The Revenge of Geography

by Robert D. Kaplan

  Cohen called Central Europe a “mere geographical expression that lacks geopolitical substance.”11 The reunification of Germany, according to this logic, rather than lead to the rebirth of Central Europe, would simply lead to a renewed battle for Europe and, by inference, for the Heartland of Eurasia: Which way, in other words, would Germany swing, to the east and toward Russia, with great consequences for Poland, Hungary, and the other former satellite countries; or to the west and toward the United Kingdom and the United States, providing a victory for the Maritime realm? We still do not know the answer to this because the Post Cold War is still in its early stages. Cohen and others could not have foreseen accurately the “debellicized” nature of today’s united Germany, with its “aversion to military solutions” existing at a deep cultural level, something which in the future may help stabilize or destabilize the continent, depending upon the circumstances.12 Precisely because they have occupied the center of Europe as a land power, Germans have always demonstrated a keen awareness of geography and strategy as a survival mechanism. This is something which Germans may yet recover, allowing them to move beyond the quasi-pacifism of the moment. Indeed, might a reunited and liberal Germany become a balancing power in its own right—between the Atlantic Ocean and the Eurasian Heartland—permitting a new and daring interpretation of Central European culture to take root, and thus providing the concept of Central Europe with geopolitical ballast? That would give those like Garton Ash credence over Mackinder and Cohen.

  In sum, will Central Europe, as an ideal of tolerance and high civilization, survive the onslaught of new great power struggles? For such struggles in the heart of Europe there will be. The vibrant culture of late-nineteenth-century Central Europe that looked so inviting from the vantage point of the late twentieth century was itself the upshot of an unsentimental and specific imperial and geopolitical reality, namely Habsburg Austria. Liberalism ultimately rests on power: a benign power, perhaps, but power nevertheless.

  But humanitarian interventionists in the 1990s were not blind to power struggles; nor in their eyes did Central Europe constitute a utopian vision. Rather, the restoration of Central Europe through the stoppage of mass killing in the Balkans was a quiet and erudite rallying cry for the proper employment of Western military force, in order to safeguard the meaning of victory in the Cold War. After all, what was the Cold War ultimately about, except to make the world safe for individual freedom? “For liberal internationalists Bosnia has become the Spanish Civil War of our era,” wrote Michael Ignatieff, the intellectual historian and biographer of Isaiah Berlin, referring to the passion with which intellectuals like himself approached the Balkans.13

  The call for human agency—and the defeat of determinism—was urgent in their minds. One recalls the passage from Joyce’s Ulysses, when Leopold Bloom laments the “generic conditions imposed by natural” law: the “decimating epidemics,” the “catastrophic cataclysms,” and “seismic upheavals.” To which Stephen Dedalus responds by simply, poignantly affirming “his significance as a conscious rational animal.”14 Yes, atrocities happen, it is the way of the world. But it doesn’t have to be accepted thus. Because man is rational, he ultimately has the ability to struggle against suffering and injustice.

  And so, with Central Europe as the lodestar, the road led southeastward, first to Bosnia, then to Kosovo, and onward to Baghdad. Of course, many of the intellectuals who supported intervention in Bosnia would oppose it in Iraq—or at least be skeptical of it; but neoconservatives and others would not be deterred. For as we shall see, the Balkans showed us a vision of interventionism, delayed though it was, that cost little in soldiers’ lives, leaving many with the illusion that painless victory was now the future of war. The 1990s, with their belated interventions were, as Garton Ash wrote searingly, reminiscent of W. H. Auden’s “low, dishonest decade” of the 1930s.15 True, but in another sense they were much too easy.

