Sometimes Intervention Works; Sometimes It’s Disastrous

To build support for his Kosovo policy, President Clinton has played seemingly every historical-rhetorical card: World War I, World War II, the Cold War, Vietnam. But Clinton’s orgy of analogy only shows that he has learned the contradictory lessons of the last century of statecraft--and that he agrees with all of them.

Since “appeasement” failed in the 1930s, a new approach was taken in the late ‘40s: “containment.” Communism would be contained by defensive alliances, such as NATO. But when containment led to Vietnam, the lesson Americans learned was that the U.S. could not play the world’s policeman and contain every threat.

With the ending of the Cold War, the grand strategy of anti-communism has yielded to a new approach, which might be called situational humanitarianism. That is, in places where the U.S. believes it can make a large difference at a small price, Americans have intervened, as in Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia.

Clinton, speaking on Tuesday about all the hatred around the world, claimed “its most virulent manifestation is right there in Europe.” That’s hardly true; the ethnic conflict in Rwanda, for example, has been far bloodier. Still, in conjunction with NATO, Clinton’s airstrikes have a reasonable chance of succeeding, at least in the short term. But what about in the long term? Has Clinton really thought through all the lessons that history offers?

Not much farther from Kosovo than Sarajevo is the island of Corfu. In 433 BC it was known as Corcyra, and it was a client-state of Athens, the greatest political-military power of the time. When the Corcyreans fell into conflict with Corinth, they appealed to the Athenians for help. After all, not only was Athens strong, but it led the Delian League, the NATO of the ancient Mediterranean. Thucydides, the historian who lived through that time, wrote that the Athenians happily sent warships to the distant island, all the while assuring other Greek states that their intervention was merely to help a friend in need.

But Sparta as well as Corinth felt threatened by the Athenian military action, and soon the Corcyrean sideshow erupted into the Peloponnesian War. In the nearly three decades of fighting that followed, Athens was nearly annihilated.

Serbia is no strategic threat to America. But that doesn’t mean that Slobodan Milosevic is completely without retaliatory capacity; it was Serb terror that precipitated World War I. And since enemies tend to have long memories, an act of vengeance could come in a year, a decade or a century.

Americans have gotten used to push-button conflicts in which we suffer virtually no casualties. But our power, however well-intentioned and well-aimed, feels far different to those who have been on the receiving end of a cruise missile or others who think they might be next. If Clinton understood history as well as he claims to, he would be more cognizant of the cost to a proud power when the historical wheel turns. As it surely will.