Successes on Bosnia Boost U.S. Foreign Policy Team : Balkans: President can boast of a non-economic initiative in foreign affairs. Christopher is smiling.

The praise heaped on the United States by officials from Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina as they signed a preliminary peace agreement Tuesday night was enough to bring a smile even to the usually dour face of Secretary of State Warren Christopher.

After a year in which the news from Bosnia has come in only two varieties--bad and worse--Christopher, President Clinton and their deputies suddenly can cite a string of successes.

Moreover, for the first time, observers can point to something that can legitimately be called a Clinton Administration plan for Bosnia--Clinton’s first non-economic initiative in foreign affairs in his 13 months in office.

On most foreign policy issues--the Middle East, Haiti, Somalia, Korea--Clinton’s team has basically continued policies of the George Bush Administration or kept a careful distance.

By contrast, the emerging Clinton approach to Bosnia--cajoling the Bosnian government and Croatia into a working alliance while using North Atlantic Treaty Organization force to intimidate Serbian separatists--marks a sharp departure from Bush’s policy of not taking sides among the combatants in Bosnia’s three-sided war.

Clinton’s initiative, which he launched last month after the deaths of 68 people in the bombing of an open-air market in Sarajevo, could provide a valuable boost in the public perception of Clinton’s foreign policy team. But it also puts the Administration more directly on the spot in case anything goes wrong.

“In our judgment, that’s worth risking,” an Administration official said. “The effort in the next few weeks is going to be critical.”

The Administration’s efforts continued to draw praise from both Bosnians and Croats on Wednesday. At a news conference, Bosnian Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic complimented U.S. efforts and said American diplomats had pledged to “remain committed to this. We welcome that commitment.”

As efforts now turn toward drawing the Serbs--the third party to the warfare--into an agreement, Silajdzic said he expects Russian pressure will be needed to bring the Serbs to the table. He dismissed criticism that the agreement he and Croatian representatives signed Tuesday night is merely a piece of paper that cannot stop the bloodshed. “All wars ended with a piece of paper and an agreement,” Silajdzic said. “A piece of paper can be very important.”

Still, he added, the de facto alliance between his government and the Croats will provide greater leverage if the Serbs do not agree to talk. “What happens if they attack (is that) we will have to defend ourselves,” he said.

Croatia’s ambassador to Washington, Peter A. Sarcevic, echoed that sentiment. “There is important international pressure” on the Serbs now, he said. As a result, “we can see that there are changes in their behavior.”

Testifying on Capitol Hill, Christopher said he believes the agreement will help “create a balance of power more likely, I think, to make the Serbs willing to negotiate seriously.”

Christopher plans to meet next week with Russian Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev in Vladivostok for talks that are expected to concentrate on the next steps in Bosnia. So far, the Administration and the Russians have loosely coordinated their actions, with Washington working on the Muslim-led Bosnian government and the Croats while Moscow has cajoled the Serbs.

If the effort to draw the Serbs into an agreement succeeds, the Administration will face two new political risks.

First, Clinton has pledged that once an agreement is reached, the United States will provide troops for an international peacekeeping force. Gen. David Maddox, commander of U.S. forces in Europe, told reporters here Wednesday that he expects such a force to eventually consist of between 20,000 and 30,000 soldiers. “I ain’t goin’ in with two squads,” he said. “We won’t go through that operation and not lose an American soldier.”

The prospect of American troops in the Balkans drew nervous comments from several senators Wednesday as Christopher testified on Capitol Hill.

The second area of risk involves money. Even as they signed the peace agreement Tuesday, the Bosnian and Croatian representatives talked of the need for reconstruction aid--a point that Croatian ambassador Sarcevic repeated.

Much of the Muslim-Croatian fighting in central Bosnia has been caused by the destabilizing impact of tens of thousands of refugees fleeing hostilities elsewhere in the region, he said. To prevent the bloodshed from starting anew, “a plan of economic recovery for this region” is “very important, crucial,” he said.

Given the unpopularity of all forms of foreign aid, those demands could become difficult for the Administration if a peace agreement is reached.

But for now those risks remain in the distance, and Administration officials have been concentrating on how to build on their recent successes.

In the last three weeks:

* A U.S.-instigated NATO ultimatum forced Bosnian Serb forces to withdraw or surrender their heavy weapons around Sarajevo, bringing a relative peace to that capital city.

* NATO planes shot down four Bosnian Serb aircraft, breaking the powerful inertia that had prevented the alliance from actually using military power in the conflict.

* A U.S.-brokered set of negotiations resulted in the federation agreement between the Bosnian government and Bosnian Croat forces.

* And Russian pressure caused the Serbs to agree to the opening of the airport in Tuzla, which will allow relief supplies to reach Bosnia’s second-largest city.

In the view of Administration planners, those events--plus the overall fatigue of two years of fighting--have brought all the parties in the Bosnian conflict to the point at which they are willing to talk.

After months of inconclusive warfare, there now is “a remarkable convergence of interests” that makes the time ripe for a settlement, an Administration official said. Faced with the idea of continued fighting, the official said, the Bosnians and Croats “couldn’t answer the question, ‘For what?’ ”

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