  At the time, in the 1990s, it did seem that history and geography had indeed reared their implacable heads. Less than two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, with all of the ahistorical and universalist stirrings that had followed that event, the world media suddenly found themselves immersed in the smoky ruins, mountains of rubble, and twisted metal of towns with difficult to pronounce names, in frontier regions of the old Austrian and Turkish empires, namely Slavonia and Krajina, which had just witnessed atrocities not experienced in Europe since the Nazis. From airy contemplations of global unity, the conversation among elites now turned to unraveling complex local histories only a few hours’ drive across the Pannonian Plain from Vienna, very much inside Central Europe. The relief map showed southern and eastern Croatia, close to the Sava River, as the southern terminus of the broad European flatland, which here heralded, beyond the Sava’s banks, the tangle of mountain ranges collectively known as the Balkans: the relief map, which shows a vast and flat green splash from France all the way to Russia (from the Pyrenees to the Urals), abruptly, on the southern bank of the Sava, turns to yellow and then to brown, signifying higher, more rugged terrain that will continue thus southeastward into Asia Minor. This region, near to where the mountains begin, was the overlapping, back-and-forth marchlands of the Habsburg Austrian and Ottoman Turkish armies: here Western Christianity ends and the world of Eastern Orthodoxy and Islam begins; here Croatia jams up against Serbia.

  The Krajina, which means “frontier” in Serbo-Croatian, was a military zone that the Austrians in the late sixteenth century established against Turkish expansion, luring to their side of the frontier both Croats and Serbs as refugees from the despotism of the Ottoman Sultanate. Consequently, this became a mixed-ethnic region that, once the imperial embrace of Austria vanished following World War I, experienced the further evolution of uniethnic identities. Though Serbs and Croats were united in the interwar years under the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, they were divided and at each other’s throats during the Nazi occupation, when a fascist Croatian puppet state of the Nazis murdered tens of thousands of Serbs in death camps. United once more under the carapace of Tito’s authoritarian communist rule, Yugoslavia’s collapse in 1991 saw Serb troops storm just over the Serbian border into Slavonia and Krajina, ethnically cleansing the region of Croats. Later, when the Croats retook the region, the ethnic Serbs here would take flight back to Serbia. From Croatia’s borderlands with Serbia, the war would next spread to Bosnia, where hundreds of thousands would perish in grisly fashion.

  There was history and geography aplenty here, but committed journalists and intellectuals would have relatively little of it. And they certainly had a point, much more than a point. First came the sheer horror and revulsion. Again, there was Garton Ash:

  What have we learned from this terrible decade in former Yugoslavia? … We have learned that human nature has not changed. That Europe at the end of the twentieth century is quite as capable of barbarism as it was in the Holocaust of mid-century.… Our Western political mantras at the end of the twentieth century have been “integration,” “multiculturalism,” or, if we are a little more old-fashioned, “the melting pot.” Former Yugoslavia has been the opposite. It has been like a giant version of the machine called a “separator”: a sort of spinning tub which separates out cream and butter.… Here it is peoples who were separated out as the giant tub spun furiously round … while blood dripped steadily from a filter at the bottom.16

  Following from this revulsion came charges of “appeasement” by the West, appeasement of Slobodan Milosevic: an evil communist politician who, in order for himself and his party to survive politically following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and retain their villas and and hunting lodges and other perks of office, rebranded himself as a rabid Serbian nationalist, igniting a second Holocaust of sorts. The appeasement of Hitler at Munich in 1938 quickly became the reigning analogy of the 1990s.

  In fact, the fear of another Munich was not altogether new. It had been an underlying element in the decision to liberate Kuwait from Sad
dam Hussein’s aggression in 1991. If we didn’t stop Saddam in Kuwait, he would have next invaded Saudi Arabia, thereby controlling the world’s oil supply and taking human rights in the region to an unutterable level of darkness. But it was the Serb onslaught on Croatia and then Bosnia, between 1991 and 1993—and the West’s failure to respond—that really made Munich a charged word in the international vocabulary.

