Bosnia has demeaned all who have touched it. The United Nations operation there is in total disarray, unable to protect the victims or produce a settlement. Europe's desire to police itself in the post-cold-war world has been exposed as a sham. Bad feeling and basic disagreements are sapping the Western alliance. In Bosnia itself, more than 200,000 people have been killed and an additional 3 million made homeless. Serbians have been impoverished and brutalized by their pursuit of ``destiny.'' So have Croats. And, as it did in the 1930s, diplomacy has become synonymous with appeasement.
Bosnia is a leitmotif for the indifferent, cynical, inward-looking '90s. From Belgrade to Moscow, fascist demagogues have been reinforced in their belief that might is right and the West is spineless. The very idea that people of different ethnic origins can coexist peacefully has suffered a heavy, perhaps fatal, blow. In the Islamic world, already facing a flood tide of fundamentalism, Western values have rarely appeared less worthy.
No one, of course, can be sure how an event like the rape of one small Balkan state will influence developments in places as diverse as Russia, South Africa and Algeria. Genocide in Cambodia, after all, did not spell the end of civilization in Southeast Asia. But in one respect, at least, there is little room for argument. Bosnia has sounded the death knell of the Western concept of collective security, which guided and sustained the North Atlantic Treaty Organization throughout its 42-year confrontation with totalitarianism.
Cries and whispers. Until the recent NATO summit in Brussels, the demise of collective security was merely whispered about in the corridors. Nine alliance members have troops in Bosnia, seven do not, but somehow the split was finessed. This is, after all, an ``out of area,'' humanitarian U.N. deployment in a region that poses no obvious threat to NATO's security.
Yet Bosnia has become the model for NATO's future. At Brussels, all eyes focused on whether the alliance should expand eastward. The meeting, however, will be remembered in history not for its timid Partnership for Peace offer to Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia, but for sanctioning the so-called a la carte option, which permits member states to choose which security issues they consider vital and which they wish to avoid.
Dreamed up by outgoing Secretary of Defense Les Aspin, the concept is grandly called Combined Joint Task Forces, and given their mounting resistance to any foreign entanglements, many Americans will cheer it on. But it may be wise to keep the champagne on ice. For more than four decades, NATO gave the West a common sense of purpose, deterred East-West conflict and imposed a degree of order even on antagonists such as Greece and Turkey. Its success came solely from its solidarity, from the knowledge that an attack on one member was an attack on all. The new go-it-alone doctrine threatens all these underpinnings.
Bosnia, of course, is a symptom rather than the cause of NATO's confusion. But every attempt to generate a more forceful Western strategy simply stimulates more disagreement. Last week it was France's turn to demand that the West impose a peace in the Balkans. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, visiting Paris, balked, arguing that it is unfair to pressure the Bosnian Muslims just when they are making gains on the battlefield. Christopher is right that the diplomatic track in Bosnia has reached a dead end. Yet to do nothing is simply to condone more violence, to sanction more slaughter and to invite more trouble.
Ethnic war on the Yugoslav pattern is now considered the greatest threat to Europe's peace. This idea may be wrong; a revanchist Russia may prove to be even more destructive. But the evidence suggests that the Clinton administration and NATO have already opted out of both scenarios, tacitly accepting the creation of a Russian sphere of influence in the East and adopting a new alliance doctrine that is a formula for impotence in troubled regions such as the Balkans and Central Europe.
If the West is to retrieve the Bosnian situation at this late stage, it must finally define its objectives. The logic of Christopher's stance is that any solution that allows the Serbs to keep what they have conquered is unacceptable. If that is the case, NATO should arm the Muslims, use air power against the Serbs -- and prepare for the consequences, including anger from the Russians. A second option is to withdraw U.N. troops, leave the warring parties to slug it out and deliver as much humanitarian aid as possible. Continuing the present policy will only hasten NATO's disintegration without ending the fighting or helping to broker a compromise.
