me!\u201d he yelled. \u201cHow can I trust you?\u201d<\/p>\n
Milo\u0161evi\u0107 was willing to give up just about anything for a deal\u2014even a Serb cemetery in the hills above Sarajevo\u2014but he wouldn\u2019t back down from the standing agreement, which gave the Serbs 49 percent of Bosnia, and the Americans couldn\u2019t ask him to.<\/p>\n
So Milo\u0161evi\u0107 and Silajd\u017ei\u0107 stared at maps in a small conference room of the American barracks and argued over where the 7 percent would come from all evening, past midnight, into the early-morning hours. Silajd\u017ei\u0107 wasn\u2019t yielding, demanding a reservoir here and a village there for the Bosnians. \u201cYou\u2019re going to take away my pants, too,\u201d Milo\u0161evi\u0107 moaned, but he acceded to Silajd\u017ei\u0107\u2019s demands and kept looking for his 7 percent. Dayton had come down to carving up slices of land.<\/p>\nHolbrooke, Warren Christopher (center<\/em>), and others map possible territorial trade-offs among Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. November 1995. (Aric R. Schwan \/ State Department)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nIn the map room across the hall from Holbrooke\u2019s suite, computer engineers had transformed aerial footage of Bosnia shot by NATO bombing planners into a 3-D video game. Using a joystick, viewers could fly over the entire country and see its features in fine detail. When Holbrooke brought Milo\u0161evi\u0107 and his sidekick, President Momir Bulatovi\u0107 of Montenegro, to experience this wonder of American technology, he suddenly realized that there was hardly anything on the screen to see\u2014no houses or villages, just mountains and rocks. He pointed this out to the two leaders.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s right,\u201d Bulatovi\u0107 said, \u201cbut that is Bosnia.\u201d<\/p>\n
Holbrooke put his head in his hands. \u201cThis is going to ruin my marriage, ruin my life. Look at what you\u2019re fighting for. There\u2019s nothing there.\u201d<\/p>\n
Around 3:30 a.m., Silajd\u017ei\u0107 came up with an idea: Give the Serbs a hunk of the terrain in western Bosnia that Muslim and Croat forces had taken just before the cease-fire. Silajd\u017ei\u0107 considered most of it worthless, and Milo\u0161evi\u0107 just wanted to get to 49 percent, and suddenly they were shaking hands. It was four in the morning. Warren Christopher called for a bottle of his favorite California chardonnay. They all toasted one another around a small circular table.<\/p>\n
Tudjman was fast asleep, so his foreign minister, Mate Grani\u0107, was summoned to give the Croatian blessing. Izetbegovi\u0107 was also roused, and he arrived wearing his pajamas under an overcoat, looking unhappy. Grani\u0107, bald and mild-mannered, studied the map and flew into a rage. All the land that Silajd\u017ei\u0107 had given to the Serbs was Bosnian Croat. Grani\u0107 pounded the map and shouted, \u201cImpossible! Zero point zero percent chance that my president will accept this!\u201d He stormed out. Milo\u0161evi\u0107 and Silajd\u017ei\u0107 sat in silence. The peace had lasted just over half an hour.<\/p>\n
Izetbegovi\u0107 was staring at the northeastern corner of the map. The town of Br\u010dko, where Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia converged along the Sava River, had been in Serb hands since the ethnic cleansing of 1992. It occupied the narrow chokepoint between the two chunks of Bosnian Serb territory, joining them to each other and to Serbia. For this reason the Serbs considered Br\u010dko strategically vital. Every diplomatic map had given Br\u010dko to them. Milo\u0161evi\u0107 kept pushing for a wider corridor\u201410 miles\u2014through Br\u010dko, while Silajd\u017ei\u0107 wanted to narrow it down to a 30-yard underpass beneath a railroad bridge. Earlier that night, Izetbegovi\u0107 had urged Silajd\u017ei\u0107 to claim Br\u010dko outright. The prime minister had replied that this would end the talks. Now Izetbegovi\u0107 was staring at Br\u010dko on the map. Silajd\u017ei\u0107 had left it to the Serbs. Holbrooke knew that something was wrong. \u201cWhat do you think, Mr. President? Can we finish the negotiation right now?\u201d<\/p>\n
Izetbegovi\u0107 always took a long time to answer difficult questions. \u201cI cannot accept this agreement,\u201d he said quietly in English.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat did you say?\u201d Christopher demanded.<\/p>\n
Izetbegovi\u0107 repeated himself, louder this time.<\/p>\n
Silajd\u017ei\u0107 threw his papers on the table. \u201cI can\u2019t take this anymore!\u201d he shouted as he rushed from the room.<\/p>\n
Sunday had been the longest day at Dayton, and it ended in dismal failure.<\/p>\n
On monday <\/span>the sun shone and the exhausted delegates wandered outside, running into one another in the parking lot, stopping to talk as if in a daze. That night Christopher went to see Izetbegovi\u0107. The Bosnian president spent 10 minutes reciting the history of Muslim grievances against Serbs and Croats, until Christopher finally lost his immaculate temper. Almost trembling, his voice rising, he scolded the Bosnians for their irrational behavior and gave Izetbegovi\u0107 one hour to change his mind, or else the conference would end. The hour went by, and Izetbegovi\u0107 answered the ultimatum. Croatia would yield 1 percent of Muslim land in Bosnia to the Serbs\u2014but now he wanted Br\u010dko. This was a new demand, and the Americans rejected it out of hand.<\/p>\nWith the knowledge that the conference would close down in the morning, Izetbegovi\u0107 went to bed and enjoyed his first good night of sleep in a long time. He would not have to be the Bosnian president who acquiesced to the results of genocide.<\/p>\n
And Holbrooke? It was the worst day of his diplomatic life. He had hardly slept in three nights. He had no more moves, no more lines. His incomprehensible stamina was spent. The show had collapsed, and much of the blame would fall on him. At a meeting with the Europeans he slumped in his chair, shoes and socks off, shirt open, trousers rumpled, and said, \u201cThat\u2019s it, we\u2019re leaving.\u201d<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t a bluff. The delegations were asked to review a press release announcing the failure of the peace conference. A planned visit by President Clinton was canceled, and the next day, Tuesday, November 21, everyone would go home. Holbrooke looked shattered. The Balkan leaders were all crazy, he told Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister, who was leading the European delegation, but the Bosnians\u2014the war\u2019s victims, for whom the Americans had gone so far and done so much\u2014the Bosnians enraged him more than anyone. He suspected they wanted the talks to fail so they could go back to fighting and win the war. If so, they would no longer have the Americans behind them.<\/p>\n
There was one person<\/span> who would not let Dayton fail.<\/p>\nMilo\u0161evi\u0107 ran into Bildt in the parking lot and begged him to keep trying to get the Serbs their 49 percent: \u201cGive me something\u2014hills, rocks, swamps, anything will do. It doesn\u2019t matter anymore.\u201d He berated Holbrooke\u2019s deputy: \u201cYou can\u2019t let this happen. You\u2019re the United States. You can\u2019t let the Bosnians push you around this way. Just tell them what to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
On Tuesday morning it snowed. Milo\u0161evi\u0107, the man most responsible for millions of individual tragedies during the past four years in the Balkans, was standing in the parking lot. He was waiting for Holbrooke to come out of an early staff meeting at which he was thanking his American colleagues for their valiant effort to end the war. Kati Marton, Holbrooke\u2019s wife, spotted Milo\u0161evi\u0107 outside in the snow and rushed him into Holbrooke\u2019s crowded and unspeakably messy room.<\/p>\n
