NEWS ANALYSIS : Accord Offers Harsh Lessons in Use of Power

President Clinton and his aides were understandably buoyed this week by their thirteenth-hour success in halting the brutal war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. But there was no real sense of elation at the White House--in part because Clinton now faces the risky mission of sending troops into Bosnia, but also because this week’s triumph came only after three years of humiliating diplomatic failure.

Already, statesmen here and abroad are warning that the United States and its allies will face more Balkan-style ethnic conflicts in the future. They find the lessons of Bosnia-Herzegovina to be sobering--but essential if future debacles are to be avoided.

The first lesson, according to diplomats and scholars, is that there are no low-cost solutions to wars, not even for a superpower like the United States.

If would-be peacemakers are not willing to use military force and risk the lives of their own troops, their efforts are likely to meet frustration.

Strange though it may seem, the combatants in a civil war like Bosnia’s have a built-in advantage over the world’s great powers, said Brent Scowcroft, a former national security adviser to two presidents.

“They’ve got passion on their side,” he said. “This is the most important thing in the world for them. It’s only a sideline for us.”

As a result, insurgents like the Bosnian Serbs--or the Somali gunmen who attacked American troops in Mogadishu in 1993--have little reason to back down before threats from the United States and its great-power allies.

On the contrary, history has taught them to challenge the great powers to see if those nations will back up their threats with steel.

That suggests a second lesson of Bosnia: Military power can work, but only when it is used in a big way.

“The great powers frittered away their advantage in Bosnia by exerting their power in pathetically ineffectual ways,” said Peter Rodman, a former aide in the Ronald Reagan Administration who is now at the Richard M. Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom.

For months, Rodman noted, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United Nations sought to pressure the factions in Bosnia to negotiate with carefully limited uses of force--in part because they feared sparking reprisals against U.N. peacekeepers on the ground.

“It was a mismatch between our objectives and our will to act, a misunderstanding of what you have to do to coerce people,” Rodman said.

Only after an extensive NATO bombing campaign was launched in August did Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic seize control of the Bosnian Serbs’ side of the then-sputtering negotiations and make an agreement possible, he noted.

“The lesson is clear: When you really do use power in a fairly ferocious way, it does make a difference,” Rodman said. “The tragedy is that we could have imposed our will this way two or three years ago.”

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But the West’s willingness to use its military power was not the only decision that helped the negotiations succeed.

Less noticed, but equally important, was the Clinton Administration’s formal abandonment of its initial position on Bosnia, which held that the Serbs could not be rewarded for their brutal policy of “ethnic cleansing” by being granted an autonomous state on the land they conquered.

“What brought the Serbs to the negotiating table in the first place was not the bombing; it was the fact that we recognized the Serbs’ separate republic” within Bosnia, noted Charles William Maynes, editor of Foreign Policy magazine and a State Department official in the Jimmy Carter Administration.

That points to a third, unpalatable lesson: The high moral ideals that have often inspired U.S. foreign policy sometimes get in the way of achieving concrete goals.

“We started with a totally unrealistic policy, the imposition of a multiethnic ideal in Bosnia,” Maynes said. “Only when the United States stopped its moralizing . . . did we make any progress.”

“The basic problem in U.S. policy in Bosnia has been a conflict between justice and stability,” agreed Michael Mandelbaum of Johns Hopkins University’s School for Advanced International Studies. “As long as the Administration defined the war as a result of Serbian aggression, it was loath to make a deal that would reward the aggressors.”

But “enforcing justice,” Mandelbaum added, would have required the United States to enter the war to help drive the Serbs back--a level of military commitment that neither Clinton nor the Bosnians’ allies in Congress ever seriously sought.

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Such a decision would have required a much clearer national consensus on the U.S. national interest in the Balkans--the kind of consensus Clinton is now hoping to build, belatedly, around the idea of sending up to 23,000 U.S. peacekeepers to Bosnia.

And this leads to the final long-term lesson of the United States’ painful experience in the Balkans: Until Americans reach some agreement on what they are willing to fight for in a post-Cold War world, every conflict may be as frustrating and intractable as Bosnia.

“Our basic problem,” a senior State Department official acknowledged, “is that we don’t know what we’re supposed to be doing anymore.”

In parts of the world where U.S. resolve to fight is clear, war has rarely even happened.

The frontier between NATO and the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact in Central Europe was quiet for four decades of Cold War. North Korea is one of the world’s most aggressive regimes, but it has never dared test the U.S. guarantee to defend South Korea. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein appears to have learned the same lesson after he guessed wrong about U.S. resolve in 1990.

But there are far more numerous parts of the world where U.S. interests are less clear--andwhere Americans have not yet had time, or inclination, to debate the matter.

In Bosnia, after more than three years and an estimated 250,000 dead, it took more than humanitarian sympathy to prod the United States to act; more, even, than fear that the war would cause instability throughout the Balkans.

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Ironically, the factor that finally forced the Western allies to solve the problem was fear that the war was destroying their own strategic relationship, pitting the United States, Britain, France and Russia against each other.

There, in the maintenance of great-power cooperation, all finally found a vital strategic interest. The most painful lesson for the people of Bosnia may be this: When the most powerful nations of the world finally stepped in, it was really to save themselves.