Winter is Coming (13 page)

There were two wars in Europe in 1999, both sequels to wars that had concluded just a few years earlier and both with considerable impact on the future of Russia. The second to begin was in Chechnya, and it played a key role in the rise to power of Vladimir Putin. The first I have already discussed: the Kosovo war in Yugoslavia where the ethnic Albanian majority in Kosovo was attempting to gain independence from the Serb-dominated central government still controlled by the unrepentant and unrestrained Slobodan Milosevic. NATO bombing had finally forced him to agree to the Dayton Agreement in 1995, ending the war in Bosnia. But the Kosovo Albanians still struggled under repression and were out of patience waiting for their own independence.

The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) began attacking Serb security forces regularly in 1998 and they were met by the brutality and indiscriminate use of force that the Serbian forces had become well known for in Bosnia. By September, a quarter million Albanians had been displaced, many without shelter. The UN Security Council issued a resolution expressing that most famous phrase in the dictionary of diplomatic impotence: “grave concern.” In October, a NATO peacekeeping mission arrived but achieved little of lasting effect as both sides violated a cease-fire almost immediately.

As in Bosnia, it took a massacre of civilians to spur the great powers to act. Forty-five Kosovo Albanian farmers were rounded up and killed in the village of Racak in January 1999. This led directly to Clinton’s speech to the American people and nearly three months of NATO air strikes and cruise missile attacks against Yugoslav forces. (And, in one tragic incident, the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three. NATO blamed the accident on an outdated map.)

By April, leaders of NATO nations were discussing an invasion of ground forces, which would have changed a great many things. Russia was openly advocating for the Yugoslav side in the conflict and the sight of NATO troops, especially American troops, on the ground as part of an offensive would have been very inflammatory in Russia. Russian weapons and supplies were also finding their way to the Yugoslav side. It was revealed in later reports that the main reason Milosevic held out as long as he did was the hope that Yeltsin would intervene militarily on his side.

Milosevic’s vicious calculations were based on the belief that conflict with the West would strengthen his position in Serbia and that desperate refugees would destabilize neighboring countries, including Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, and probably even Bosnia. The Balkans would be set on fire again and Western public opinion would prevent NATO from sending in ground troops. Then the Serbian military would play a decisive role in resolving the chaos, and of course reap the spoils.

Events, fortunately, did not turn out as he had hoped. The prestige of the free world was saved by the united actions of the major democratic powers. An impressive air campaign and the efficient organization of refugee camps sent a clear signal to every quarter in the world that the West was capable of supporting its moral claims with advanced logistics that totalitarian regimes simply lack.

Kosovo also demonstrated that the United Nations in its current form was, and is, irrelevant when it comes to solving such crises. It doesn’t take a Nostradamus to predict the fate the Kosovars would have met had it been left up to the United Nations, where Russia and China have a veto, to deal with Milosevic.

This brings me back to the role of Russia in the events in the Balkans. It seemed obligatory in the Western capitals to give Boris Yeltsin and his special envoy Viktor Chernomyrdin credit for convincing Milosevic to accept the terms dictated by NATO. (That the G7 had so quickly become the G8 made it clear some sort of payoff had gone on.)

In my view this public appraisal contained serious flaws. If Milosevic had accepted the Rambouillet peace deal months earlier, he could have prevented the creation of over a million refugees, the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians, and the destruction of Serbia. President Milosevic torpedoed this deal with the open support of Russia, which categorically objected to the presence of an international police force in Kosovo.

Later, after Serbian resistance was shattered by NATO air-power, Russia changed its view on foreign troops entering into Kosovo and decided to play the role of “impartial” broker. Imagine someone jumping onto the train just a few seconds before departure and then arguing with the conductor about the ticket price.

If one assumes that Russia did have serious influence over Belgrade’s decisions, then Yeltsin’s government should have been held partly responsible for Milosevic’s stubbornness in conducting his murderous policy of ethnic cleansing. If Russia’s influence was being overestimated, what was the point of US Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott’s overanxious shuttle diplomacy?

European and American leaders once again proved eager to salve Russia’s “great power” ego and anxiety, and for what? It was a classic form of enabling an abuser, even if in Yeltsin’s day it was more petty crime than major felonies. Russia was in denial and acting in a self-destructive fashion that also had impact abroad. Had the Western powers been firm about Russia’s true status and used that as leverage to encourage transparency and reform, we would all be much better off today.

Instead, with their Serbian ally in ruins and Yeltsin exposed as a mass murderer, the Yeltsin administration and the Russian media were desperate to create some angle that would salvage their dignity. While Russians in the country’s far east and northern territories were gravely concerned about obtaining a regular supply of food and fuel that coming winter, the Russian government was actively working to equip ten thousand peacekeepers for Kosovo.

In my
Wall Street Journal
op-ed after Kosovo, I had rare words of praise for Western leaders for their decisive action. I ended with a reminder that Kosovo would not be the last such intervention needed unless they combined their power to create a more stable world order. The United Nations had been created in 1945 to cement a political order following the Allied victory. But quickly the organization became a body of compromises in which the superpowers could veto any resolution deemed against the interests of their clientele. With the collapse of the Soviet Union this system no longer served the purpose of international peace and stability.

UN-crafted compromises were no longer necessary, and often dangerous. Indeed, strict adherence to the UN’s resolutions by President Bush in 1991 ultimately spared Saddam—and prolonged the Gulf crisis indefinitely. Milosevic tried to play a similar game by involving Russia as a mediator (ironically Yevgeny Primakov was the broker of choice there, as with Iraq) and demanding UN authorization for any Alliance action.