\u201cOkay, okay,\u201d Milo\u0161evi\u0107 told the Americans. \u201cI will walk the final mile for peace.\u201d He would agree to submit the status of Br\u010dko to international arbitration in a year. It was the last card he had to play.<\/p>\n
Holbrooke instantly recovered his strength. \u201cChris,\u201d he told the secretary of state when they were alone and he\u2019d locked the door for privacy, \u201cthe next meeting may be the most important of your entire tenure as secretary.\u201d Christopher was listening hard. \u201cWe can get this agreement\u2014or we can lose it. Forget Washington. It\u2019s entirely in our hands. We must go into the meeting with an absolute determination to succeed.\u201d<\/p>\n
They went next door to the Bosnian barracks. They refused to sit down. From the doorway, Holbrooke presented Milo\u0161evi\u0107\u2019s offer. Izetbegovi\u0107, Silajd\u017ei\u0107, and Sacirbey listened. Holbrooke repeated it.<\/p>\n
\u201cDo you accept the Br\u010dko arbitration?\u201d<\/p>\n
Izetbegovi\u0107 experienced a moment of confusion. He hadn\u2019t expected Milo\u0161evi\u0107 to give in. The pause seemed to last forever. Then he said, \u201cIt is not a just peace.\u201d Another eon of silence. \u201cBut my people need peace.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThen it\u2019s all right,\u201d Holbrooke said. To Silajd\u017ei\u0107 he looked like a man who had just been pulled back from the gas chamber. He murmured to Christopher, \u201cLet\u2019s get out of here fast.\u201d<\/p>\n
VII. Let\u2019s give Holbrooke his due. He ended a war. Well, he and others\u2014but without Holbrooke I don\u2019t know who would have stepped forward to cajole and bully and outlast the Balkan warlords until they sat down together for the initialing ceremony in the B-29 conference room at the Hope Hotel that Tuesday afternoon, and the signing ceremony the next month in Paris. He was once asked what tactics he had used. \u201cPersistence,\u201d he said. \u201cA kind of relentless harassment of the parties into concessions that they were not ready to make unless pressured by the United States with the credible threat of the use of force.\u201d<\/p>\n
The end of the war came much too late for the living and the dead. Izetbegovi\u0107 was right; the peace was not just. What the Serbs gained by murder they were allowed to keep by agreement. You can\u2019t blame Holbrooke for that. By the time he took over, the Republika Srpska was a stubborn fact. The time to reverse it was in 1992 or \u201993\u2014and back then Holbrooke wanted to intervene on the side of the victims. But by 1995 his only purpose was ending the war. That was what the Bosnians needed more than anything. Izetbegovi\u0107 felt crucified at Dayton, but when he returned to Sarajevo his people cheered him for bringing peace. On New Year\u2019s Eve, three years after Holbrooke spent the night shivering in the Holiday Inn, Sarajevans attended an outdoor concert in front of city hall.<\/p>\n
History is efficiently brutal with our dreams. Dayton wasn\u2019t the highest peak after all. It wasn\u2019t the Marshall Plan or the opening to China. It solved a nasty problem, but it didn\u2019t create something new and big. For those who lived through the war, who suffered on the inside or cared on the outside, Bosnia was immense, it was all that mattered. But Holbrooke devoted three years of his life to a small war in an obscure place with no consequences in the long run beyond itself. The disproportion between effort and significance\u2014I respect him for it. But Dayton did not mark a new path onward and upward in the American story. It was closer to the end of something.<\/p>\n
It didn\u2019t seem that way at first. It seemed as if Holbrooke might be the author of a new doctrine.<\/p>\n
Think of the late \u201990s. Microsoft, Tomahawks, Titanic<\/i>. Our economy, military, and culture were unchallenged, apparently unchallengeable. It hasn\u2019t been like that before or since. Those years were, you could say, the high-water mark of the American century. But there was no Clinton doctrine. There was barely a Clinton foreign policy, other than the president\u2019s boundless confidence in globalization. Everything seemed to be getting better on its own\u2014and if people were killing one another in eastern Congo or the southern Balkans, what did it really have to do with America?<\/p>\n
Holbrooke wanted more. He was that rare American in the treetops who actually gave a shit about the dark places of the Earth. You could call it an updated version of the liberal internationalism of Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy. The enemies were now murky civil wars, second-rank tyrants, mass atrocities, failed states. Kissinger would not have recognized these as subjects of high national interest, but Holbrooke, never a practitioner of pure realpolitik, was alive to the present.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is no time for fin de si\u00e8cle malaise,\u201d he said in a speech in 1997. \u201cThe post\u2013Cold War era demands a thoughtful examination and the design of new tools to meet its challenges\u2014many of them both humanitarian and political. So far into this new, as yet unnamed era, we have only shown a capability to react, which costs dearly in lives and money. Managing chaos is the foreign-policy challenge of the 1990s \u2026 If we were too brash and bold at times during the Cold War era, we are too complacent (or indifferent) and cautious today.\u201d<\/p>\n
Chaos was an even tougher problem than the Soviet Union, less predictable, more in need of local knowledge and the help of allies. Though the response might or might not include force, it had to be intervention, early and persistent\u2014whereas Americans like to show up late, in large numbers, then impose a quick solution and move on. Managing chaos didn\u2019t have much of a constituency in the United States.<\/p>\n
The argument over how to use America\u2019s superpower was mostly with ourselves. We had no rivals. The circumstances were unique. The Dayton Accords placed Russian troops in postwar Bosnia under NATO command\u2014the first and last time that happened. NATO was expanding to the very borders of the former Soviet Union, and Holbrooke brushed off the concerns of people like Kissinger about provoking the old Russian paranoia. What did Russia have to fear from the West? We wanted to include it in the enlarging circle of European democracies, and never mind NATO. One virtue of realpolitik is that it gives you a feel for the interests of other people, and Kissinger thought Holbrooke was too much a swaggering American to understand why Russia might imagine that it was being encircled. The risk in his doctrine was a kind of liberal imperialism.<\/p>\n
Some Europeans\u2014some Americans, too\u2014thought we took the wrong lesson from Bosnia: that America only had to throw its weight around to get results. These skeptics would draw a straight line from Dayton to Iraq, and in Holbrooke they saw the humanitarian face of American hubris. I didn\u2019t think so. I thought he represented what was best about us. It looks more complicated now, but I\u2019d still take him over the alternatives.<\/p>\n
If you ask me when America\u2019s long decline began, I might point to 1998. We were flabby, smug, and self-absorbed. Imagine a president careless enough to stumble into his enemies\u2019 trap and expend his power on a blue dress. Imagine a superpower so confident of perpetual peace and prosperity that it felt able to waste a whole year on Oval Office cocksucking. Not even al-Qaeda, which blew up two American embassies in East Africa that August, could get our serious attention\u2014Clinton\u2019s response, a barrage of cruise missiles, was derided left and right for following the script of Wag the Dog<\/i>. The Republicans decided that destroying the president was more urgent than the national interest, and they attacked his every move at home and abroad. Our leaders believed they had the luxury to start tearing one another apart, and they\u2019ve never stopped. Did any country ever combine so much power with so little responsibility? Slowly, imperceptibly at first, we lost that essential faith in ourselves.<\/p>\n
