No Commitment Is Without Risk : U.S. dispatches 300 troops to Macedonia

The United States, after long threatening to do something about the brutal war in Bosnia-Herzegovina but not intervening, is now preparing to intervene in nearby Macedonia, while this time soft-pedaling on its threats.

Secretary of State Warren Christopher describes the planned movement of 300 ground troops as “both symbolic and tangible.” While their expressed aim is to help keep the peace, their implied purpose is to serve as an earnest of a U.S. commitment to act more boldly if need be. Washington hopes that the troops, who will join a 750-man Scandinavian battalion already on the ground, will deter aggression simply by their presence. What can’t be ruled out, though, is that Macedonia could also become the site of yet another explosive ethnic conflict, with Americans possibly right in the thick of it. The United States is rightly meeting its responsibilities of international leadership. But Americans have to understand there are risks in this commendable effort.

Macedonia--a country Washington doesn’t even yet recognize because NATO-ally Greece objects to its use of its historic name--is one of those places seemingly destined by geography to be a dark and bloody ground of contention and conquest. The landlocked country shares borders with Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria and Albania, all of which maintain a nervous interest in what goes on there. Among its 2 million people are about 400,000 Albanians, 87,000 Turks and 45,000 Serbs. Serbia still regards Macedonia as part of “Greater Serbia,” an assertion of ominous implications, while Bulgaria maintains that Macedonians--at least through the 19th Century--fondly regarded themselves as Bulgarians. Here, in short, is another simmering stew of claims, resentments and real and fancied memories of the kind that historically has made the Balkans a synonym for turmoil.

Christopher’s announcement of the U.S. commitment at a NATO foreign ministers meeting also aimed at demonstrating the Clinton Administration’s fidelity to that organization, to the United Nations--under whose auspices the U.S. troops will serve--and to the overall concept of collective security. Meeting these worthy policy aims could help keep war from spreading in the former Yugoslavia. But this operation won’t be risk-free. Trouble could erupt in Macedonia itself or it could be set off by a Serbian attack on the next-door Albanian enclave of Kosovo. In any event U.S. involvement might not remain limited for very long. That has to be candidly considered now, before a possibility becomes a fact.