There have been endless pretexts and warrants for the American abdication. Most shamefully, we passed off our acquiescence to the Serbian project of conquest as something we owed Russia, an act of deference to the pan-Slavic spirit that was said to be blowing through that land. We fell for this great legend because it suited our needs. There is a Russianist, and a Russophile at that, in the inner circle, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott. But no Russianist was needed to see through that shameless pretense. Pan-Slavism has never run deep in that presumably mystical Russian soul. It was the calling of a few romantics and priests and literati; the Russian state looked at the pan-Slavic sentiment with cold-blooded disdain and caution. A cursory reading of the Congress of Berlin’s diplomacy, which settled the first great Balkan Crisis in 1878, ought to put an end to the legend of Russia’s commitment to the Serbs. Alexander II hated Balkan revolutionaries and their ruinous radical-ism; St. Petersburg played the game of the Great Powers when the scramble for the Ottoman Empire’s European domains had begun. Serbia got very little of its grandiose ambitions fulfilled; the Serbs had no sponsor among the powers. They had wanted Bosnia; it was ceded to the Habsburgs. They had wanted Novi Pazar, a territory separating Serbia from Montenegro; it, too, was denied them.
We gave currency to the pan-Slavic idea, summoned it from the world of the dead, when it should have been blatantly clear that the Russians were in this enterprise as a way of simple financial blackmail, of squeezing the best for themselves out of the industrial democracies. There was never an explanation why a ruined society on the ropes like Russia, riddled with all kinds of troubles, struggling to keep a political center alive amid plunder and chaos, was owed favors in the Balkans. That our concern for Russia had to be demonstrated by sanctioning genocide in Bosnia carried “Russia-firstism” beyond the call of duty. Were we serious about helping Russia get beyond autocracy and failure and chaos on that road toward political democracy and market reform that we say we want for her, the last thing we would do for Russia would be to indulge the darker, more atavistic part of her temperament. We ought to have given the Russians a choice: the company of outlaws and pariahs or the decent company of nations at peace.
A policy of spin and appeasement with thirty months on its hands gets to be good at playing the game of exculpation. It finds the pretexts and squeezes them as they come. Nor is this policy above seeing hidden victories and accomplishments in the ruins. The Clinton advisers have taken to claiming for the Bosnia policy an amazing defense: whatever its faults and cruel harvest in Bosnia, their policy, they say, has prevented the spread of a wider war in the Balkans. The killing rages in the northern Balkans, but peace (of sorts) reigns in the southern end of the peninsula. Greece, Turkey and Albania, we are told by the Clintonites on the Sunday talk shows, have stayed out of the fight, and all is quiet in Kosovo and in Macedonia between the Slavs and the Albanians. But the troubles in the southern Balkans haven’t happened simply because they haven’t happened, not because the southern Balkans have been incorporated into our zone of peace or been awed by the display of our might. The Serbs have no interest in a wider war. They have secured the submission of Kosovo and disinherited its Albanian population. Why risk a wider war when you can get what you want with a smaller, less costly enterprise? The warlords of Belgrade and Pale may be cruel, but they will take victories on the cheap when they come their way.
