Too Late Ve Get Schmart

I wish more people (other than me) had been saying what Ted Galen Carpenter is saying over the The National Interest:

The Bosnia conflict was a huge missed opportunity for the United States to set new, more rational, priorities for itself in the post–Cold War world. A far better policy would have been to inform the Europeans that a petty conflict in the Balkans did not reach the threshold of a serious security threat to the transatlantic community warranting direct U.S. involvement, much less requiring Washington’s leadership. NATO’s European members had no more right to expect a dominant U.S. role in dampening a Bosnian civil war than Americans would have had the right to expect European countries to take the lead in addressing a similar conflict in the Caribbean or Central America.

back when it might have done some good. That is practically verbatim what I said at the time and have maintained ever since. I understand the rationale of Lord Ismay first Secretary General of NATO’s characterization of NATO’s purpose as “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”.

But how did keeping the “Germans down” transmogrify into pursuing German foreign policy objectives? Destabilizing Yugoslavia was a German foreign policy objective as was NATO expansion.

More recently from a practical standpoint NATO has been a mechanism for venue-shopping for approval in U. S. military actions rejected by the United Nations Security Council with no moral or legal standing.