The Power of a Cease-Fire

Secretary of State Warren Christopher has had trouble rallying Europe behind American leadership on the Bosnia question, but the Europe Christopher visited is in extraordinary inner turmoil.

In Britain on Thursday Prime Minister John Major’s Tories suffered their worst defeat in 50 years. Major’s own popularity is now the lowest ever recorded for a postwar prime minister. France has been grieved and sickened by the suicide, just one month after he failed to win reelection to his post as prime minister, of Pierre Beregovoy, for years a close associate of President Francois Mitterrand. In Germany, the Social Democrats are in shock over a scandal that has cost them, overnight, the charismatic Bjoern Engholm, whom they hoped would succeed Helmut Kohl as chancellor; and yet Kohl is also at the nadir of his popularity. In Russia, President Boris N. Yeltsin survived the April 25 referendum, but on May Day his opposition organized the most violent political action Moscow has seen since the 1991 coup attempt. Finally, Italy, the European power closest to the Balkans, has seen the resignation of Premier Giulio Amato after half his Cabinet resigned over links to the Mafia.

All this--every one of these politically traumatic events--happened in the two weeks immediately preceding Christopher’s visit. No wonder the secretary of state had trouble focusing the European mind.

Meanwhile, however, joint Turkish-Russian-American intervention in a quasi-civil war structurally quite like the Bosnian conflict seems to have achieved a breakthrough. The little noticed effort to end the conflict between Armenians and Azeris over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave in Azerbaijan led on Thursday to a 60-day cease-fire, a limited Armenian withdrawal from a keenly contested region of Azerbaijan, and peace talks.

The United States, for all its problems, faces just now no political crisis comparable to those afflicting its allies. For this perhaps transitory reason, among others, American leadership is still indispensable in Bosnia. What the breakthrough in Nagorno-Karabakh suggests is that it might just prove effective. President Clinton is conducting himself not as a bumbling novice but as a careful statesman recognizing a leadership vacuum and filling it.