The High Political Risk of ‘Moral’ Wars

American embroilment in the Balkans, especially if it grows to involve ground troops, should test the dominant conventional wisdom in U.S. political and foreign policy for the last two decades: Low-risk, low-mortality gunboat and cruise-missile diplomacy, from Grenada to the Middle East, yields a solid political payoff.

Instead, we could see the humbling lesson taught 30 years ago in Southeast Asian jungles and rice paddies continue today in mountain passes with unpronounceable Slavic names; and perhaps recall the sorry fate of the early ground-troop commitments in Vietnam that only Americans older than 50 actually remember.

In domestic terms, Democrats ought to be nervous that mixing moral insistence with overseas warfare could renew their biggest political weakness of this century. Economically, there may be a new dilemma: a war that could undercut, not invigorate, the U.S. business cycle. Oil supplies could shrink and financial markets tremble. The Republicans, in turn, have to worry that most of the circumstances in which they profited from Democratic war policies and failures no longer apply.

For the moment, at least, the roar of airstrikes and the smell of aviation gasoline on the evening news is still a winner. Since spring 1980, when failure dogged President Jimmy Carter’s military mission to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran, his successors have gained politically from two decades of seaborne invasions (Grenada and Haiti) and airstrikes (from Libya to Baghdad). This has been accompanied by an equally relentless pattern of U.S.-led financial rescues, involving Latin American nations, U.S. banks and Mexican and other currencies, augmented by International Monetary Fund oxygen tents for South Korea, Indonesia and Brazil. Americans now turning 40 have seen this duality of bombs and bailouts succeed throughout their adult lives.

The new peril, though, is that the Balkans again expose the Achilles’ heel of past Democratic administrations: war-related naivete and foreign policy as a morality play. Warfare, instead of being a last-stage tool of national self-interest, gets interwoven with morality or democracy. Then the war--or subsequent peace--is mishandled.

Doubters can recall how President Woodrow Wilson’s moral claims for fighting World War I drew mockery as Europe in the 1920s and ‘30s became a laboratory of spoilsmanship, revolution and cynicism. World War II brought more naivete, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s hopes for cooperation with the Soviet Union led, through meetings like Yalta and Potsdam, to the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe. Nazi concentration camps were replaced by Soviet gulags. Then President Harry S. Truman misjudged the effectiveness of U.S. power in the Korean War, Lyndon B. Johnson botched U.S. involvement in Vietnam and Carter failed in the Iranian hostage crisis. Each time, many voters soured.

The early stages of mid-1960s U.S. involvement in Vietnam also emphasized morality and Uncle Sam’s helping hand. Johnson even promised to repeat the rural electrification achieved in the U.S. in the 1930s, this time along the Mekong River. These misjudgments chiseled Johnson’s political epitaph, and President Bill Clinton could be similarly vulnerable if he decides to send U.S. troops to the Balkans. Several of Johnson’s announcements about committing soldiers to Vietnam seem chilling when compared to recent news.

Not that Vietnam is the best parallel. Today’s Balkans, centered on Yugoslavia, are almost as unstable at this century’s end as at its beginning, and for a similar reason. Instead of the ethnic crazy quilt left by the unraveling Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, we now have the debris of a disintegrated communist empire. Similar ancestral hates are front and center, not least the recurring six-century-old hostility between Orthodox Christian Serbs and Muslim Albanians and Kosovars.

As usual, the moral difference is minimal. The United States, Britain and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization denounce the Serbs because the allies have embraced the Albanians and Kosovars. The Kosovo Liberation Army, hitherto a terrorist group committed to Kosovo’s independence from Serbia, escalated tensions a year ago by killing Serbian policemen. When the Serbs brutally cracked down, the allies increased their pro-Kosovo tilt. Ivo Daalder, an expert at the Brookings Institution, says the U.S. and NATO have their “head in the sand” about the KLA and have been maneuvered into becoming “the air force of the KLA.” The Serbs, even more ruthless, have stepped up their retaliation and killing to force a partition of Kosovo or to draw the U.S. and NATO into a ground war that Western voters won’t support.

Clinton is in a particularly tight spot because of his draft evasion during the Vietnam War, not to mention the problem of his 1998 and 1999 airstrikes being linked to distracting the public from the Monica S. Lewinsky scandals. On the first night of the NATO airstrikes, Belgrade TV broadcast “Wag the Dog,” the movie about a U.S. president who starts a war to cover up a sex scandal. Baghdad television had done the same thing last year. Few presidents have been less equipped to marshal national opinion behind a controversial war, and the public, already sharply divided, could turn hostile quickly if ground troops are committed and casualties begin to mount. The airstrike strategy has had the same implicit promise in Washington, London and Brussels: no casualties.

Though a Clinton embarrassment tantalizes GOP strategists, there’s another ingredient to consider. In the past, Republicans often suggested that Democrats used mobilization and war production for economic stimulus. Indeed, World Wars I and II, the Korean War and Vietnam did stretch out the business cycle. In 1999, by contrast, the U.S. economy is beginning its ninth year in an up cycle, a 20th-century peacetime record. Commitment of 30,000 or 40,000 U.S. troops to Kosovo could hardly provide the usual mobilization boost.

On the contrary, a serious ground war in Europe could threaten the business cycle. It could strain the embattled European Monetary Union. The many Muslim oil-producing nations could be aroused. Terrorism could balloon: Serbian terrorists, the so-called Black Hand, were notorious in the years before 1914. The economic bailout and Band-Aid activities of the IMF and World Bank could be jostled. The recession that policymakers say the U.S. can no longer afford, because of its impact on overinflated stock markets, would arrive.

These politics could be especially tricky. Clinton and the Democrats would be hurt by public indignation, yet the Republicans could not expect their usual benefits from Democratic war fumbles. When they benefited in 1946, 1952 and 1968, the economy was strong and anti-communism was a GOP ally. Voting Republican was easy. Any war-related economic implosion in 1999-2000, however, would focus voter nervousness about GOP economics. Blame could be split because the GOP controlled Congress when this fighting began, not the case in 1917, 1941, 1950 or 1965.

There is also a more disturbing dimension: What this two-decade parade of U.S., British and NATO punitive expeditions may tell us about Anglo-U.S. circumstances. The public already has an element of “Wag the Dog” cynicism. When the 1998 strikes against Iraq were mounted under the name “Desert Fox,” the media made much of a Midwest veteran’s post that complained about the unfairness to German Gen. Erwin Rommel (the “Desert Fox”), who fought his World War II enemies man-to-man. More territory in Asia and Africa seems to be slipping into chaos and away from the West, which, like 4th- and 5th-century Rome, cannot muster anything more than punitive expeditions. Religious leaders even paint the latter-day United States in similar terms of moral corruption.

Rome, in retrospect, was at its peak after its youthful civil wars and during the early Roman Empire, and the same can be argued for the English-speaking peoples. Their three great 17th- to 19th-century civil wars--the English Civil War, the American Revolution and the American Civil War--were all vital sortings out, ladders to success and greatness. In a different way, so were World Wars I and II. By contrast, the conflicts since then--in Korea, Vietnam and the Persian Gulf--have been stalemates or even losses.

Now the punitive expeditions and airstrikes pose a new question about the evolution of Anglo-U.S. power. It is eerie to think that a critical definition could come in the Balkans, which Rome, too, found not worth the price.