While Clinton and his senior people were preoccupied with the economics of domestic policy, the crisis in the Balkans stubbornly refused to go away. For what was happening in Bosnia, it was all too clear from the news seeping out of Srebrenica, was a growing humiliation for the West and above all the Clinton administration. In late April 1993, the top Clinton people met again and again over Bosnia, and gradually a consensus began to emerge for lifting the arms embargo and using airpower. On May 1, at a meeting of the principals, the president finally authorized a change in policy, or so it seemed. We would go with lift and strike. The Serbs had to respond to our demands in Bosnia and end their barbarous behavior, or we would help arm their opponents and unleash allied airpower upon them. But the decision had a major catch—we had to have European approval. The secretary of state was assigned to meet with the European leaders and try to get them to agree to the new policy. Additionally, the military component—whether or not the Joint Chiefs would actually go along with it—was still to be declared.
But in truth, the administration’s top people, after a prolonged review, had not really made any progress. They had come up with a bastardized proposal that reflected all of their differences; if anything symbolized how ill-prepared and divided the administration was over what would be its first major foreign policy crisis, it was Christopher’s trip. To Al Gore, more of a Bosnia hawk than most senior officials, there was a sadness about it all and he had a sense of foreboding. They were sending Christopher on a fool’s errand and the Europeans were going to stiff him, Gore was sure. Gore was simply screaming inside, he later said, and he was certain that the secretary felt the same way. Pondering how so dismal a first step could have been taken by bright, talented people who had been working on the subject for so long, Gore would decide that both exhaustion and desperation had led to a policy doomed to failure.
Christopher left for London the night of May 1. The trip turned into an absolute disaster and marked Christopher from the start—a reputation he would work hard to overcome during the next three and a half years—as a weak man personally, who was bearing a weak policy from a weak administration. The policy was poorly thought out and in no way took into account how fierce the European resistance was likely to be. Its key weakness, however, was that the president himself was not entirely convinced of its validity, or that following through on it was worth the price it might extract from his presidency. He was on board, but then again, they might find out that he was not exactly on board.
That was weakness number one. Weakness number two was that the secretary of state, who himself was not a great enthusiast, knew of the president’s doubts, his wariness about the potential cost, and therefore felt the leash on him was quite tight. Weakness number three was that the military was in no way for the new policy, nor was the Congress, as a team of deputies from the administration discovered when it talked with congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle. Moreover, the Europeans would probably treat the Christopher visit with disdain. Not only were they going to be opposed to the lift and strike policy because it would put Europeans, not Americans, at risk, but because many European leaders were privately still smoldering over the brashness of the president’s use of Bosnia during the 1992 campaign. They resented his almost cavalier trashing of their commitment, no matter how weak and vulnerable it was, especially coming from someone whose country had yet to pay any dues. It had struck them as symbolic of a certain kind of American insolence, the cocksure voice of a young and arrogant politician telling them what they should do and how weak their existing policy was. They already knew all too well that they were wrestling with an issue that had become a horror and that their policy was inadequate.
A Clinton who had talked about ending the crisis by sending American ground troops as well as American warplanes was one thing; a Clinton who criticized what the Europeans were doing on the ground but refused to commit American troops was another. Therefore it was payback time. To the Europeans, American policy on Bosnia, the rhetoric, and now this escalation that would be carried out from thousands and thousands of feet above the ground were characteristic of a country that wanted it both ways. America sought to be internationalist on the cheap and to remain partially isolationist, sure that it had the right to dictate policy for every other country all over the world.
