AT WAR - Rules for Diplomats . . .:. . . and when to break them - Brief Article

National Review, Dec 3, 2001 by John O'Sullivan

Bismarck is supposed to have said that asking him to take political principles into account when conducting foreign policy was like suggesting that he walk through a dense forest with a twelve-foot pole between his teeth. Well, he would say that, wouldn't he? Still, even if we discount for the cynicism of a 19th-century practitioner of realpolitik, his observation cannot be dismissed. For when U.S. policy- makers turn to such places as Afghanistan and the Balkans, they bring with them a set of principles that often make them stumble.

Here are three such rules: You should not change borders; you should not propose a peaceful transfer of populations; and your solution- especially if it requires force-must have the approval of the U.N. Now, these are all useful ideas, provided that they are seen as cautionary- and optional-restraints. Changing borders is reasonably seen as dangerous because it might be a precedent encouraging expansionist states to seek the forcible breakup of vulnerable nations. Peaceful transfers of populations are disliked lest they encourage violent "ethnic cleansing." And U.N. sanction is required because diplomats generally want to place as many obstacles as possible in the way of force as a solution to disputes.

All of these are reasonable aims. But there may well be circumstances in which other solutions are preferable. For example, allowing Slovenia and Croatia to secede from Yugoslavia involved much less violence than would have resulted from an extended attempt to compel them to stay in the federation. The U.S. position-that we had no dog in that fight- effectively gave Milosevic permission to prevent their departure by force. He soon abandoned that effort, but the U.S. policy-largely dictated by a dislike of changing borders-was a grave error; by re- liberating the genie of political violence, it helped cause the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

Compare and contrast the "velvet divorce" of Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Against the expressed wishes of virtually every Western leader, all concerned to prevent the redrawing of boundaries, the two halves of Czechoslovakia broke apart peacefully and have since developed quite effectively as single states. There is no conflict between them such as might well have developed had significant numbers of Czechs and Slovaks felt imprisoned in a common state. And their recent history compares very favorably with the wars between nations forcibly constrained to stay in Yugoslavia. Yet despite these experiences, redrawing boundaries remains a bugbear to respectable diplomatic opinion.

Let us now look at transferring population. Hostility to this is so fixed an element in international affairs that when the Dayton Accords were negotiated, one element in them was the return of Bosnian refugees forcibly ejected by ethnic cleansing. But very few refugees have in fact returned to the homes they left-and for good reason: They would be returning to live next door to the very people who drove them out. That would be prudent, indeed possible, only if they were offered more or less permanent protection by NATO. It is hard not to feel that a better solution would have been to compensate them for their loss of property and assist them to settle amid their new (and ethnically similar) neighbors.

What makes this unbending hostility to population transfers so hard to fathom is that the postwar order in Europe rests upon the violent expulsion of ethnic Germans from eastern Europe. Unjust though that it was, it created stable post-war borders that have minimized conflict ever since. And the decision of successive West German governments not to seek to reverse these expulsions, asking instead for reasonable compensation for their victims, has rightly been seen as a very considerable act of statesmanship.

And then there is the use of force without U.N. sanction. Suppose that a powerful state, say China, invades Freedonia. When the U.S. seeks a U.N. Security Council resolution to condemn and resist the invasion, China vetoes it. If the U.S. has made a prior decision to forswear force without the U.N.'s blessing, then Freedonia will be conquered and occupied. Unlawful force will have triumphed. If that is a bad thing, then the rules that helped bring it about are either foolish, or wicked, or (as I think) a reasonable guide in general but not invariably valid or binding. The U.S. should be very wary of attempts by its European allies to obtain American consent to this U.N. preeminence; when they are not dictated by soft-headed pacifism, these urgings reflect an envious desire to constrain America's "hegemonic" power.

Most of the above rules are dictated by an understandable desire to promote stability in international affairs. That has led some conservatives to mistakenly denounce "stability" as such. Anyone who seriously thinks stability a bad thing should be given a one-way ticket to Colombia. The actual error committed by the diplomats is to confuse stability with unbending support of the status quo. When a status quo is unavoidably dissolving, as Yugoslavia was in 1990, the correct response is to persuade the different parties to abjure violence as a means to a solution. If that can be achieved, then they will eventually be led by the facts on the ground to solutions that reflect the wishes of the local populations. And if those solutions include border changes or transfers of population, so be it.