Yugoslavia: What Future?

This paper records remarks delivered on February 1, 1994, four days before the violence in Sarajevo that triggered a NATO ultimatum. It sketches several policy options on the table--the U.S. position at the January 1994 NATO Summit, the modified lift-and-strike position of the Action Council for Peace in the Balkans, and the truce-and-pressure-the-Serbs approach of some U.S. analysts. It predicts that in three to five years we will be faced with a Balkans in which Serbia is the principal regional power. This Greater Serbia can take various forms--more-or-less democratic, difficult, pariah, or truncated. A plausible outcome could be a hegemonic Serbia that interacts uneasily with its neighbors. Whatever the outcome, however, the Balkans will be characterized by substantial elements of autocracy and sporadic but persistent violence, requiring a foreign presence to help cope with a difficult situation. This international presence will be more humanitarian than military. The current U.S. approach contains several elements that hurt U.S. interests: lack of clarity about the use of force, ineffective opposition to human rights violations, ambivalence about a political settlement, and a steady weakening of important multilateral organizations--the UN and NATO--on which the U.S. wants to rely.