The american century <\/span>ended in Baghdad and Helmand, in Aleppo and Odessa, and in Beijing. It also ended in Wisconsin and in Silicon Valley and, maybe above all, in Washington, D.C. It ended from overreach and exhaustion, rising competition, the rapid changes and broken promises of globalization, and the failure of our own middle-class democracy, which, when it was thriving, gave us an influence that exceeded even our power.<\/p>\nAnother place where the American century ended was Bosnia.<\/p>\n
Twenty years after Dayton, five years after Holbrooke died when his aorta tore open during a meeting in Secretary of State Hillary Clinton\u2019s office, a woman in Sarajevo named Aida began to experience insomnia. Though she had lived through the entire siege, she never counted herself among the hundreds of thousands of Bosnians with post-traumatic stress disorder, but now, two decades after the war, she lay awake night after night, unable to take her eyes off the American presidential campaign on TV. Something about the people at Donald Trump\u2019s rallies was deeply familiar to Aida\u2014their clothes, their faces, their teeth, the men\u2019s mustaches, the women\u2019s hair and makeup, the illogic of their grievances, their rage, their need for an enemy. She knew these people, and as she watched them her heartbeat raced, her breathing turned rapid and shallow. She began having flashbacks, not to the war but to the years just before it, when things once unacceptable even to think suddenly became commonplace to say, until every boundary of decency was erased. Moments in the American campaign brought up uncanny counterparts from those years in the Balkans. Late one night, during the Republican National Convention, Aida suddenly heard the voices of 1 million Serbs in the streets of Belgrade shouting for the head of a Kosovar leader\u2014\u201cArrest Vllasi! Arrest Vllasi!\u201d\u2014while Milo\u0161evi\u0107 cupped his ear and goaded them: \u201cI can\u2019t hear you!\u201d In Cleveland they were chanting \u201cLock her up! Lock her up!\u201d<\/p>\n
Aida knew where it would all lead, and she tried to warn her American friends that Trump was going to win. They found this hilarious, especially when she offered them a refuge in her country, in her house\u2014a hiding place in Bosnia after the shit hit the fan in America and her Bay Area friends realized that the other side had all the weapons. Trump\u2019s victory inspired no \u201cI told you so\u201ds from Aida. After all, she had refused to see her own war coming.<\/p>\n
After the Cold War, grand strategists proposed various scenarios for the future of the world: liberal capitalist triumph, the clash of civilizations, great-power rivalry, borderless anarchy. Nationalism didn\u2019t make the short list. The squalid, murderous politics of dying Yugoslavia was an atavistic embarrassment, a throwback to what Bismarck, in a fit of irritable prescience, called \u201csome damned foolish thing in the Balkans.\u201d The fratricidal wars of the 1990s had nothing to do with the age of high-speed globalization that would soon erase national identities and make us all networked cosmopolitans.<\/p>\n
The warlords turned out to be ahead of their time. Kurt Bassuener, an American expert on Bosnia, calls Trump \u201cAmerica\u2019s first Balkan president.\u201d His public performances sound like translations from the Serbian. For Aida, Trump\u2019s rule told her that Bosnia no longer has anyone to count on. Europe ceased being a noble idea when populist demagogues put up razor-wire fences to keep out refugees. Now the American idea is gone, too. \u201cAfter the United States\u2019 values collapsed, who\u2019s there to look up to?\u201d Aida asks. \u201cWho? The Middle East? Asia? China? They don\u2019t have any compassion. Russia?<\/i>\u201d<\/p>\n
Not long ago I went looking for Holbrooke\u2019s ghost in the rocky patch of southeastern Europe where he had staked his personal claim on history. Maybe this will surprise you, but there are no Richard Holbrooke Streets or Squares or statues in Sarajevo. Not one thing is named after the man most responsible for the fact that people are drinking Turkish coffee at outdoor tables in the Old Town. When I pointed this out to Aida, she said, \u201cI don\u2019t need a monument to Dick Holbrooke. I\u2019m<\/i> a monument to Dick Holbrooke. I am the Richard Holbrooke Walking Monument.\u201d<\/p>\n
Holbrooke is still remembered in Bosnia, but without much gratitude, because the war never really ended. Dayton put a stop to the killing, and I never met a Bosnian of any origin who expressed regret for that. \u017deljko Kom\u0161i\u0107, who lost his mother to a sniper\u2019s bullet as she was drinking coffee in her Sarajevo apartment in 1992, was a soldier in the Bosnian army in 1995 and up to his chest in snow when he heard that the parties had reached an agreement in Dayton. \u201cI have no words to describe to you the happiness and the joy I felt,\u201d he said. \u201cDo you know how happy I was that I was actually going home?\u201d<\/p>\n
Last October, Kom\u0161i\u0107 was elected as the Croat member of the country\u2019s three-person presidency. He has an office in the restored presidential building in Sarajevo. Apart from a few bullet holes in the exterior walls, there\u2019s no trace of the war\u2014except that Kom\u0161i\u0107 is presiding over a government that can\u2019t form itself. Because he is not a Croat nationalist and won election with the help of votes from Bosniaks (as Bosnian Muslims call themselves), rival Croat politicians claim that Kom\u0161i\u0107 does not represent the Croat people, and that this lack of representation violates the rights granted to each group by Dayton. So Croat nationalists, who want an entity of their own, are blocking the formation of local governments, which paralyzes the entire mad system of interlocking jurisdictions created at Dayton.<\/p>\n
To stop the war, the negotiators had to come up with an ungovernable country. The constitution of Bosnia-Herzegovina\u2014Annex 4 of the accords\u2014created a state that has two entities (the Muslim-Croat federation and the Republika Srpska), three presidents (one from each of the main ethnic groups), 10 cantons, 14 legal systems, and 152 ministries. The patient survived but remains deformed.<\/p>\n
Foreigners, including Holbrooke, saw the Dayton agreement as a placeholder for the evolution of a future state. They expected Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks to move past the war and start building a normal country\u2014if not the generation that fought the war, then the next generation of Bosnians, who would care more about all the opportunities of the 21st century than about tribal hatreds. Annex 4 would give way to a new constitution that would clear out the bureaucratic plaque, consign the geriatric nationalists to the past, and create a functional modern state of equal citizens. Eventually, Bosnia would take its place in the European Union and, perhaps, NATO.<\/p>\n
