Bob Dole: Bosnia and American Exceptionalism
[Mr. Dole is a former majority leader of the U.S. Senate and in 1996 was the Republican Party nominee for president.]
When it announced that it was giving the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama last month, the Nobel Committee praised the president for his efforts on climate change. It also said in its citation that, with Mr. Obama now in office, a "multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position" and "dialogue and negotiations" are the preferred instruments for conflict resolution.
This commendation raises concerns for many observers, including me, who believe in American exceptionalism, and who agree with former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright that we are the "indispensable nation." Preserving and defending our values at home and promoting them abroad are essential to protecting our national interests. Others—particularly opponents of the U.S.-led intervention in Iraq—disagree and welcome a correction to what they perceive as the zeal and excesses of the Bush administration.
Regardless of where you stand, it should be clear that multilateralism isn't always the best approach and that the idea that the United States is merely one among many equal nations doesn't take into account the unique role the U.S. can play in world affairs.
Nowhere is this clearer than in Bosnia, where, in the early 1990s, a country and its people were under attack and on the brink of destruction. As the situation deteriorated, the U.S. demurred, and Europe took ownership of the crisis. Speaking for the European Community, Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jacques Poos famously declared, "The hour of Europe has dawned." Unfortunately, that was an hour of passivity and noninterventionism, and it turned into years of carnage and the worst European genocide since World War II. The slaughter ended only when the U.S. led a NATO military campaign to halt the violence.
Today, Bosnia is again under threat. This time the threat is not from the brutality and immediacy of genocide. Rather, it is a more subtle menace: the prospect of a state weakened to the extent that it dissolves; leaves its people in separatist, monoethnic conclaves; loses all hope for democratic development; and validates ultranationalism. This is happening not on battlefields, but at the negotiating table. It is happening because, rather than strengthening state powers and drawing the recalcitrant Bosnian Serbs back into Bosnia, representatives of European Union member nations led by former Bosnia chief negotiator Carl Bildt are walking back parts of the 1995 Dayton Agreement that had put an end to the three-and-a-half year war that had torn the country apart...
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When it announced that it was giving the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama last month, the Nobel Committee praised the president for his efforts on climate change. It also said in its citation that, with Mr. Obama now in office, a "multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position" and "dialogue and negotiations" are the preferred instruments for conflict resolution.
This commendation raises concerns for many observers, including me, who believe in American exceptionalism, and who agree with former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright that we are the "indispensable nation." Preserving and defending our values at home and promoting them abroad are essential to protecting our national interests. Others—particularly opponents of the U.S.-led intervention in Iraq—disagree and welcome a correction to what they perceive as the zeal and excesses of the Bush administration.
Regardless of where you stand, it should be clear that multilateralism isn't always the best approach and that the idea that the United States is merely one among many equal nations doesn't take into account the unique role the U.S. can play in world affairs.
Nowhere is this clearer than in Bosnia, where, in the early 1990s, a country and its people were under attack and on the brink of destruction. As the situation deteriorated, the U.S. demurred, and Europe took ownership of the crisis. Speaking for the European Community, Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jacques Poos famously declared, "The hour of Europe has dawned." Unfortunately, that was an hour of passivity and noninterventionism, and it turned into years of carnage and the worst European genocide since World War II. The slaughter ended only when the U.S. led a NATO military campaign to halt the violence.
Today, Bosnia is again under threat. This time the threat is not from the brutality and immediacy of genocide. Rather, it is a more subtle menace: the prospect of a state weakened to the extent that it dissolves; leaves its people in separatist, monoethnic conclaves; loses all hope for democratic development; and validates ultranationalism. This is happening not on battlefields, but at the negotiating table. It is happening because, rather than strengthening state powers and drawing the recalcitrant Bosnian Serbs back into Bosnia, representatives of European Union member nations led by former Bosnia chief negotiator Carl Bildt are walking back parts of the 1995 Dayton Agreement that had put an end to the three-and-a-half year war that had torn the country apart...