  The Munich analogy tends to flourish after a lengthy and prosperous peace, when the burdens of war are far enough removed to appear abstract: the case in the 1990s, by which time America’s memories of a dirty land war in Asia, then more than two decades old, had sufficiently dimmed. Munich is about universalism, about taking care of the world and the lives of others. It would be heard often in reaction to the failure to stop genocide in Rwanda in 1994. But Munich reached a fever pitch in the buildup to NATO’s tardy yet effective military interventions in Bosnia in 1995 and in Kosovo in 1999. Those opposed to our Balkan interventions tried to raise the competing Vietnam analogy, but because quagmire never resulted, it was in the Balkans in the 1990s where the phantoms of Vietnam were once and for all exorcised—or so it was thought and written at the time.17

  Military force, so hated during the Vietnam years, now became synonymous with humanitarianism itself. “A war against genocide must be fought with a fury, because a fury is what it is fighting,” wrote Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic. “For the purpose of stopping genocide, the use of force is not a last resort: it is a first resort.” Wieseltier went on to rail against the need for exit strategies in humanitarian interventions:

  In 1996, Anthony Lake, his [President Bill Clinton’s] tortured and timid national security adviser, went so far as to codify an “exit strategy doctrine”: “Before we send our troops into a foreign country, we should know how and when we’re going to get them out.” Lake was making omniscience into a condition of the use of American force. The doctrine of “exit strategy” fundamentally misunderstands the nature of war and, more generally, the nature of historical action. In the name of caution, it denies the contingency of human affairs. For the knowledge of the end is not given to us at the beginning.18

  As an example, Wieseltier cited Rwanda, where a million Tutsis perished in a holocaust in 1994: a Western military quagmire, had we intervened to stop the killing, he wrote, would surely have been preferable to what happened. Wieseltier, who, like Garton Ash, was one of the most formidable and morally persuasive voices of the decade, was writing in regards to the frustration he felt over the limited and belated NATO air war to liberate Muslim Albanians in Kosovo from Milosevic’s policies of expulsion and extermination. The air war targeted Serbian towns and cities, where what was required, according to humanitarian interventionists, was to liberate Kosovar towns with ground troops. Clinton’s hesitant way of waging war was complicit in large-scale suffering. “The work of idealism,” Wieseltier wrote, “has been reduced to relief and rescue, to the aftermath of catastrophe. Where we should have rushed bullets we are now rushing blankets.” Clinton, he said, had discovered a kind of warfare “in which Americans do not die, a … cowardly war with precision technology that leaves polls and consciences unperturbed.” He predicted that “this age of immunity will not last forever. Sooner or later the United States will have to send its soldiers to … a place where they will suffer injury or death. What will matter is whether the cause is just, not whether the cause is dangerous.”19

  Indeed, an invasion of Iraq began to emerge as a cause in the 1990s, when the U.S. military was seen as invincible against the forces of history and geography, if only it would be unleashed in time, and to its full extent, which meant boots on the ground. It was idealists who loudly and passionately urged military force in Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo, even as realists like Brent Scowcroft and Henry Kissinger, increasingly pilloried as heartless, urged restraint.

  Yet, in fact, the 1990s was less a decade of military power overall than it was specifically a decade of air power. Air power had been crucial to ousting Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991: though geography, in this case, made high-tech war easy, as operations were conducted over a featureless desert where it rarely rained. Air power was also a factor in ending the war in Bosnia four years later, and with all its demonstrated limitations, carried the day against Milosevic in Kosovo four years after that. The ethnic Albanian refugees ultimately returned to their homes, even as Milosevic was weakened to the extent that he fell from power the following year in 2000. We Don’t Do Mountains, went the phrase summarizing the U.S. Army’s initial resistance to sending troops to Bosnia and Kosovo. But it turned out that as long as we owned the air, the Army did mountains rather well. Geography had reared its head all right in the Balkans, but air power quickly overcame it. Then there were the Air Force and Navy fighter jets patrolling the Iraqi no-fly zones, keeping Saddam in his box throughout the decade and beyond. Consequently, segments of the elite, awestruck at the American military’s might, became infused with a sense of moral indignation against the George H. W. Bush and Clinton administrations for not using the military in time to save a quarter of a million people from genocide in the Balkans (not to mention the million in Rwanda). It was a mind-set that at least for some could lead to adventurism, which it did. That, in turn, would lead in the next decade to the partial undoing of the Munich analogy, and restore to geography some of the respect that it had lost in the 1990s. The 1990s saw the map reduced to two dimensions because of air power. But soon after the three-dimensional map would be restored: in the mountains of Afghanistan and in the treacherous alleyways of Iraq.

