From 1914 to 2008

I was thinking what a foolish blunder it was for Bush to have pushed for NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. Just how long do we think we can poke the Russian bear and get away with it? Does Bush really think that the American people would be willing to send soldiers to carry out a shooting war with Russia over Ukraine? (Well, maybe they would: after all, these are other people's sons and daughters). Then I read Bill Lind's piece about how past Balkan and Eastern European history plays into the current situation, and this ceased to be for me something to be merely annoyed at. Read it yourself, and see if you don't think that the US foreign policy establishment, on a bipartisan basis, is stumbling into a wider war. Excerpt:

Never content to see a fire without pouring gasoline on it, the Bush administration promptly recognized the new “state” of Kosovo, as did some forgetful European countries. Russia, which may remember history too well, responded by announcing its support for Serbia. Within a week, Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence and the Great Powers’ response to it had set the stage for a classic 19th-century Balkan crisis. A few old fogies may recall that the last such crisis, in the summer of 1914, led to a certain amount of unpleasantness, not entirely contained within Balkan boundaries.

[snip]

Here we come to that fateful tendency of Balkan history to spill over. The question, as always in Balkan crises, is what will Russia do?

When NATO bombed Serbia in the 1990s, Russia was too weak to respond. That is no longer the case. The Russian economy is doing well, flush with petrodollars. Russia’s military, while still somewhat ragged, is in far better condition now than it was then. Most critically, the boozy, corrupt Yeltsin has been replaced by the new Man of Steel, Vladimir Putin. The results of the recent Russian presidential election, where Putin’s handpicked successor won with 70 percent of the vote, show that he has the Russian people behind him.

Russia’s relationship to events in the Balkans in fact serves as a barometer of her strength. When Russia is weak, she has to stand by helplessly as her Balkan friends—Serbia heads the list—are defeated and she is humiliated. When she is strong, and when her government wants to look strong at home as well as abroad, she brooks no such treatment. More than once, events in the Balkans have led Russia to go to war.

At this point the ghost of 1914 rises, not as wisps of vapor but like Il Commendatore. Can Washington see it? Probably not. In the middle of the Clinton administration’s Balkan war, I asked an American four-star general who was in most of the key meetings, “Don’t our people know the history of this region?” He replied, “They know the history, but they don’t think it applies to them.” Nothing blinds like hubris.

Here is how events might play out on a 1914 model...

Read the whole thing.

As Larison points out, historically blind adventurism of this sort is bipartisan. And Steve Chapman says that while the presidential candidates would no doubt handle Iraq differently, the song otherwise remains the same:

But it's worth remembering what helped to get us into Iraq: a bipartisan consensus on foreign policy that favors U.S. military intervention abroad whenever we may be able to accomplish something that looks appealing. That was our national approach under the past three presidents, and it's a safe bet it will be our approach under the next one.