None of this happened. Bosnia remains ethnically cleansed. The refugees were supposed to return to their homes after the war, but very few of them did. Annex 4 is still the constitution, and the war continues by peaceful means. The country is ruled by the heirs, political and sometimes biological, to the three nationalist movements that made war. They denounce one another publicly and stoke mutual fears at election time, but behind the scenes they\u2019re cronies who collaborate to stay in power and fatten themselves off the same spoils system. The governing structure cast at Dayton ensures that nationalists will keep winning elections and ruling like mafia bosses. Ethnic politics produces rampant corruption that chokes the economy and stunts social change. Most jobs are controlled by political patronage and sold for thousands of dollars in bribes; youth unemployment is above 60 percent; the birth rate is below replacement level; more than half the population lives outside the country; and tens of thousands of Bosnians leave every year, most for Germany. But in spite of the daily tension and grimness, in spite of all the wartime Kalashnikovs hidden in closets and rocket launchers buried in backyards, Bosnians say that there won\u2019t be another civil war, because Bosnia doesn\u2019t have enough people left to fight one.<\/p>\n
Bassuener, who worked in Bosnia for 11 years, called the Dayton agreement \u201ca warlord-containment system which is also a warlord-wish-fulfillment system.\u201d It created a country in which almost no one is happy. \u201cEverybody knows that they personally lost the war, and the fuckers in the black Audis won.\u201d<\/p>\n
January 9 is Republika Srpska Day\u2014the day when Bosnian Serbs celebrate the birth, in 1992, of their dream country, christened with a \u201cNazi name.\u201d In 2016 Bosnia\u2019s high court ruled Republika Srpska Day discriminatory and therefore illegal, but a ceremony is still held annually, defiantly, in Banja Luka, the capital of the Serb entity. This past January 9, the streets of Banja Luka were draped in Serb flags, and Serb police officers, dressed in paramilitary uniforms and bearing automatic rifles, goose-stepped through the main square as they sang the Republika Srpska national anthem, and the Night Wolves, a gang of pro-Putin Russian bikers, joined the parade, and locally manufactured black armored vehicles, called \u201cDespots,\u201d rolled past the assembled dignitaries. Afterward, sequined dancers performed a folk ballet of eternal love for Republika Srpska called The Birth<\/i>. You might have thought it was the early \u201990s.<\/p>\n
Milorad Dodik is the Serb member of Bosnia\u2019s presidency. In the years after Dayton, when Western money and personnel were pouring into the country, he talked like a liberal and was the Americans\u2019 favorite Bosnian Serb politician. But in 2006, in the run-up to an election, the same epiphany that had transformed Milo\u0161evi\u0107 into a Serb nationalist two decades earlier now illuminated Dodik\u2019s path, and he saw his future in making the Republika Srpska great again. In the years since then, Dodik has consolidated power and personal wealth as a virulent nationalist. His avowed goal is a separate state for Bosnian Serbs.<\/p>\nBosnian Co-president Milorad Dodik (left<\/em>), a hard-line Serb nationalist, on Republika Srpska Day in Banja Luka. January 9, 2018. (Miomir Jakovljevic \/ Anadolu Agency \/ Getty)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nIn his address on Republika Srpska Day, Dodik spoke as if he were the president of an independent country, not the Serb member of the three-headed presidency of a country called Bosnia. \u201cWe don\u2019t want to deprive others of their freedom, we just want it to be known that we are ready to fight and defend our own freedom,\u201d he said. \u201cIn 1995 the Dayton peace agreement was created, and the Serbs stood behind it. But \u2026 Bosnia-Herzegovina is not our desire; it is something we had to accept. We were forced into it by an international negotiating process.\u201d He concluded with a warning: \u201cI love the Republika Srpska. I love the Serb people. I don\u2019t hate anybody. All of our friends are welcome, be they Croats or Bosniaks, from everywhere, from far and near. But when you come here, you will find people who know what they want, and they will not hurt you with anything\u2014but make sure you don\u2019t hurt them.\u201d<\/p>\n
The dayton agreement <\/span>contains two opposing forms of nationalism\u2014one ethnic, one civic\u2014and the real battle for Bosnia lies between them. The preamble to Annex 4 says, \u201cBosniacs, Croats, and Serbs, as constituent peoples (along with Others), and citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina hereby determine that the Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina is as follows.\u201d The whole contradiction is right there, in the unwieldiness of that one sentence. Bosnia has constituent peoples\u2014three worth naming, to be exact, along with unidentified Others, such as Jews and Roma\u2014and it has citizens. The constitution seems to place citizens in a separate category from constituent peoples. Citizens think of themselves as Bosnians first. They want to live in a state that grants rights to individuals, not groups. They vote for multiethnic civic parties that campaign on democracy and the rule of law, such as Na\u0161a Stranka, or \u201cOur Party,\u201d which is led by a Serb but did well in last October\u2019s local elections in Sarajevo and elsewhere. Citizens might be fewer in number than constituent peoples, but they, too, point to Dayton for support.<\/p>\nIn March 2018, the body of a 21-year-old Serb named David Dragi\u010devi\u0107 was found in the mud by a river on the edge of Banja Luka. The police declared the deceased a petty criminal and his death an accident caused by drugs, but the findings contained so many gaps and contradictions that Banja Lukans, led by David\u2019s grieving parents, began to challenge what they believed to be a cover-up of official mischief. The daily protests became a movement called Justice for David. It continued to grow throughout the year. On some evenings tens of thousands of people filled Banja Luka\u2019s main square. Non-Serbs drove up from the federation to participate, and there were solidarity protests in Sarajevo and Tuzla. David\u2019s father and the father of a young Bosniak who had been mysteriously killed joined hands in Sarajevo. On November 21, the anniversary of the Dayton Accords, a huge crowd came out in Banja Luka. Demonstrators held up signs declaring the human rights granted by the agreement and stolen by the authorities.<\/p>\n
Justice for David is the first movement to unite Bosnians across ethnic lines, against the ills that afflict them all\u2014corruption, patronage, police abuse, official impunity. Nothing like it has ever happened in Bosnia, and it alarmed the fuckers in black Audis. On December 30, Dodik\u2019s police assaulted the demonstrators in Banja Luka\u2019s main square in order to clear the streets ahead of Republika Srpska Day.<\/p>\n
