Croatia
Essay,
Jan/Feb
2001
Recent political transitions in Belgrade and Zagreb have created a historic chance to make lasting peace in the Balkans. Torn by ethnic strife for a century and a half, the region must now choose between disintegration into ever-smaller ethnic states and integration into the European Union. The EU must actively facilitate the latter, or the Balkans could suffer another round of bloody war.
Essay,
Sep/Oct
1998
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.
Essay,
Jul
1973
The fruits of détente in Europe are now being gathered. West German Chancellor Willy Brandt has completed his triad of treaties with former enemies in Moscow, Warsaw and East Berlin, The accord on West Berlin has confirmed that city's status and removed it, for the present at least, as a possible flashpoint of war. President Richard Nixon has made his voyage to Moscow to proclaim with the Soviet leaders a new era in Soviet-American relations, on which the return visit now sets its seal. Visions of sugarplums dance in the heads of Soviet planners and Western businessmen. Détente, of course, does not have the same purposes for all concerned, and some may find its fruits bitter or the sugarplums unripe. Nevertheless, as all prepare to sit down together in Helsinki at a conference on security and coöperation, the cold war seems far away.