  In 1999, articulating a sentiment increasingly common among liberal intellectuals, Wieseltier wrote:

  The really remarkable thing about Clinton’s refusal to include the removal of this villain [Slobodan Milosevic] among his war aims is that he himself inherited the consequences of his predecessor’s refusal to include the removal of another villain among his war aims. In 1991, half a million American soldiers were a few hundred kilometers away from Saddam Hussein, and George Bush did not order them to Baghdad. His generals feared casualties, and they had just concluded a zero-defects war of their own. They, too, adverted to the “territorial integrity” of Iraq, as if the misery that would result from the collapse of the state would be commensurate with the misery that had already resulted, to the Kurds in the north and to the Shia in the south, from the survival of the state.20

  It was as if the imaginary borders of Central Europe were limitless, extending unto Mesopotamia. Things would turn out differently, of course. But in 2006, during the worst of Iraq’s sectarian carnage, following the collapse of the state, which may have rivaled the violence that Saddam had inflicted on the country, Wieseltier had the grace to confess an “anxiety about arrogance.” He admitted to having nothing useful to say despite his support of the war. He would not be among those supporters of the invasion who were toiling strenuously in print to vindicate themselves.21

  I, too, supported the Iraq War, in print and as part of a group that urged the Bush administration to invade.22 I had been impressed by the power of the American military in the Balkans, and given that Saddam had murdered directly or indirectly more people than had Milosevic, and was a strategic menace believed to possess weapons of mass destruction, it seemed to me at the time that intervention was warranted. I was also a journalist who had gotten too close to my story: reporting from Iraq in the 1980s, observing how much more oppressive Saddam’s Iraq was than Hafez al-Assad’s Syria, I became intent on Saddam’s removal. It would later be alleged that a concern for Israel and a championing of its territorial aggrandizement had motivated many of those in support of the war.23 But my experience in dealing with neoconservatives and some liberals, too, during this time period was that Bosnia and Kosovo mattered more than Israel did in their thinking.24 The Balkan interventions, because they paid strategic dividends, appeared to justify the idealistic approach to foreign policy. The 1995 intervention in Bosnia changed th
e debate from “Should NATO Exist?” to “Should NATO Expand?” The 1999 war in Kosovo, as much as 9/11, allowed for the eventual expansion of NATO to the Black Sea.

  For quite a few idealists, Iraq was a continuation of the passions of the 1990s. It represented, however subconsciously, either the defeat of geography or the utter disregard of it, dazzled as so many were with the power of the American military. The 1990s was a time when West African countries such as Liberia and Sierra Leone, despite their violence, and despite being institutionally far less developed than Iraq, were considered credible candidates for democracy. But it was the power of the military, and in particular that of the Air Force, which was the hidden hand that allowed universalist ideas to matter so much more than terrain and the historical experience of people living on it.

  Munich, too, was at work in approaching the dilemma of Saddam Hussein after 9/11. Though the United States had just suffered an attack on its soil comparable to Pearl Harbor, the country’s experience with ground war had been, for a quarter-century, minimal, or at least not unpleasant. Moreover, Saddam was not just another dictator, but a tyrant straight out of Mesopotamian antiquity, comparable in many eyes to Hitler or Stalin, who harbored, so it was believed, weapons of mass destruction. In light of 9/11—in light of Munich—history would never forgive us if we did not take action.