The protests moved around the corner, to the plaza in front of an Orthodox cathedral. Several nights after January 9, 150 people assembled outside the church. It was a smaller gathering than the earlier ones\u2014the police were watching from nearby\u2014but the citizens stood and held candles in quiet dignity. Among them was Aleksandra Vranjes, a 41-year-old single mother. She had been a member of Dodik\u2019s party, but the grief of the dead youth\u2019s parents moved her to join Justice for David, which eventually cost her a patronage job in the ministry of education and culture.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m just a mother, a parent, a human being. You either feel these things or you don\u2019t feel them,\u201d she said. \u201cTo them\u201d\u2014she named Bosnia\u2019s ruling ethnic parties\u2014\u201cwe are a bad seed, we are the seed of civil society that scares them the most, because we are gathering people together. All they were doing was splitting people apart. We are a threat to the system they built over the past 20 years.\u201d On November 21, Vranjes had joined the throng and held up a sign that said freedom of speech<\/span>. \u201cDayton gives us those human rights that we don\u2019t have a right to use anymore. They\u2019re using Dayton just to divide people, but the Dayton peace agreement is perfect for ordinary people, because it\u2019s got everything to tell people they\u2019re free, just like people everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\nHere was a movement calling for human rights and decent government, invoking language written into the accords by Americans\u2014I assumed that Justice for David could count on the United States for support. But the morning after the vigil outside the church, Dejan \u0160ajinovi\u0107, a local journalist who covered Justice for David and grew close to David\u2019s father, set me straight.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is no U.S. involvement in supporting the Justice for David movement. Maybe the biggest takeaway from all of this is what it means on a micro scale when the U.S. pulls itself from international affairs, which is what\u2019s happening. If the U.S. was involved as it was, like, before two or three years ago, I know exactly what I would tell the father to do. I would tell him, \u2018Go to the U.S. Embassy.\u2019\u2009\u201d No politician in Bosnia, even the ones who hate the U.S., can ignore it. The country that ended the war and midwifed the birth of Bosnia still has great influence and prestige, far more than the European Union. But the influence is waning, because it is no longer used. \u201cEither they are not giving statements, or they are mild,\u201d \u0160ajinovi\u0107 said. \u201cAll these populist things that were happening in the \u201990s are now happening again.\u201d<\/p>\n
He continued: \u201cThe American president is saying journalists are the enemy of the American people. Do you know how devastating that is here? What can the U.S. ambassador tell about freedom of the media?\u201d He concluded, \u201cThe U.S. is pulling back from world affairs generally. And it did not start with Trump; it just accelerated with Trump.\u201d<\/p>\n
When I visited Sarajevo in January, the American Embassy was between ambassadors. Because of the government shutdown in the U.S., the embassy was functioning with a skeletal staff, and no one was allowed to talk to me. Christopher Hill, a retired ambassador who worked alongside Holbrooke throughout his shuttle diplomacy and Dayton, described the low American profile in Bosnia this way: \u201cWe\u2019ve been doing a lot of leading from behind. It doesn\u2019t work.\u201d<\/p>\n
A rough consensus among Bosnians dates the start of American withdrawal to 2006, catalyzed by a general sense that Bosnia was moving in the right direction, complacent confidence in Dodik as our man in Banja Luka, European eagerness to become the overseer, and the huge distraction of the Iraq War. We lost interest in this outpost of Pax Americana. In 2007, EU troops who had replaced the Americans were shifted to Afghanistan\u2014apparently there was no more need for hard power in Bosnia. The neglect deepened during the Obama years. Bosnia became a fourth-tier issue in Washington, generally relegated to the level of deputy assistant secretary of state. Dodik\u2019s secession talk got more and more extreme. In 2016 he was hit with American sanctions, but he knew that we weren\u2019t up for a fight over principles. The years of squeezing Bosnian politicians had ended.<\/p>\n
Now that the American century is over, we\u2019re becoming more like Bosnia than Bosnia is like us.<\/p>\n
Now the nationalists have a natural ally in the White House. \u201cTrump should be a friend of the Serb people,\u201d an elderly Serb woman in Pale told me, \u201cif only for the fact that the nanny who raised his children was a Serb.\u201d It\u2019s true: Milka Milisavljevi\u0107 babysat Don Jr., Eric, and Ivanka for eight years and taught them a few words of Serbian. If Trump ever hears of Bosnia, he could destroy the country with a single tweet. Bassuener, the Balkan expert, imagined how it would go: \u201cEU in chaos already with invading Muslims. Bosnia? Terrible idea! Croatia and Serbia should just split it. Simple!\u201d<\/p>\n
As the u.s. pulled away,<\/span> Bosnia became a geopolitical vacuum. The vacuum is slowly being filled by Russia. So far it\u2019s all soft power: appeals to pan-Orthodox unity, easy credit for local companies with ties to party bosses, debt converted into political influence. Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, paid a visit to Dodik two weeks before last October\u2019s election, and President Vladimir Putin met with him twice last year. Russia\u2019s main strategic goal is to use its influence over the Serbs to keep Bosnia out of NATO.<\/p>\n\u201cThe only state that has a plan here is Russia,\u201d Emir Suljagi\u0107, an international-relations professor in Sarajevo who, as a teenager, survived the Srebrenica genocide, told me. \u201cThe Europeans are muddling through, believing procedure and bureaucracy can replace policy and vision. America is as divided as Bosnia in some ways. Russia is the only one who has their act together.\u201d<\/p>\n
The 20th century began in Sarajevo. Starting with the First World War, three wars were fought in Bosnia\u2019s towns and mountains. Then came Holbrooke\u2019s achievement at Dayton, giving Bosnia a precarious foothold in the liberal world. Now the American century is over, and even Bosnia, which would not exist without the United States, is slipping away. Maybe it was always too small and profoundly messed up to matter. Maybe it was never possible for outsiders to make a change there. All that foreigners could ever do was secure conditions in which Bosnians might make a change themselves. But now we\u2019re becoming more like Bosnia than Bosnia is like us.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s something else that would trouble Holbrooke\u2019s ghost. Not the end of our global leadership\u2014it was never sustainable, and 1995 was unique\u2014but the withering-away of our example. We overestimate ourselves in almost every way, from jingoism to self-hatred, and all the while we ignore nameless people in obscure places like Sarajevo and Banja Luka who still <\/i>think we stand for something that they want for themselves. To adapt with grace to a cut in power is wisdom. It\u2019s folly to throw away the pearl of our real greatness.<\/p>\n
<\/small>“The In-Your-Face Diplomat”<\/a><\/p>\nAn impressive new biography of Richard Holbrooke gets the man right but the big lesson wrong.<\/em><\/p>\nBy James P. Rubin, May 12, 2019, Politico Magazine<\/p>\n
In the case of the globetrotting American diplomat Richard Holbrooke, there is only one degree of separation between him and almost every significant figure in American foreign policy in living memory. His surrogate father in high school was Dean Rusk, President John F. Kennedy\u2019s secretary of State. He played tennis with General Maxwell Taylor, JFK\u2019s top military adviser, as well with Robert Kennedy. He had lunch with George Kennan, perhaps the most towering figure of postwar American foreign policy, the day his second son was born. He wrote one of the Pentagon Papers\u2014yes, those<\/i> Pentagon papers\u2014commissioned by Robert McNamara. And years later, he ghostwrote the memoirs of Clark Clifford, counselor to presidents from Harry Truman to Lyndon Johnson.<\/p>\n
Holbrooke was even a member of Averell Harriman\u2019s Vietnam peace delegation in Paris as a young Foreign Service officer. That friendship lasted decades and evolved into a special relationship with Pamela Harriman, through whom he socialized with Washington\u2019s political and media elite, including future Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Later in life, he befriended Pete Peterson, a billionaire and Commerce secretary for Richard Nixon who kept him plugged into the New York worlds of finance, law and entertainment. These were just some of the older men who helped him thrive in international high society\u2019s power elite, smoothing his path to high posts in the Carter, Clinton and Obama administrations. When it came to his peers \u2014 men like Anthony Lake, Frank Wisner, Strobe Talbott and Leslie Gelb \u2014 they were either the closest of friends or, in the case of Lake, best friends and best enemies.<\/p>\n