Lift and strike, if it had been undertaken, would have signaled a dramatic change in American policy. Instead the Christopher trip was the high-water mark in the failure to find an acceptable policy. The Bush people, if they had not acted, had at least limited their rhetoric. But the Clinton people had escalated Bosnia as an issue during the campaign, and expectations had risen, particularly in Bosnia. Just before the president took office, American reporters working in the Balkans were constantly being pulled aside by Bosnian Muslims who told them what a great man their new president was.1 But if Clinton himself was for the new policy, it was in the most tentative way. His doubts still outweighed his certainties. He was for the change in policy, but not for its implications or the cost mandated by that change. He had never made clear to his top people what he really wanted. Thus his own upper bureaucracy was divided, and broad political support for any kind of greater involvement was threadbare. He had already decided that domestic issues were of a far higher priority politically, and he was loath to place his administration and his future domestic policies—all centered around the health of the economy—at risk. So the president might favor the new policy, but he was hardly ready to fight or pay for it.
As for Christopher, his job was not to outline the new policy to the Europeans in terms that they would be forced to deal with, as many of his predecessors had done on other high-priority issues: I want you to know that the president of the United States has decided to pursue a policy of lift and strike and we would like your support, but we are going to do it in any case. Rather he would consult with them. That struck old hands at the State Department as an odd word. The Europeans were unaccustomed to signature American diplomats consulting in this manner. They were accustomed to someone like George Shultz or James Baker telling them in a nice way that brooked little disagreement what the United States of America intended to do. That was part of Christopher’s problem from the start. We were going to consult with people who did not want to be consulted with and would surely oppose any change in the policy.
Barry Schweid, the veteran AP reporter covering State, one of the most senior journalists working the beat, heard that Christopher was going to Europe and that a dramatically new policy was in the works. He immediately called a source of his in the White House. “What’s he going to do?” Schweid asked. “He’s going to consult with the Europeans on lift and strike,” his source said. Consult, Schweid thought, they always say they are going to consult. That was the brush-off they normally gave to reporters when they had something to hide. So he kept calling around, trying to figure out what the new policy really was and why Christopher was going to Europe. Everyone, his best sources who were always straight with him, kept saying it was going to be a consultation, so finally he believed it. But Schweid was sure that Christopher would fail.
The second part of Christopher’s problem was the man himself. Among the hawks and doves in the U.S. government on Bosnia, Christopher was somewhere near the center, perhaps slightly on the dovish side. He was, some of the people around him thought, hardly convinced of the validity of the policy he was selling. Years later, when he spoke about the trip with friends, he would describe the president as passive at the time, unwilling to jeopardize other interests. The absence of presidential passion, he would note, affected the entire trip. That was why, it was believed, Christopher presented the policy in a way that could best be described as tentative and in a manner that allowed the Europeans to reject it with a minimum of exertion. His grand tour of Europe started in London. The British were not eager for any change. They had people on the ground and did not want to escalate the dangers under which they served. They opposed lift and strike because they most emphatically did not want more arms pouring into the Balkans, and they were sure that such a policy would escalate the arms race there. Nor did they have any desire to be drawn into a larger military conflict.
Those Americans who were pushing for a more aggressive policy were convinced that British policy had an almost unconscious pro-Serb bias since the British had dealt with them in the past. None of the factions was particularly pleasant to deal with, they were all in the eyes of the British foreign office a rough, uncivilized bunch, but the Serbs appeared to be the strongest force in the region and that was an argument for dealing with them. Or at least not alienating them. Besides, the group that had emerged as their principal opponent in Bosnia were Muslims. They might be Europeanized, they might long ago have dropped many of their Islamic customs, but they were Muslims nonetheless, and there was a certain bias against them.
The Brits were not ready to deal. Far from it. Nor did the State Department have its own people on board. Ray Seitz, the American ambassador in London, was not in any way an admirer of the new administration. The secretary of state, Seitz would later write in his memoirs, with what was extremely faint praise, stood out in the Clinton administration “like an adult in a kindergarten, but Christopher always seemed smaller than the events around him.”2 Seitz was appalled by the change in the policy that his superior was now trying to sell and the irritation it would surely cause his friends in the British government. When the secretary proposed the new policy at a meeting with Prime Minister John Major, Douglas Hurd from the Foreign Office, and Malcolm Rifkind from Defense, Christopher did so, in Seitz’s words, “with all the verve of a solicitor going over a conveyance deed.” Seitz told how, during a subsequent break, he suggested to Major that he take Christopher aside and point out the impossibility of getting the skeptical British cabinet to accept the new policy, which Major thereupon did. It was a remarkable moment of clientism—an American ambassador telling a foreign prime minister how to shoot down the policy of the ambassador’s own country for the benefit of the country to which he was accredited.
