Unholy Symbiosis: Isolationism and Anti-Americanism

Two seemingly unrelated developments on both sides of the Atlantic that threaten to feed on each other seriously jeopardize the continued military engagement of the United States in Europe. The two developments that threaten this vital component of both American and European security are, first, an emerging congressional isolationism, manifested in opposition to maintaining U.S. forces in the Balkans, and, second, an increasing European--particularly French--anti-Americanism.

Isolationism--A Bad Fashion Back in Vogue

First, we have homegrown American provincialism. Powerful forces in Congress--mostly on the Republican side of the aisle but also some on the Democratic--appear unwilling to meet the challenge of continued U.S. leadership in the NATO-directed operations in Bosnia and Kosovo. A crucial test arose in May 2000 when the Senate narrowly defeated the so-called Byrd-Warner amendment to the military construction appropriations bill. If passed, the amendment would likely have led to a withdrawal of U.S. ground troops from Kosovo by July 2001. Expecting a close vote, Vice President Al Gore sat as president of the Senate, prepared to cast his vote against the amendment in the event of a 50-50 tie. In the end, 15 Republicans joined 38 of the 45 Senate Democrats to give the internationalists a thin 53-47 vote victory.

A catastrophe was only narrowly averted, for the United States cannot afford to disengage from Europe--particularly not from the Balkans. Southeast Europe offers an opportunity for the United States to continue to lead the North Atlantic Alliance in the twenty-first century, now with a more equitable distribution of the burden with our European allies than was the case for the first 50 years of NATO's existence. One would think that Americans, having successfully fought a war to liberate Kosovo, would now be determined to win the peace, but unfortunately that does not seem to be the mood of many members of Congress.

No one would assert that all 47 of my colleagues who voted for Byrd-Warner are isolationists. Some of them voted for what they saw as the Senate's prerogatives to authorize foreign military action, although constitutionally in this case their concern was misplaced. Others professed to be defenders of realism in international relations, although in truth they are anything but that. Some defenders of the armed services incorrectly perceived a debilitating drain on scarce resources. Still others were venting their apparently endless hatred for President Bill Clinton.

In fact, in the exhaustive debate on the Senate floor, while the proponents of Byrd-Warner were all over the philosophical lot--from neo-isolationism to pseudo-Realpolitik--all shared an ideologically grounded refusal to look facts in the face. Their major arguments fell into four groups and provided a revealing glimpse into the broad cross section of the Senate that is increasingly uneasy about, or hostile to, the United States enforcing peace in the Balkans.

First, there are the adherents of the "historically hopeless" school. They view the Balkans as a half-civilized place where naive, do-gooder Americans are doomed to failure. Their critique usually begins with intellectually lazy formulations such as, "Those people have been fighting each other for 500 years." Leaving aside the superficiality of such sound-bite commentary, one might respond by asking how it is that the French and Germans are now the closest of friends after having fought three bloody wars against each other between 1870 and 1945. Or, how has Hungary buried the hatchet with Romania, Poland with Germany, Slovenia with Italy, and so on? All these peoples apparently got the message that killing one another is ultimately self-defeating. The members of the nationalities of the Balkans are sentient beings, similarly capable of learning from their mistakes, if they are given a stable framework within which to do so.

Second, there is the allegation of unequal burden sharing on the part of our European allies. The Byrd-Warner amendment actually was passed...