For all of the idealism and movements toward integration that have been guiding modern states, national interest must remain preeminent. Unless states can attain their strategic objectives, both economic and military, in the world’s most geopolitically relevant regions, the rhetoric of idealism will remain meaningless. The end of the Cold War presented the United States with a series of wide-ranging military and diplomatic options to secure its global interests for the foreseeable future. The European Union, while seen by some as a future economic and political counterweight to US influence, has stalled under the weight of unmet development expectations and internal social schisms. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan) has not developed the military cohesion and political unity to counter NATO.
Nevertheless, the last fifteen years of American foreign policy have not lived up to expectations. Two policy decisions have weakened America’s strategic interests and diplomatic mobility to the present day: engagement in the Oslo Process to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and military intervention in Kosovo. Examining the consequences of both initiatives serves not only to better understand the blunders of a misguided foreign policy, but also to paint a clearer picture of America’s long-term grand strategy.
American involvement in the Arab-Israeli conflict is nothing new. The United States was instrumental in saving the regime of Egypt’s Gamal Nasser in 1956, when his bid to nationalize the Suez Canal resulted in a military reaction from an Anglo-French coalition seeking to retain its nations’ links to the Indian Ocean and from an Israel seeking to avoid economic collapse. America also played a key role in negotiating the cease-fires that ended the Six Day and Yom Kippur Wars as well as the 1979 Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt. This involvement, for all of its intimacy, was grounded in the reality of the Cold War and the need to check Soviet expansion into the heart of Africa and South Asia.
The 1993 Oslo Process, by contrast, had none of the underlying strategic necessity of America’s previous commitments. It was a diplomatic gamble, undertaken by an untried Clinton Administration, aimed at improving America’s image in a post-Cold War world. Whereas American involvement in Israeli security affairs should have been scaled back following the Soviet collapse, the onset of Oslo meant a rapid and sustained increase. In the long-term, this resulted in Israel’s becoming more dependent on American goodwill to act independently of its national interest. Furthermore, Israeli and American interests underwent a distorted and dangerous blurring in official policy discourse. The Arab states, seeing the US as the only power able to force Israel’s hand, began demanding a settlement to the “Israeli-Palestinian” issue as the price for cooperation with Washington. Most importantly, little evidence exists to support a change in attitudes toward American policy brought about by Oslo. What is certain is that America limited its diplomatic options, thrust itself into a role it was ill-prepared to handle, and weakened one of its most stalwart allies in an increasingly antagonistic world.
While engagement in Oslo hampered America’s regional strategy in the Middle East, another blunder would have even more profound consequences: the 1999 military intervention in Kosovo. The province had been a part of Serbia for over three centuries and had retained a majority Serb population through most of the last century. Through a combination of ethnic tensions and economic depression, that number had fallen to less than 10% by the end of the 1990s. Despite calls for independence from Kosovo’s Albanian majority, Serbia was under no requirement to allow the province to secede and was determined to maintain its sovereign rights. The breakdown of negotiations over Kosovo’s right to autonomy and the collapse of a tenuous ceasefire between the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and Serb security forces in the winter of 1998 resulted in NATO military action. A 78-day bombing campaign against Serb targets, including the capital of Belgrade and industrial facilities across the country, forced a full military withdrawal. Kosovo was given autonomy and put under UN oversight.
American policymakers argued that a move against the Serbs was a response to genocide and barbarism equal to that of the Nazi Holocaust. However, NATO action only caused greater damage. While presenting a grossly disproportionate image of Serb policies, the United States recognized and supported the KLA. That organization, whose members were directly financed by Saudi Arabia and trained in camps operated by Al-Qaeda in Bosnia and Afghanistan, would serve as a springboard for a future Islamist advance into Central Europe through the Balkan corridor. By forcing Serbia’s hand, the US had inadvertently strengthened the positions of its most determined global adversaries.
The intervention also antagonized Russia which, coupled with American support for NATO expansion into Eastern Europe and “colored” revolutions across its peripheries, increasingly viewed Washington as a strategic threat. Russia faces a rapidly falling birthrate and a political elite nostalgic for the glory of the Cold War, both ingredients for global engagement in contention with American interests. Of utmost concern for US policymakers is the potential for a Russo-Chinese challenge to US influence in Central Asia-with the expansion of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization-and the Middle East, as Iran continues to solidify its trade relationship with Beijing and strengthen its military ties with Moscow. A decupling of Russia from China, America’s most pressing strategic objective, became a lot harder to achieve following the Kosovo intervention.
America’s strategic aims following the end of the Cold War are multi-fold. At the regional level, the US must seek to manufacture and maintain desirable power balances in the Middle East, expand its influence in Central Asia, and strengthen its presence in the Far East to check Chinese ambitions. At the global level, the overriding aim is to separate Russia from China, transforming our former adversary into a strategic partner against Chinese expansion and allowing for more cooperation with our current Middle East strategy.
America’s involvement in Oslo weakened its ability to create a desirable power balance in the Middle East, as seen by Saudi Arabia’s current demand that the price for containing Iran and stabilizing Iraq may be the acceptance of its 2002 plan, aimed at Israel’s effective extinction. The military intervention in Kosovo heavily damaged Russian attitudes of American intentions and foreign policy, while simultaneously fomenting a possible Islamist drive through the Balkans. These effects, taken together, hamper America’s attainment of its long-term strategic objectives and bode poorly for the future of its foreign policy.
