‘Your independence is irreversible, absolutely irreversible.” So declared Vice President Joe Biden, thrilling a parliamentary assembly in Pristina, Kosovo. These were still the early months of the Obama administration, and the vice president was touring the Balkans to take a victory lap in the breakaway Serbian territory whose independence he’d done so much to champion as an influential senator.
As Vladimir Putin tucks away Crimea, just as he clawed South Ossetia and Abkhazia back from Georgia five years ago, Kosovo is worth remembering. So is President Obama’s staunch support of Manuel Zelaya, the socialist would-be dictator Hondurans tried to rid themselves of back in 2009. With an unreconstructed Soviet imperialist eying more worlds to reconquer, one is constrained to ask whether the Beltway’s transnational progressives will ever be called to account for greasing the skids for him.
But the Kosovo precedent — which, as National Review’s editors noted this week, is one that Putin wielded as a club against the West while storming Ukraine — is not solely, or even mostly, Obama’s fault. He was a bit player in the closing act of a debacle that tossed territorial integrity overboard when our bipartisan foreign-policy solons decided it was inconvenient to their trendy priorities. In this instance, it was about appeasing Islamic supremacists.
Kosovo was an overwhelmingly Albanian-Muslim province of the former Yugoslavia. It had sided with the Nazis in World War II and later come under Communist domination. The mutual hatred between the Kosovar Muslims and Orthodox Christian Serbs resulted in centuries of dueling atrocities and efforts by each side to wipe out the other.
In the Nineties, while straining for independence from the Serbs, Kosovo served as a safe haven for al-Qaeda and affiliated terrorist groups. Like contemporary “rebels” in Syria and Libya, the Kosovo Liberation Army had moderate Muslim elements but also worked cooperatively with the jihadists. Naturally, the separation of Kosovo from Serbia became a cause célèbre of the Muslim Brotherhood and the global jihad. As night follows day, it also became fashionable at the soirées wheretransies convince themselves that Islamic supremacists will surely moderate if given the responsibilities of governance and will like us better if we support their access to power.
The Brotherhood and its fellow Islamic supremacists were heartened when President Bill Clinton encouraged the rabidly anti-American jihadist regime in Iran to arm the Bosnian Muslims in their war against the Serbs — a flagrant violation of a U.N. embargo against arms shipments to Yugoslavia that Washington, a Security Council member, had endorsed. Later, when war broke out in Kosovo, despitebrutality on both sides, the Brotherhood knew it had a receptive audience for propaganda framing the conflict as a one-sided “ethnic cleansing” of Muslims by Serbs.
By 1998, the scandal-plagued Clinton found any page-turning opportunity welcome. He picked up the “genocide” theme and ran with it. Providing what would later become Obama’s Libya-war blueprint, Clinton instigated an unauthorized, undeclared, and ultimately disastrous war, in the absence of any threat to the United States, ostensibly to protect civilians but in reality on behalf of the Muslims.
Clinton’s State Department warned the Serbs that NATO bombing would commence unless they agreed not only to withdraw forces from Kosovo but to an arrangement whereby Kosovo would surely be granted full independence from Serbia after three years. The Serbs refused. Clinton miscalculated that the Serbs would quickly blink and that his aerial attacks, though lawless, would be brief and easily forgotten. Instead, the Serbs did not surrender and the bombing went on for nearly three months, causing far more damage than the carnage it was ostensibly meant to stop, while the killing intensified on the ground.
Finally, in 1999, with Russia interceding on the Serbs’ behalf, the fighting ended with an agreement Clinton could have gotten at the start: an international security force to keep the peace but a commitment from the West that Kosovo would remain part of Serbia. In addition, the settlement was placed under the authority of the U.N. Security Council, where Serbia would be assured of Russian support, rather than under NATO.
The outcome bitterly disappointed Islamic supremacists, whose hopes for a Muslim state independent of Serbia had also been dashed in the earlier Dayton accords, which ended the Bosnian conflict. But the Brotherhood and its allied jihadists kept agitating.
