4:58AM
Tom's KnoxNews column today
Sunday, July 16, 2006 at 4:58AM What America should have learned from Balkan wars
This week I spoke at Croatia Summit 2006, an international conference exploring future security challenges for southeastern Europe. Held in the gorgeous resort city of Dubrovnik, this gathering of heads of state served as a celebratory reunion for diplomats who, a mere decade ago, strained to stamp out a series of wars in the Balkans.
The U.S.-led military interventions into Bosnia and Kosovo evoke few memories back here in the States. Remember the anti-war movement? The acrid public debates? [read on]
Reader Comments (3)
"--imagine an IMF on steroids--"
Hmmm.... that would be quite a conversation.
That's my third column written exclusively on planes. Getting pretty decent at that, as weird as it is.
The Balkan Wars are in need of thorough digestion by analysts and historians. Perhaps the most important international event of the Clinton Presidency other than those involving malfeasance, misfeasance, or non-feasance it provides the first real insight in to what the western Europeans had learned about themselves and the United States from the rest of the 20th Century.This relationship is the key to survival of the West. Russia was important also but not "Outcome Determinative" as the legal profession sometimes states. The real issues from that experience are as follows: 1. Is Western Europe really as stable as it appears or is the cafe society of Vienna pre-WWI still idolized as a model by Western European for society and the driving force in the Western European objective for society (all real issues fought out over Kaffee and Torte but nothing resolved) but a model for a time and place that led the rest of the world to destructive warfare; 2. Will the U.S. be able to provide the brain or financial power to save Western Europe again as it did with men and material in two World Wars, or has mismanagement of the U.S. body politic terminally weakened U.S. power to be of assistance; 3. Will the Balkans again have assisted in allowing a new intellectual (not physical)siege of Vienna by the Islamic World that Western Europe is unable to resist; 4. The Balkans exist between two worlds-the secular West and Islam. Will the secular world arm itself as did Western Christendom or will it take the equivalent of the fall of Spain to the Islamic World to determine that the wars of religion are again upon the West. I suggest Turkey as the pivot and the new Spain. 50-100 years out I suspect the Balkan Wars will be view not as a mere side-show but much more important as an historical event. But I could be wrong! Still examination of what really happened and why, and military and political performance by the West should be reviewed in detail now, including release of key archival materials, not 50 years down the road. The seeds of the destruction of the secular West may be buried in the Balkans.