Especially for those of us from a younger generation of American diplomacy, George Packer\u2019s new biography, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century<\/i>, is not only a riveting read but also an eye-opening psychodrama, revealing the feuds and friendships behind the scenes that often drove and always colored American foreign policy for five decades, from Vietnam in the 1960s to the Balkans in the 1990s to Afghanistan today.<\/p>\n
But the book purports to be more than just a biography: This tale of Holbrooke\u2019s diplomatic ambition and dramatic death is also intended as an authoritative historical statement about the end of an era\u2014and a pessimistic one about the future of American power. When it was excerpted in the Atlantic<\/i>, for which Packer is a staff writer, the headline splashed across the cover was “Elegy for the American Century.” American diplomats, we are told, will never again be as relevant as Holbrooke and his predecessors were because America\u2019s power to influence our world has waned \u2014 the American century has come to a close. As a consequence of its brilliance as a biography and the seriousness of Packer’s ambitions, Our Man<\/i> is sure to have an effect on the intensifying debate about the right level of U.S. engagement in today\u2019s world. Even if a new wave of “America First” isolationism wasn’t rising in our domestic politics, defining the U.S. role would still be difficult in an international environment marked by a return of great power confrontation with China and Russia, continued chaos and political upheaval across continents, biblical refugee flows, and a series of hot wars in the greater Middle East.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, the book draws only part of the lesson it could take from Holbrooke’s career. It paints a compelling collective portrait of the Vietnam generation\u2019s brutal infighting and, especially, of its disastrous consequences in Iraq\u2014but in focusing on only the negative lessons from that history, it risks adding a defense of declinism to the debate over America’s role in the world just as an important presidential campaign season is starting up. With the Iraq fiasco still haunting both parties, Afghanistan\u2019s conflict approaching the 20-year mark and President Donald Trump destroying what remains of a domestic consensus on American internationalism, it is imperative to get the diplomatic history right.<\/p>\n
***<\/p>\n
<\/div>\n
The Holbrooke story will never be told better <\/b>than it is in Packer\u2019s tale of this one-of-a-kind American diplomat. The author is a public intellectual whose evolution from journalist to prominent supporter of President George W. Bush\u2019s invasion of Iraq gives him a particularly profound appreciation of Holbrooke\u2019s standing in the foreign policy firmament, which may be the reason Kati Marton, Holbrooke\u2019s widow, allowed him unfettered access to all his diaries and other documents heretofore unavailable. This rare access combines with Packer\u2019s extensive reporting and gifted writing to bring us as close as we may ever get to the truth about Holbrooke\u2019s life and work, its high and lows, and its rare intersection with many of the finest diplomats and journalists from Vietnam, Bosnia, Washington and Afghanistan. The remarkable result reads more like a final draft than a first draft of history.<\/p>\n
Too often the picture is not a pretty one. Holbrooke was already known for his in-your-face style\u2014he could be aggressive, even bullying, in pursuit of U.S. objectives, which were often hard to disentangle from Holbrooke’s personal ambitions. Packer shows us this self-regard playing out in Holbrooke\u2019s climb to the top of his profession. Again and again we see Holbrooke crossing lines of propriety like few others, revealing how often he leaked to the media and lied to his friends, then covered his tracks\u2014sometimes, as in the case of Frank Wisner, by fingering a close friend for one of his damaging leaks during the Vietnam War. Although uncomfortable, we learn about a critical broken friendship that came back to haunt him: his relationship with President Bill Clinton’s national security adviser Tony Lake. It was a feud Clinton apparently never could understand. It was not a matter of war and peace or bureaucratic intrigue that led to Lake\u2019s hatred of Holbrooke, we learn: Instead, it was mostly a consequence of Holbrooke telling him that he had fallen in love with Lake\u2019s wife. So much for policy differences.<\/p>\n
Which makes it even more mind-boggling that Holbrooke’s signature achievement was made possible by his friend-turned-foe, Lake. Packer portrays Lake as having the rare ability to separate his personal feelings from diplomatic business, at least during the Clinton era. Indeed, it was his cooperation with then-U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright in 1995, while Holbrooke was on an extended vacation, that drove a change in U.S. policy on the catastrophic war in Bosnia, from passivity and deference to Europe\u2019s priorities and the United Nation\u2019s studied neutrality to an assertion of American leadership with intensive diplomacy backed by NATO\u2019s formidable firepower. This policy shift, in turn, led to the bombardment of the aggressor Bosnian Serbs and what would be seen as Holbrooke\u2019s greatest diplomatic achievement: ending the Bosnian war.<\/p>\n
\n
\n\n
\n<\/div>
Holbrooke (left) speaks with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic during a meeting in Belgrade in August 1995. | AP<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/aside>\n<\/div>\nHolbrooke\u2019s role in NATO\u2019s 1995 bombardment of Bosnian Serb forces is often misunderstood, as it is by Packer. It was not until NATO finally decided to use air power that the Bosnian Serb military halted its campaign of ethnic cleansing and mass murder of Bosnian Muslims. Despite how it may have seemed to the public, the individual most responsible for setting those deadly air strikes in motion was British General Rupert Smith, who used his authority to unleash NATO airpower until the Bosnian Serbs agreed to end their brutal siege of Sarajevo. And it was Lake, leading an interagency team on his most important diplomatic mission, who presented Clinton\u2019s muscular new policy to our European allies in London and Paris. But when it came time to tell the warring parties of the new strategy, the torch was passed, with Lake\u2019s approval, to the man he most despised to finish the job. Then, to give the diplomat his due credit, with the power equation finally shifted away from the Serb aggressors and in favor of the Bosnians, Holbrooke\u2019s brand of bluster, bluff and flattery at the negotiations in Dayton, Ohio, proved decisive in bringing peace to that troubled land after three years of war and misery. At Dayton, Holbrooke ended a war.<\/p>\n
Packer is accurate in saying there will never be another Holbrooke. For one thing, the pool of America\u2019s foreign policy professionals has expanded many times from the relatively small men\u2019s club that dominated the halls of power for so long. For another, two powerful women, Albright and Hillary Clinton, soon became the leading players, taking the stage as Packer\u2019s narrative became a tale of frustrated ambition and sudden death worthy of a Greek tragedy.<\/p>\n