All of this made it clear that the world needed an international decision-making mechanism not hobbled by the ideological baggage of the Cold War. The UN’s goal of freezing the status quo between two nuclear superpowers was obsolete. Democracy was ascendant and it was time to formally recognize this and to press the advantage. The indictment of Slobodan Milosevic by a war crimes court was an excellent first step toward such a new world order but, as we now know, precious few steps were taken afterward.

In his definitive book on the Yugoslav wars, American journalist David Halberstam wrote an insightful passage about what led

Milosevic to ruin and, eventually, to die in jail in 2006 while on trial for war crimes in The Hague.

Milosevic had managed to retain the view of many a totalitarian figure before him. He believed that if democracies were slow to act, it was a sign of weakness; if they were affluent, then they were also decadent. In addition, because their politicians and their citizens feared paying the price of war, they could be bullied. He once told the German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, “I can stand death-lots of it—but you can’t.”

He was proved wrong eventually, but only after hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions more wounded and traumatized. Sadly, we can add to Halberstam’s first sentence, “and like many a totalitarian figure after him.” Putin performed the same ruthless calculus in his dealings with the free world over his invasion of Georgia in 2008 and over Ukraine today. Terrorists of every kind use this reasoning. They believe that democracies—our slow, affluent, fearful democracies—cannot stand up to suicide bombers and bloody massacres. They also believe the values of the modern world are both its weakness and a threat to their survival, and they are correct on both counts. Our challenge is to overcome our weaknesses without losing the values the enemies of the free world fear so much.

The type of evil Milosevic represented has always been difficult to understand. He was urbane, intelligent, and able to present himself to different people in ways that flattered them and made them trust him. The Bush 41 foreign policy team was reportedly baffled by how “their friend” Milosevic transformed from a well-mannered banker and bureaucrat into a fire-breathing Serbian nationalist who championed ethnic cleansing campaigns against his own citizens. This prompts a key question for this book and for our current world order: Are monsters born or are they made?

I do not intend to open a “nature versus nurture” debate about the genetic makeup of psychopaths or the long-term impact of a difficult childhood on personality. I have spent far too much of my life asking and answering questions about the origins of my chess success, and the only conclusion I’m confident in is that I was lucky to find a game that suited my talents perfectly very early in life. I’m happy to leave those theories to the psychologists and geneticists.

I’m referring to potential evil versus actualized evil and society’s role in preventing the former from becoming the latter. At what point do others have to accept some of the responsibility for the crimes of a murderer? Crimes they could have prevented? Not in the sense that a murderer is not responsible for his actions, of course. There is already far too much excuse making for criminals of every sort, as if the concept of personal responsibility can be suspended as long as a motive can be concocted. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is no more tolerable if you believe he felt threatened by NATO expansion than if you don’t believe he felt threatened. Telling Ukrainians they provoked Putin by rejecting him and moving toward Europe is like telling a harassed woman she should wear longer skirts. Do not lose sight of who is the offender and who is the victim! If we fail to maintain that moral balance and our perceptions of what is right and what is wrong, we are too vulnerable to propaganda.

The caveat is on the practical side of the matter. It is foolish to let down our defenses against an attack simply because we will be in the moral right should that attack come. Condemn, prosecute, and punish the violators, absolutely, but do not make it easy for them. Orson Welles’s modern fable of the scorpion and the frog is a memorable lesson. The frog carries the scorpion across a river on its back, convinced by the scorpion’s logic that it will not sting him because if it does, they will both die. In the middle of the river the scorpion stings the frog, who says, dying, “Logic?

There is no logic in this!” The scorpion replies, “I know, I can’t help it. It is my character.”

The practical moral is not to trust a scorpion because logic and being in the right doesn’t help you very much when you’re dead. Another lesson is that not everyone acts in mutual best interest, or even in their own best interest, and that true nature can override logic and self-preservation. I think of this whenever I hear European diplomats talking about wanting to reach a “win-win” scenario with Putin over Ukraine.

This attitude is admirable in some ways, and it is the definition of diplomacy to at least say that is your goal. It would be wonderful if every crisis or conflict could be ended to mutual benefit, or at least to mutual satisfaction. But assuming that can happen with Putin or with ISIS ignores the true nature of the enemy. Putin’s only goal is to stay in power and he has moved beyond needing cooperation with the free world to do that. He needs conflict and hatred now, and how do you negotiate with that without betraying your ideals and your people? Al-Qaeda and ISIS want to cut off and destroy the modern world of rights and freedom. How does a pluralistic liberal society negotiate with that worldview to mutual benefit? It cannot.

When the logic of assumed mutual benefit keeps failing, it is time to try something else. We are not condemned to expose our backs to the world’s scorpions over and over in the hope that next time, for once, they won’t sting us.

Few humans are truly scorpions—complete psychopaths. Since the end of the ages of monarchy and empire, rising through political ranks to the highest stations requires at least some subtlety and intuition. (North Korea is one of the few modern exceptions and the result is obvious.) The crux of the “born or made” argument is potential meeting opportunity. Slobodan Milosevic probably would have been just another party boss had the revolutions of 1989 not given him the chance to seek greater power through inciting hatred. Milosevic was allowed to flourish in that role long enough to become responsible for the first genocide on