‘Collateral Damage’ Isn’t Limited to the Battlefield

Seven weeks, more than 5,000 airstrikes and one shattered Chinese Embassy after the United States and its allies went to war against a small Balkan country, here are the results so far:

“Ethnic cleansing” is continuing, largely unimpeded, in Kosovo, the separatist province in southern Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav military is said to have suffered serious losses, but the war’s end is nowhere in sight. And on the global front, among the major powers whose goodwill the United States wants to keep, Russia is unnerved and China furious.

A conflict that was expected to be little more than a brief bit of muscle-flexing by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to stop the killing in Kosovo has instead mushroomed into a global diplomatic crisis. And the Clinton administration’s worries now include not only the fate of the Kosovars and the stability of the Balkans but also broader developments, such as the prospect of a new Moscow-Beijing axis wielding two unfriendly votes on the U.N. Security Council.

President Clinton appealed to Americans last week to stay the course in Kosovo--”to work together, to be firm, to be resolute, to be determined to resolve this now.”

But behind the scenes, Clinton and his aides were a whirlwind of desperate action trying to keep the war--and relations with China and Russia--on an even keel.

Clinton telephoned both Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin and Chinese President Jiang Zemin (who showed China’s ire by refusing to take a call until Friday). After the bombing of China’s embassy in Belgrade, the Yugoslav capital, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright visited China’s ambassador in Washington--at almost midnight--to apologize. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, the administration’s global trouble-shooter, shuttled between Washington, Moscow and other capitals.

By the end of the week, State Department spokesman James P. Rubin declared that “progress has been made,” but he said it was too early to provide details. Another senior official said “intensive consultations” with Russia were occurring “on an hourly basis.”

Other senior officials said they detected signs that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic might be weakening. Undersecretary of State Thomas R. Pickering said the Russians were indicating that Milosevic was showing “a greater willingness to accept an international presence, a military presence and even a NATO presence” in Kosovo after the air war ends.

If nothing else, the Kosovo crisis has brought home the fact that even without the Cold War, modest regional conflicts can cascade into great-power confrontations.

Some in the administration acknowledge that the sudden acceleration of this international crisis has felt like an abrupt descent on a roller coaster. One mid-level official said it felt as if the administration’s foreign affairs agenda was “imploding.”

As evidence, this official recalled how, barely a month ago, Republicans were wary of talking about foreign policy because Clinton’s standing in public opinion polls was so high and their party was so divided. But now GOP politicians are elbowing one another to charge the president with incompetence in the Kosovo campaign.

“Handling these teacup wars is the greatest challenge in foreign policy today,” said Leslie H. Gelb, president of the Council on Foreign Relations. “Every time they occur, they trigger the old kind of security and competition problems” with Russia and China.

“This is not to say that . . . we’re going to have a major new conflict with Russia and China,” Gelb added. “But it will be a period of real strain.”

Ironically, the Clinton administration acted in Kosovo partly out of a concern for global perceptions. While the Balkan interior might not be crucial to the U.S. national interest, officials believed that a failure to act decisively against the Yugoslav campaign of terror there--especially after Milosevic ignored a series of U.S. warnings--could have larger consequences.

But larger consequences have come about anyway, just not in the way the administration expected. Consider:

* An already unsteady relationship with Moscow now centers on a diplomatic high-wire act that requires Western leaders to carefully nudge Russia to accept NATO’s conditions for peace in Kosovo, then hope that Russia can sell it all to Milosevic. Those involved in the process--in both Europe and the U.S.--say they think they can bring Russia around. The ability of Russia to persuade Milosevic to accept these same conditions is much more problematic.

* The Chinese Embassy attack has not just strained Beijing’s ties with the U.S. In a way, it is also personally embarrassing to President Jiang, who barely one year ago escorted Clinton through his nation in a highly successful summit that seemed to fix his political future on a positive relationship with the U.S.

Worse, the embassy bombing occurred in the middle of a simmering crisis in U.S. relations with China. Despite Clinton’s efforts to patch things up, controversies over Taiwan, espionage and campaign contributions have turned China into a divisive partisan issue in Washington.

Six weeks ago, Washington and Beijing were moving toward a major agreement that would let China join the World Trade Organization. Clinton put off the deal then, partly because he feared that Congress was not ready to support it. Now the embassy bombing may provide the ammunition that opponents of the deal in China needed to block the deal there.

* Some officials in other NATO capitals privately complain that the administration has not managed the war well--a view reflecting a sense of disquiet about America’s leadership in the transatlantic relationship that could, if things go badly wrong, imperil the cohesion of the alliance itself.

Robert Zoellick, a former senior aide to then-President Bush, worries about a potential erosion of respect--and fear--for American military might elsewhere in the world if NATO emerges as anything less than the clear winner of the war over Kosovo.

One of the Persian Gulf War’s dividends, Zoellick said, was an aura of American power that, for example, forced the Chinese to blink in 1996 when tensions rose in the Taiwan Straits.

“This dividend has now been wasted away and could be really misspent if the war ends badly,” he said. “[Iraqi President] Saddam [Hussein] is not done, and who knows what the North Koreans have been considering?”

The risk, Zoellick said, is a loss of respect for the United States, not only in China and Russia, but even in Europe.

Still, Gelb noted, things could be worse.

“The absence of traditional major-power conflicts is still the most monumentally important fact of this period,” he said. “There is nothing we and the Russians are going to war over, nothing we and the Chinese are going to war over. The last 500 years of history were characterized by major-power conflict, but that is a thing of the past.”