In fairness, I should say that as a close adviser and spokesman for Albright, I had a difficult relationship with Holbrooke. As Packer himself reports, I wasn\u2019t alone in finding Holbrooke exasperating in the extreme. In fact, I remember once smashing one of those large government-issued cellphones against the side of the secretary of State\u2019s Boeing 707 in frustration after \u201cour man\u201d and I argued over some detail of the Kosovo diplomacy in 1999. But I respected his boldness and unequaled knowledge of American diplomacy, and in subsequent years our relationship improved to a stage that might be described as a wary professional friendship.<\/p>\n
Packer’s declinism is possible partly because he glides over important achievements. He spends many pages bemoaning the fact that the peace in Bosnia made at Dayton was flawed, which has meant little political development and continued ethnic struggles in that once peaceful center of ethnic coexistence. All of which is true.<\/p>\n
But it is also the case that most of the Balkan countries are democratic, independent and allies of the West. That came about because in the wake of the years it took to act in Bosnia, President Clinton and Secretary Albright developed a strategy for the emerging crisis in Kosovo that improved on the previous model, accelerating decision-making, and thus managing to head off some of the shortcomings that were codified in Dayton.<\/p>\n
\n
\n\n
\n<\/div>
U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, right, listens to a comment from Holbrooke at a multilateral meeting in October 1998 about the crisis in Kosovo. | AP<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/aside>\n<\/div>\nHolbrooke and Albright worked together on Kosovo, but as that province exploded into violence\u2014when Albanians’ demands for equal rights triggered a violent crackdown by Serbian forces controlled by strongman Slobodan Milosevic\u2014she felt a far greater sense of urgency with respect to the use of force and resisted his continual pressures to make diplomatic engagement with Milosevic a higher priority. While a peace agreement and diplomatic solution were given every realistic chance, Milosevic\u2019s clear guilt was not masked in a cloak of constant engagement and theater. Instead, the Albright State Department moved quickly to establish principles that would synchronize force and diplomacy. NATO unity and international legitimacy was one principle; another was a commitment to a U.S.-led peacekeeping force in a postwar environment, agreed in advance. And American leadership was less bruising than in Bosnia, as a daily call was established with foreign ministers of the UK, France, Italy and Germany to guide the process. The partnership with our allies was real in Kosovo, and not just a fig leaf for Washington dictating every outcome.<\/p>\n
The result of this model was an unqualified success. Kosovo was free and Milosevic was overthrown by his own people and sent for trial before the international war crimes tribunal in the Hague. And the truth is that back then Holbrooke was frustrated by his second-tier role and took to second-guessing Secretary Albright every step of the way.<\/p>\n
***<\/p>\n
Packer’s excessive focus on the drawbacks<\/b> of Dayton may be part of the reason for his pessimism regarding the power of the United States. This dim view of U.S. leadership is then reinforced by the final act of the drama, which centers on Holbrooke\u2019s inability in 2009 and 2010 to persuade the Obama administration to develop the necessary ingredients to negotiate an end to the war in Afghanistan.<\/p>\n
This is the most painful part of the book for admirers of Holbrooke. Having lost again in his never ending quest to be secretary of State\u2014this time to Hillary Clinton, who he regarded as a friend and supporter\u2014he was given a major post as special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. By this time the war in Afghanistan, having been ignored by the Bush administration, was in its eighth year and provoking comparisons to the Vietnam conflict during which Holbrooke\u2019s career began. This was different than Vietnam in an important way: Afghanistan\u2019s terrorist network had shown on Sept. 11, 2001, what can happen when a far-away conflict comes to America. Yet for Holbrooke and his generation, the lessons about getting trapped in a distant and misguided war seemed more and more relevant. Secretary Clinton was hoping that the man who ended a war in Bosnia could achieve similar success there.<\/p>\n
But in a meaningful sense, Holbrooke did not get the mandate he needed. If Holbrooke were alive today, I believe he would be looking over at Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, Trump\u2019s envoy to Afghanistan, with a certain degree of envy. Not only has the current administration decided not to expand America\u2019s military deployment\u2014a strategy Holbrooke secretly supported in 2009\u2014but Khalilzad has also been given space to negotiate with the Taliban to end the Afghanistan War without a lot of oversight from American officials in Washington. There is a relevant historical analogy here that Holbrooke absorbed from his time with W. Averell Harriman. Harriman often told Holbrooke that when it came to his most successful diplomatic missions\u2014keeping Stalin on side for President Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II and negotiating a partial nuclear test ban treaty with Russia on behalf of JFK\u2014he had a straightforward objective and little or no micromanagement from Washington.<\/p>\n
By contrast, Packer tells us in excruciating detail how Holbrooke\u2019s experience as President Barack Obama\u2019s envoy to Afghanistan was the opposite of Khalilzad\u2019s today. Holbrooke said he had the worst office in the State Department, that the U.S. military was leading around the diplomats, rather than having the civilians in control. All the while, the White House was signaling its contempt for the special representative. Obama would travel to Afghanistan and White House aides would hide the fact of the trip from Holbrooke until Air Force One was landing in Kabul. And not once would Holbrooke\u2014a man who saw himself as the bridge to America\u2019s titanic inside players of diplomacy\u2014ever meet the president alone.<\/p>\n
This was Holbrooke\u2019s world in 2009 and 2010, the last years of his life. And in his final months of his life, several generals worked together to build a case for his dismissal, we learn. We watch how this formerly formidable bureaucratic infighter is reduced to begging colleagues for support and praise. With only Secretary Clinton still in his corner and little to show for all the effort expended, Holbrooke literally bursts his biggest blood vessel in the secretary of State\u2019s office\u2014the office to which he had aspired for so many decades\u2014and dies in the operating room later that night.<\/p>\n
As a biographer, Packer has proved beyond doubt that Holbrooke was an almost-great man. He is right to demonstrate how rare it is for someone who is not secretary of State to be so dominant and prominent in American foreign policy.<\/p>\n
But the second part of his thesis is more assertion than analysis. Is American international leadership really at end? Is it really true that American diplomacy is no longer capable of greatness? \u201cThe American century,” he writes, “ended in Baghdad and Helmand, in Aleppo and Odessa, and in Beijing. \u2026 Another place the American century ended was Bosnia.\u201d<\/p>\n
The shortcomings of the Dayton plan for Bosnia\u2019s future prospects and the length and seeming futility of the war in Afghanistan are reasons for frustration, but do they justify Packer\u2019s grandiose assertions about the end of American leadership? No doubt America’s costly and ill-considered occupation in Iraq has also damaged perceptions of U.S. leadership. Confidence in international action has been shattered in many Western countries, too. Packer himself went through his own wringer on the question of U.S. intervention. He was one of many prominent liberals who supported the Iraq War and then was understandably demoralized by the failures to stabilize Iraq after the fall of Saddam. His compelling account, “The Assassins’ Gate,” documents his disillusionment.<\/p>\n