Quite apart from its notorious jihadist precincts, its compromised militia, and its availability as a launch pad for terrorism in Europe, Kosovo utterly lacked governing institutions and was rife with unemployment and political corruption (as Caroline Glick outlined at the time). Yet our government went back on the deal that had ended the Kosovo war in order to confer sovereignty on a province clearly not deserving of it. Even Biden implicitly conceded as much while making a pit stop in Serbia during his aforementioned 2009 victory lap. “The United States does not, I emphasize, does not expect Serbia to recognize the independence of Kosovo,” he told President Boris Tadic.
But this does not begin to quantify the blunder. Much worse, in terms of global stability, the United States and the West had (a) set a dangerous precedent for disaffected minorities to claim a right to break away from their countries and (b) underscored that will-to-power still rules, all the precious palaver about international law notwithstanding.
If anyone has a hyperactive will-to-power streak, it is Putin. Moreover, not only is the Kremlin Serbia’s patron, it has its own disaffected minorities — Chechen Muslims, for one — yearning to break away. Infuriated by the West’s Kosovo machinations, it wasted little time exploiting the new order of things.
The perfect place to make mayhem was Georgia. Since the Soviet collapse, it had been challenged by pro-Russian separatists in South Ossetia and Abkhazia — each, like Kosovo, technically part of the host country but de facto independent, with the resulting tensions kept in check by international peacekeepers, including Russians. Georgia had elected as its president Mikheil Saakashvili, a staunchly pro-Western democrat who had resolved to rein in the secessionists and was thus despised by the Kremlin. Taking a page out of Clinton’s book, Russia echoed the secessionist propaganda and announced that it would be expanding aid to the disputed provinces. When that naturally prompted a hostile reaction from Georgia, the Kremlin further incited the pro-Russian separatists and used the resulting tensions as an excuse to invade. Putin calculated that the U.S. and Europe would huff and puff and . . . do nothing. It has been five years — looks like a pretty good bet.
Crimea is a repeat performance that offers other useful transnational-progressive misadventures for Putin to exploit. In Kiev and the west of Ukraine, citizens resisted the campaign by President Viktor Yanukovych to abort enhanced ties to Europe and indenture their country to the Kremlin. Yanukovych, of course, is the Putin puppet narrowly elected in 2010 by carrying the heavily Russian strongholds in eastern Ukraine. Urged on by Putin, he undertook to crush the protest lethally and was compelled to flee when democratic forces in parliament stripped him of his powers. As one would expect, he turned up in Russia, becoming Exhibit A in Putin’s condemnation of the “illegal coup” — the “true,” democratically elected president of Ukraine whose pleas for help the Kremlin could not ignore.
Sure, it was farce . . . but not farce without precedent. In 2009, Honduras’s socialist president sparked street protests when he lawlessly attempted to rewrite the country’s constitution in order to remain in power. He was arrested, deposed, and deported, with the overwhelming endorsement of the Honduran congress and supreme court, fully consistent with Honduran law. Except that the international Left wanted Zelaya kept in place, so President Obama inserted himself into Honduras’s internal affairs.
Obama and Secretary of State Clinton looked the other way at Zelaya’s incitements, condemned his removal as a “coup,” and demanded that he be restored to power out of respect for “democratic elections” (never you mind the rigorous democratic processes that ousted him). As the Wall Street Journal noted at the time, the Obama administration backed the rhetoric with brass knuckles, cutting off aid, threatening to seize Honduran assets, pulling visas from Honduran officials, and threatening not to recognize future Honduran elections.
Ukraine might have thought about defending its sovereign territory, but it is without sabers even to rattle. The country surrendered its prodigious nuclear arsenal in reliance on an unenforceable, unratifiedsecurity guarantee from Clinton. Not to be outdone, Senator Obama and the GOP’s foreign-policy clerisy later expanded that surrender into the wholesale destruction of Ukraine’s weapons stockpiles — on the theory that, as Obama explained it, a country’s abandoning its weapons makes for a safer country and a safer world.
In successful enterprises, the daft are rooted out and sidelined. In the United States, we put them in charge of foreign policy — for life.
— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy.
@ Ted Belman:
I understand that but is my #3 overly long? I have had 2 and 3 liners put in moderation for no apparent reason no links or foul language either.
No wonder that US is now seen as a weaker and unreliable ally by so many countries around the globe. It is sad to see the only super power in the world with still a great potential in its current state mainly due to its weak leadership.
As we are not yet in communist “utopia” (exists only in the so called progressives mind), is it not silly to say “a country’s abandoning its weapons makes for a safer country and a safer world”? Who else believes in such impractical and stupid notion in this chaotic and troubled world (full of strife)?
This is due to inability to discern between wishful thinking/imagination and reality because of the progressives confused ideological commitment. What happened in Crimea, Kosovo and Honduras could have negative ramifications all over the world.
@ Ted Belman:
Just tell him what I say to TX, “put a sock in it,boy”. Works for me!!!!
@ yamit82:Overly long comments are identified as spam. Once the system has marked your long comments as spam it is more likely to identify others of your comments as spam. I have to keep approving your comments so that the spammer is reeducated.
Every third comment is now going into moderation like my comment # 3
bernard ross Said:
The cold war never ended only Russia was too weak to keep it above the Radar. Russia first of all wants all of the Slavs under their sovereignty or at least within their sphere of influence. Putin has never forgiven America for Bombing and destroying Serbia and supporting the Albanian Kosovo. Russia was too weak then to prevent America and Nato but he is not against payback wherever he can stick it to America.
The Russian people used to suffering adore strong leaders and accept the message that America is an existential enemy of the Rus People… They want their Historic Crimea back under Russian sovereignty and will back Putin no matter what as a matter of National interest, National pride and belief it’s a restoration of an historic injustice (the loss of parts of Ukraine and Crimea.
Having Nato hugging Russias borders has always stuck in their throats and Missiles in Poland were always understood by Russia as a move to threaten Russia.
The Russian People unlike most Europeans are nationalistic and Putin is playing to their sentiments, they will overlook the lousy Russian economy for a return to Russian greatness.
It’s still all about Oil!!!
Putin overseeing an economy based mostly on energy sales needs the price of oil to be around $110 a barrel to meet his economic obligations. So by stirring the pot so to speak he probably hopes the uncertainty will both raise the price of oil and gas and keep it high for the foreseeable future. In that he has many silent partners including America, Iran, The Gulf States and the Saudis. That’s why they will cry crocodile tears over the Ukraine but their main concerns are keeping the prices of gas and oil high.
an interesting perspective which blames the US, EU, NATO for the current crisis as a result ot reneging on their prior commitments to Russia.
the biggest culprit here is the US.
Not a bad exposition, but missing a few important points.
First, Georgia started the shooting war with Russia and Russia was only responding. Likewise in Ukraine, Yanukovych was deposed in a violent coup by Ukrainian neo-Nazis and he had to flee for his life. One of the first acts of this new “government” was to remove Russian as an official language in Ukraine, despite European standards suggesting that it remain. This is similar to the suffering of Serbs brave enough to remain in Croatia where contempt is also openly displayed towards attempts to exhibit Serbian text in public signs where Serbs still have a significant minority.
So far, Russia is behaving in a civilized manner, despite endless provocation and sodden conspiracies against it from its neighbors. Putin’s role is to be a figurehead for what Russians can only sensibly do. Kosovo should never have been handed over to the Albanians. The Albanians in Kosovo have bred their way to demographic dominance and as a consequence the country is a social basket case, unfit to make any claims to being able to govern itself. The EU knows it. The US knows it and certainly the Serbs and Russia knows it.
Russia sat on its hands while its cousins in Serbia were murdered, humiliated and exiled in their own country. When they tried to defend themselves, they were called murderers and dragged off to further death and degradation at the ICTY.
Do not doubt that if NATO ever sets foot in Israel, that Jews will suffer the same fate as the Serbs. Already we have heard them talking about taking Israeli officers to European war crimes courts to dignify more lies and libels. This is the order we in the US are upholding in Europe.