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KISSINGER NEWSWEEK ARTICLE 5/17/99

Ironically, a war in a little corner of the Balkans has
spread far beyond the Balkans. Kosovo has exposed sore spots
in the Clinton Administration's foreign policy that have
heretofore been obscured by palliatives rendering them
invisible without curing them.

The outraged sense of humiliation in Moscow, which has
spread to all levels of the population, may leave a residue
that could blight US-Russian relations for decades. The
virulent Chinese reaction to the bombing of their embassy in
Belgrade vented the accumulated frustrations of many months'
standing. Finally, NATO unity is brittle; key allies are eying
the exits; domestic opposition is mounting in Germany and

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Italy and was always powerful in Greece. If the bombing
continues into the summer, the crisis of confidence is likely
to become public.

The causes are plain enough. In Russia and China, the
leaders are products of societies that look at foreign policy
in the historic terms of national interest. That is, they
assess decisions about peace and war by whether they enhance a
nation's security or further its prosperity. If they can
discern no such traditional reason, they ascribe our motives
not to altruism - which is the American perception of itself -
but to something more cynical. They will interpret what seems
like indifference to their concerns to a hidden (and
hypocritical) penchant for domination.

In Europe the situation is more complex. There, the
allies share our motives but are beginning to question our
competence. And they find themselves under increasing domestic

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pressure as the civilian damage from the bombing begins to
approach the devastation of ethnic cleansing.

The Clinton Administration's style has prevented the
intellectual clarity that could have bolstered our leadership.
The formative experiences of its key personnel were either in
the Vietnam protest movement or in the politics of
presidential campaigns, or both. Their formative experience
makes them suspicious of the role of power in foreign policy;
they use it without conviction and ineffectively. They
emphasize the so-called "soft" issues, like the environment,
and are little concerned with such notions as the
international equilibrium. Extraordinarily driven by public
opinion polls, they are ever tempted to convert foreign policy
into an aspect of domestic politics. Their foreign policy is
quite skillful in dealing with short-term tactical issues but
obtuse with respect to strategy; adept at "spinning" public

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opinion but tone deaf to the sensitivities of other societies.

The neglect of long-range strategy explains how it was
possible to slide into the Kosovo conflict without adequate
consideration of all its implications. In the days before the
start of the bombing, it was conventional wisdom in Washington
that Serbian attachment to Kosovo was tenuous and that
Slobodan Milosevic was looking for a pretext to get rid of the
incubus it represented - which three days of bombing was
supposed to supply. But what if Serbia, the country that had
fought the Turkish and Austrian empires and had defied Hitler
and Stalin at the height of their respective powers, did not
yield? How far were we willing to go? Not to ground war, it
was announced at the very beginning, tempting Milosevic to
test his endurance of sustained bombing. No provision was made
for foreseeable contingencies, such as a war of attrition and

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the flood of refugees it was bound to create - not to speak of
the ethnic cleansing, which the war accelerated.

From the start, there has been a growing gap between the
rhetoric employed (a habit [left over] from domestic political
battles) and the means with which to back them up. Allied
public pronouncements since the beginning of the crisis have
ritually compared Milosevic with Hitler. But the military
dispositions and transparent reluctance to accept
Allied/American casualties signal their unwillingness to
conduct the kind of struggle necessary for the overthrow of
the accused tyrant. But if the outcome is to be some kind of
negotiation, Milosevic would emerge as legitimized. All the
ambiguities that had aborted the Rambouillet conference would
reemerge and be compounded by the onus of dealing with the
proclaimed equivalent of Hitler. Thus the Alliance, under
American leadership, has set a trap for itself by justifying

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the war in terms requiring total victory, while their strategy
impels compromise.

One of the most important decisions taken in those now
seemingly far-off days in February, when its choices were
still open to it, was to insist with the threat of force on
placing 30,000 troops into a province that was the origin of
the struggle for independence of a state with which NATO was
not at war; and to use the foreseeable refusal to accept this
ultimatum as justification for military action. This proposal
- hailed by American and British leaders as the opening of a
new phase of humanistic diplomacy - marked an astounding
departure for an administration that had entered office
proclaiming its devotion to the UN and "assertive
multilateralism." This transformation of the Alliance from a
defensive military alliance into an institution prepared to
impose its values on a country with which it was not at war by

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military force, occurred in the same months that three former
Soviet satellites joined NATO. It tended to undercut repeated
American and Allied assurances to the Russians that they had
nothing to fear from NATO expansion since the Alliance's own
charter proclaimed it as a purely defensive institution.

In this manner, Kosovo has become a symbol of Russia's
post-Cold War frustrations. The tribulations of Russia's
traditional friend (despite the interruption of the Tito
years) brought home Russia's decline and has generated a
hostility to America and the West that has spread beyond the
Moscow elite into the population at large, threatening the
emergence of a kind of Nationalist and Socialist Russia - akin
to the European Fascism of the 1930s. This would be a sorry
end for a decade of devoted efforts by the Clinton
Administration to support Russian reform and relate Russia to
the West. This sincere and dedicated effort has always

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suffered from the reluctance of the Clinton Administration to
engage in a genuine strategic dialogue rather than a
consultation consisting of a technical elaboration of American
views on functional questions. In this manner, Kosovo has
turned into a crisis of US-Russian relations going far beyond
the Balkans.

This is why I believe that exorbitant expectations are
attached to the Russian mediation in Kosovo. A Russian leader
who wants to stay in office cannot be perceived at home as
supporting the NATO program in Yugoslavia. Hence a Russian
mediator faces a double dilemma: if he is seen as supporting
NATO's demands, he loses standing at home; if he induces us to
reduce our demands, American political leaders will use Russia
as a scapegoat in the domestic criticism to which they will be
subjected. Hence Russian mediation of a ceasefire risks
mortgaging US-Russian relations even further. Russia's most

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constructive role would be as full participant at a conference for political arrangements in the Balkans following a ceasefire.

Before the attack on its Belgrade embassy, China's reaction to the bombing was more muted than Russia's but equally intense. Every nation views international events through the prism of its history. And to China, the new NATO doctrine of humanitarian intervention evokes its experience with Europe's unilaterally proclaimed civilizing mission in the Nineteenth Century that led to the fragmentation of China and a series of Western interventions. These humiliations were capped in the Twentieth Century, first by the Japanese invasions and then by the so-called Brezhnev doctrine according to which the Kremlin claimed the right to punish by force of arms Communist regimes that strayed from its ideological line. Indeed, it was to resist the Brezhnev

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doctrine that China moved to restore its relations with the
United States in 1971.

That policy of reliance on close ties with the United
States is now in question. The accidental attack on its
embassy culminated what, in Beijing, is perceived as
increasingly peremptory American conduct, insensitive to
Chinese dignity and subordinating to American domestic
politics a relationship that should instead be based on mutual
interests. President Clinton's China policy has courageously
reflected the conviction of all his predecessors that both
China and the United States have much to gain from cooperation
and risk exhausting themselves - in different ways - by
confrontation. For China, confrontation would mean a threat to
its economic program and ultimate reform. For America, it
would spell an Asia in turmoil, torn and weakened by the need
to choose constantly between the world's most populous country