Packer wasn\u2019t the only liberal hawk mugged by the Bush administration\u2019s multiple failures before, during and after the Iraq invasion. But just as lessons from history must be learned, they should not be overlearned. In my view, the model of American leadership using diplomacy backed by force that President Clinton and Secretary Albright enunciated and implemented in Kosovo\u2014U.S. leadership, international support, a postwar plan and international peacekeeping\u2014has never really been applied since. Indeed, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously told the Pentagon that nothing about the Balkan wars should be seen as a guide for the future. Sure enough, in Afghanistan the Bush administration refused allied support and rejected NATO\u2019s historic offer of help before the war. And it refused to send a peacekeeping force to key areas when the Taliban fell. Instead, key resources and energy were diverted from Afghanistan back in 2002 when they could have been decisive and attention turned to the ill-fated invasion in Iraq.<\/p>\n
Just as dangerous was the overreaction to the Iraq fiasco that led to international abdication in Syria. Failure to act in Syria has devastated the international order, with hundreds of thousands dead, millions of refugees destabilizing Syria\u2019s neighbors and Europe, and a previously unthinkable vacuum that the Kremlin has filled with its massive military campaign to save Bashar Assad and return Russia to the region, to the detriment of us all.<\/p>\n
***<\/p>\n
The United States will never again<\/b> have the near total monopoly on military power and economic production we had at the end of World War II. Too often that moment is set as some kind of baseline, when in fact it was an aberration. The growth of other global economies, such as Germany’s and Japan’s, is more a sign of a successful U.S. policy than a diminution of U.S economic power. It was our policy to promote American growth by building large trading partners in Europe, Asia and around the world. That policy has worked, as billions of people\u2019s standard of living has risen. Nor will there be another unipolar moment like the 1990s, when Soviet communism\u2019s collapse left the United States without rivals. Russia has rebuilt its military and the Chinese are doing the same.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
China and Russia are genuine adversaries seeking to undermine American power and potential. And many of our successful friends around the world have grown weary of a sometimes-aggressive leadership style. But most of the ingredients of America\u2019s leadership position remain. It will require a new resolve to lead internationally, new approaches to tap the potential of our partners and friends, and restored confidence in American leadership. In truth, it is more a matter of will than wallet.<\/p>\n
Books that suggest American greatness is behind us can serve to sap that will without justification. We are still the indispensable nation, for instance, when it comes to leading our hemisphere against a regime in Venezuela that has impoverished its people and caused chaos and instability across the region and leading our European allies to contain Russia\u2019s international aggression and contempt for the Western institutions many thought it wished to join. And in Asia, where China\u2019s new, more aggressive leadership presents clearer dangers to the region, the openness to American leadership shows what distinguishes us from global powers of the past. We have voluntary military relationships with dozens of countries in East Asia and the greater Middle East\u2014the kinds of alliances China will never have. Countries like Vietnam want<\/i> American ships visiting their ports. Japan, Thailand, and others may have specific problems with the current administration, but they do not want to be dominated by China. They still look to America to balance Chinese power, keep the sea lanes open and allow their economic growth to continue. None of them, not even North Korea, wants an alliance with communist China.<\/p>\n
The secret to wielding American power on behalf of enlightened international leadership is much the same today as it has been since the days after World War II, when American diplomacy was harnessed to create decades of international peace and growing prosperity. Just as those diplomats created alliances and a structure of partnerships to support American leadership, it is the way we manage our allies and partners that will be the key determinant of what is possible and what is not. Maintaining and expanding alliances has not been a high priority for the Trump administration, and the president\u2019s statements and actions too often weaken our key asset. But when Trump is gone, those alliances can be rebuilt and strengthened. Perhaps they won’t be quite as strong as they were in the 1990s, but the world has changed since then. Certainly they can be strong enough for American diplomacy to matter again and for American diplomats to do great things.<\/p>\n
\n
\n\n
\n<\/div>
At a refugee camp in northwest Pakistan in 2009, Holbrooke, then the top U.S. envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, talks with a displaced man inside his tent. | AP<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/aside>\n<\/div>\nThey may do these great things without the kind of personal references to the wise men of the postwar era that Holbrooke was famous for. But there is still a lot of work to do. And for as far as we can see, America will still be the strongest military power\u2014with alliances that multiply that power exponentially\u2014and have an economic strength second to none and a political system that, painful as it to watch sometimes, is far more admired and emulated around the world than the alternatives.<\/p>\n
Ironically, Packer deploys some of the hubris and hyperbole he correctly attributes to Holbrooke by making a subtheme of his biography the idea of the end of an era of American leadership. And unfortunately it seems that Packer the biographer has adopted some of the myths of American decline that have been popular in recent years. Certainly, we have had successes and failures. But it is far from clear from this account that American leadership has reached a point of no return.<\/p>\n
In the end, if we marshal our substantial power and the energy of our allies, there is every possibility that the United States will play an equally important role in the next century as we did in the last one. Yes, we need to regain the will we have lost since the Iraq fiasco and the 2008 financial crisis, but the possibilities are still there, whether or not our brilliant biographer can see them.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Map of Bosnia-Herzegovina 1995, The Atlantic, May 2019 Updated: Today we focus on an adjunct of our series, The End Of Civilization As We Knew It. The last installment was at the end of last year. But we’ll be back to it. And as we are today, we’ve been visiting related issues. How many […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7146"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001004"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7146"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7146\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7208,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7146\/revisions\/7208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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