PERSPECTIVE ON YUGOSLAVIA : A War Awaiting America’s Notice : The integrity of a democratic Eurasia depends on resolution of the crisis; threat of U.S. power will hasten peace.

Sarajevo earned its place in history as the cradle of World War I. Unless someone acts soon to stop the Yugoslav civil war, the Balkan city can make history again, this time as the place where the “new world order” died. Such stakes justify a major stepping up of U.S. engagement, including the threat--and if need be, the use--of military force.

This conclusion will not seem justified by traditional analysis of U.S. strategic interests. Indeed, when Yugoslavia began coming apart more than a year ago, the great powers reached a common conclusion: Nothing that happens in that out-of-the-way country can be permitted to upset broader political understandings on the European continent.

This hard-headed calculation was reinforced by comparison of Yugoslav turbulence with other events--rather, one other event: the collapse of the Soviet Union. Concern about whether its death throes will produce new democracies or new sources of global conflict dwarfed anything that could happen to the “south Slavs.”

But more is at stake for the West than old-fashioned strategy or even the spectacle of human suffering, which is neither unique to Yugoslavia nor awe-inspiring by recent global standards. The underlying significance of the Yugoslav civil war stems from four facts. It is the most intense and long-lasting conflict in Europe since the guns fell silent in 1945. It has become a test case of whether brute force can be permanently rejected as a basis for organizing relations among European states and peoples. It is ineluctably posing the question of whether anything is different--and better--about the world that is emerging from the wreckage of the Cold War system. And what the West tolerates in Yugoslavia will tell other post-communist societies what is--and what is not--acceptable behavior.

Yugoslavia is important precisely because it is part of Europe, on the border of a European Community that is still consolidating a 40-year effort to make war impossible among its members. The EC has created a “European civil space” that has no parallels and whose success is needed to redeem a century that, in European conflicts alone, has produced an unmatched toll of dead. Indifference to the Yugoslav slaughter would not only shame the West but also jeopardize hopes to extend the civil space eastward, eventually embracing Russia, tomorrow’s great political and strategic presence across Eurasia.

Stopping the fighting will not end problems in the former Yugoslavia. These can only yield to the efforts of its several peoples, and only if their efforts are lubricated by the same political reform, plus economic aid and advancement, that permitted Western Europe’s integration to perform its historic role in abolishing interstate conflict. No outsider can sort out the tangle of bitter memories and contemporary claims. But outsiders can demand that one method, force of arms, be placed out of bounds, and they can enforce that demand by showing willingness to employ overwhelming force of their own.

The United States is inescapably involved. It has a moral debt because the Bush Administration, concerned about the setting of poor precedents for what was still the Soviet Union, endorsed Yugoslav unity. It thus inadvertently gave Serbia’s leaders an argument for pursuing their ambitions toward other republics. The United States has a political responsibility because for two years it insisted that NATO, which it dominates, should have no rivals in providing security for Europe.

It also has a strategic interest in stopping the fighting and in asserting the sanctity of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s original borders, however much of its territory has been usurped. This is the same concern that brought American military power to the Continent three times in this century: to ensure that Europe’s conflicts were not exported across the Atlantic. Today’s time horizon is different because there is no Hitler or Stalin menacing the peace. But if the message from the former Yugoslavia to the former Soviet empire is that “anything goes,” today’s U.S. leaders may incur a heavy debt to the next generation of Americans.

The need for the United States to act on Yugoslavia--with the threat, and potentially the use, of force--is also the logical extension of its countering Iraq’s aggression against Kuwait. As in Desert Shield and Desert Storm, the United States cannot hide behind the argument that others’ interests are also at stake; at this moment in history, American leadership is still the indispensable requirement for common action. Economic sanctions are unlikely to thwart determined leaders if military force is ruled out from the beginning. And there can be little hope of building a new world order if America, along with its Western partners, ducks the issue of principle in what is symbolically its own back yard.

In the 1930s, the League of Nations signed its death warrant when it failed to stop Italy’s aggression in Abyssinia, thus informing the world of the poverty of collective security. Today, that instrument of statecraft is again being tested, along with U.S. willingness to play the role that its size and interests require.

The United States continues to base massive military power in Europe, as do its allies. The countries from the Atlantic to the Urals that have a stake in ending the Yugoslav conflict can collectively wield enormous political clout. Thus the mere threat of military intervention by a U.S.-led coalition of states from both West and East should suffice to stop the killing. Whether Washington has the will to act here and now will set a precedent of historic proportions.