Russia Arrives, Opening Doors : Cooperation with NATO is rife with possibility

When the NATO ultimatum expired in Sarajevo, who won? Russian President Boris Yeltsin has claimed averting NATO air strikes as a major diplomatic victory. Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic has exulted over the same event, welcoming the Russian troops, unexpectedly dispatched to Sarajevo, as guarantors of Serbian military victory. President Clinton, who pushed for the air-strikes ultimatum, has also claimed a victory, pointing to the silence of the Serbian artillery ringing Sarajevo and to the first respite the besieged city has enjoyed in nearly two years. The Muslim leadership of official Bosnia has offered conflicting interpretations of an event whose real meaning will only become clear in the days and weeks ahead.

NATO was wise, whether its wisdom was intentional or not, to postpone the threatened air strikes on Serbian artillery. Doing so has handed Yeltsin a diplomatic triumph, but it has also opened several doors that otherwise would never have opened.

The first is the possible extension to other Bosnian cities of a NATO ultimatum on artillery bombardment coupled with the protective (for the Serbs) presence of Russian troops. For the moment, President Clinton is resisting pressure from Europe to extend the ultimatum, but that door remains open, most notably at Mostar. Immediate air strikes in Sarajevo would have closed it.

A second door leads to Russian participation in policing an eventual peace settlement. Demagoguery feeds on paranoia. The aggressive territorial ambitions of President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia fed on the fears of Serbs that they could not be safe as a minority in Croatia or in multiethnic Bosnia. Paradoxically, had the Western powers that first recognized Croatia and Bosnia taken measures to protect the Serbs there, Milosevic and Karadzic could have been foiled. Russian protection for Serb minorities might have similar effect even now.

The third and most important door leads to a major new definition of European security. It could be argued that if Russia is not against the West, Russia must be with the West. A collective European security system that simply disregards Russia cannot suffice. But if Russia and the West are together, then what are they against? One hopes they would be against just the sort of retrograde, renegade nationalism Milosevic and Karadzic whipped to a frenzy in a war that has wrecked the Serbian economy and disgraced the Serbian name. Russia and NATO, working together half by accident, had a stunning impact in Sarajevo. The further reach of their cooperation is--in theory, at least--not only peace in the Balkans but the guarantee of peace in Europe.

Meanwhile, the Bosnian partition plan urged by the European Union and the United Nations may yet be overtaken by events. A new proposal for a Croatian-Muslim union in Bosnia implies an abandonment of the assumption in the earlier plan that a multiethnic state can no longer even be contemplated. This happy reversal may yet prove to be the harbinger of several larger ones. That, in any event, is the hope raised by the past several days.