The Triage of Dayton

Warren Bass

From Foreign Affairs, September/October 1998

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Summary:  Somehow the Americans went from claiming they did not have a dog in the Bosnia fight to redrawing the map of the Balkans over Scotch with the ruthless Slobodan Milosevi,c. But the Dayton Accord that ended Bosnia's war has been oversold. It is the product not of Wilsonian idealism but of a reluctant realpolitik. Had Washington intervened in 1993, as Bill Clinton promised to, 100,000 lives could have been saved. Dayton has strengthened the two nastiest dictators in the region, Serbia's Milosevi,c and Croatia's Franjo Tudjman, and edged toward accepting the de facto partition of Bosnia. The violence in Kosovo today is a reminder of the costs of appeasing aggressors.

Warren Bass is an Associate Editor at Foreign Affairs and a Wexner Fellow in history at Columbia University.

NOT A TRIUMPH

On November 16, 1995, Lieutenant General Wesley Clark sat in Dayton, Ohio, in a PowerScene virtual reality imaging system, using a joystick to fly back and forth through simulated three-dimensional scenes of the hills of Bosnia east of Sarajevo. At around 11 p.m., Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic joined him, as well as some other U.S. officials. Lubricated by Scotch, Milosevic and the Americans zoomed back and forth on the computer simulation to try to carve out a path from the besieged Bosnian capital to Gorazde, a U.N. "safe area" surrounded by Bosnian Serbs. In the wee hours of the morning, Clark used crayons to draw a corridor from Sarajevo to Goraz de that was not hopelessly indefensible. Milosevic shook hands with Clark, who is now the supreme allied commander in Europe, and Richard C. Holbrooke, the main American peace negotiator, and what is variously known as the Clark Corridor or the Scotch Road was born.

Somehow, the United States had shifted from a determination not to be dragged into the Balkans to using U.S. officials and computers to draw Bosnia's new frontiers. Winston Churchill used to brag about having drawn Jordan's borders on a map one afternoon; the American general could say much the same thing about Bosnia. But America's entry lacked swagger. Rather, U.S. policymakers came to sketch the Scotch Road with a profound sense of ambivalence. Documents relating to this diplomacy -- including Holbrooke's memoir To End a War and the State Department's 1996 official study of the process leading to the Dayton Accords of November 1995 -- show that American officials were painfully aware of the shortcomings of U.S. Bosnia policy and the distance it had shifted from the goals that Bill Clinton had espoused in 1992. If the devil is in the new details, they both afford a richer understanding of the evolution of U.S. policy and reinforce the enormity of the shortfall of American statecraft in the Bosnian crucible.

To be sure, Dayton was a vast improvement over the muddle and bloodshed that preceded it. But it has been oversold. Dayton represented not the vindication of the liberal ideals with which Bill Clinton excoriated George Bush on the 1992 campaign trail -- firm action to halt genocide, bringing war criminals to justice, tolerance, multiethnic nation-states, liberal nationalism, and the use of international and European institutions -- but rather a version of the chilly realpolitik that kept the Bush administration out of Bosnia. The deal the administration helped cut edged ominously close to partition, writing an epitaph for Bosnia as a multiethnic state and ceding much of its territory to the Bosnian Serbs. Many of Dayton's better provisions, especially the prosecution of war criminals and the return of refugees, remain largely unimplemented. Worse, Dayton required dealing with and ultimately strengthening Milosevic and Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, two ethnic nationalists whose ideology and ruthlessness are antithetical to liberal values.

Dayton's lessons are grimly appropriate when considering the current violence in Kosovo, where Milosevic's ...

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