An Absent America, a Toothless Europe : Yugoslavia: Since the United States won’t accept a European military force, it must take an active role in stopping Serbia’s aggression.

The Yugoslav civil war has become the longest-lasting European conflict since World War II. It is also the first time in half a century that the United States has washed its hands of a threat to security on the Continent. Unless the Bush Administration reverses course, it will not only tarnish its newly won reputation for countering aggression but also raise questions about U.S. relevance to Europe’s future.

Yugoslavia’s breakup is a product of the Cold War’s end. As elsewhere in Eastern Europe, long-suppressed national rivalries are flourishing in the wake of communism’s failure. Under Serbia’s leadership, the Yugoslav army has been pummeling Croatia in an anachronistic spasm of nationalist passions.

By common agreement, this is no replay of the Balkans crisis of 1912-14, which precipitated World War I. Any number of archdukes could be assassinated in Yugoslavia and the great powers would not fight one another. That assurance has produced a false sense of security and widespread indifference to Yugoslav suffering. The United States has characterized the civil war as an internal problem.

This is Europe, however, a Continent trying to make itself whole, to spread eastward the lessons of democracy, to grapple with the uncertainties rising out of the wreckage of statist economies and the collapse of the Soviet empire. Yugoslavia will not ignite a regional war, but it is precedent for a dozen other ethnic, religious and national struggles.

The United States has had one stab at peacemaking. In June, Secretary of State James A. Baker III visited Yugoslavia and expressed a U.S. preference for the country to remain unified, the same lesson it was preaching to the Soviet Union. As outdated a policy as U.S. support for Iraq in 1990, Baker’s statement had a similar result. Just as Saddam Hussein believed that Washington would acquiesce in his invasion of Kuwait, Serbia took Baker’s words to mean that Washington would not oppose the use of force to keep Croatia in the federation.

When its error became obvious, the Bush Administration backed off and left to its European allies the task of coping with the Yugoslav civil war. The European Community, forced to act without its superpower patron, bumbled through the next several months. Divisions within the EC were highlighted as Germany championed Croatian independence, while France--petulant lest Germany gain influence in the Balkans or France’s Breton and Corsican minorities get big ideas--backed Yugoslav unity. Britain tried to ignore what is happening on the Continent. Only now has the EC agreed to impose sanctions on Yugoslavia, applying them in practice to Serbia.

Apologists for U.S. policy defend themselves by citing European incompetence. Yet the EC has legitimate excuses. It is still not ready to meet European security problems without a U.S. role. This crisis occurred about three years too early for the timetable of European unity. Nevertheless, starting from scratch, the EC has not done too badly.

More important, the United States has deliberately sought to inhibit European institutions for European security, lest they compete with NATO and dilute U.S. influence. Last year, the United States led the effort to keep the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe from building an effective institution for peacemaking. The Conflict Prevention Center that emerged is only a talking shop. This spring, the Bush Administration fought French efforts to breathe life into the Western European Union, a military grouping of nine of the 12 EC members.

In October, the Administration also scorned a proposal by Paris and Bonn to strengthen the union as the European Community’s security wing, including a 60,000-soldier corps that would be built on the existing 5,000-soldier Franco-German brigade. Again, the United States reacted as though its authority in NATO was under attack. At the Rome NATO summit two weeks ago, George Bush went so far as to demand, on the spot, that the Allies decide whether they wanted U.S. troops to stay in Europe. They quickly caved in to this either/or demand.

It is understandable that Bush and Baker want nothing to do with Yugoslavia. Outsiders cannot sort out its tangled politics, and West Europeans are much closer to the scene. And following the triumph of Desert Storm, the last thing the White House wants is a potentially losing venture in foreign policy, the President’s strong suit in the 1992 elections. Only reluctantly did Bush finally accede even to joining EC sanctions against Yugoslavia.

But the United States is trying to have it both ways: demanding primacy in European security for itself and its chosen instrument, NATO, while standing aloof from the only current threat to that security. This is a poor message to send to other states and groups in Europe that are considering whether to settle their destinies through military force. It is also a poor message to send to European allies who have to decide whether to write the United States into plans for the Continent’s future.

Bush must take a robust and principled stand. The United States can’t sort out Yugoslav politics, but it can tell Serbia flatly that its use of force is out of bounds and that it must stop--period. The United States should lead the West in threatening to strangle Serbia economically; to isolate it like a latter-day Albania and permanently bar it from membership in any Western institution including the EC. That would stop the killing. It would also preserve Bush’s rapidly fading reputation for opposing aggression and keep the United States from becoming politically and militarily irrelevant in Europe.