Not that the British needed much instruction; they could feel Christopher’s lack of enthusiasm. Major was quite emphatic about not changing the policy. His government, he told Christopher, might fall if he backed any escalation in Bosnia. He had no support in his cabinet and none in the Parliament. So London had been tough. But even before the end of the day, as Christopher was on his way to Paris, stories began to leak out of London that the Americans were not going to cut it on this new policy shift, and worse, they had no idea of what was going on in the Balkans. Paris was just as tough. François Mitterrand, who was essentially pro-Serb, was not about to agree to any escalation. “It’s immoral to deprive the Bosnian Muslims of arms,” he told Christopher, “but we are not going to change.” The stories coming out of the European capitals—like reviews of a new play doomed to failure—grew more negative and condescending by the day, saying in effect that this new American team wasn’t going to pull it off. The back-channel word already being fed to journalists was no better: the Americans simply did not know what they were doing. It was terrible, one member of Christopher’s team noted later. They didn’t like our new policy because it might be too strong, but when we delivered it in a somewhat conciliatory manner, then we were too soft for the job.
On the third day of the trip, Christopher was in the Bonn airport when he got a call from Defense Secretary Les Aspin. You might as well forget selling lift and strike, Aspin told him, “the president’s gone south on us.” The policy, fragile at best, was no longer a policy. No one on the Christopher trip was ever quite sure why Clinton had changed his mind. Perhaps he had never really been on board. Perhaps he had been talking in the interim with the military, specifically Colin Powell. Perhaps he had been reading Robert Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts, a book given to him by Powell and which on first reading he apparently thought suggested that it was all hopeless. To Clinton, it seemed to say that the people in the Balkans had been killing each other for centuries and nothing could be done about it.
For whatever reason, Clinton was definitely pulling back. The word spread quickly throughout the top of the bureaucracy that the president had been reading Kaplan’s book. His tone had changed and he was now talking about how the people in the Balkans had been doing this forever and would continue to do it. Six years later when Clinton gave a strong speech validating the ferocious high-technology bombing of Kosovo, he decried, in his justification for the American military escalation, those who had argued for standing on the sidelines because these Balkan peoples had been killing each other for centuries. Critics noted that one of the people who had been guilty of that particular rationalization was the president himself when he had tried to justify the failure to push harder on the lift and strike policy in Bosnia.
Christopher returned from his first important trip, as one colleague said, “bullet holes all over him.” His own people believed this bad trip had resulted from a poorly thought out policy, taken on by ill-prepared people who did not really support it. They did not even know that, in the final days of the Bush administration, Larry Eagleburger had made a comparable trip, trying to get the Europeans to change the policy. And though, unlike Christopher, he was an old friend of the top European political figures, he had walked right into a stone wall. Bill Montgomery, who had been Eagleburger’s top aide, was working in the State Department Operations Center on the day that Christopher’s plane was due to return to Washington when he got a call from Beth Jones, Christopher’s executive secretary. She said that they were flying back and that Lieutenant General Barry McCaffrey was with them as Colin Powell’s representative on the trip. McCaffrey, she said, had been telling them about a similar trip that Eagleburger had made back in December. “Can you tell us about it?” she asked. Montgomery was stunned that they knew so little about the immediate precedent for their trip.
They had all underestimated, Christopher would later note, how strongly the Europeans were opposed to any change in policy and how hard they would fight against it. Christopher arrived back on a Friday, and on Saturday he presented his report to the principals. He acknowledged the strength of the European opposition but said that the policy was still doable. To do it they would have to stay the course, and the president would have to get behind it with considerable muscle and push the allies very hard. The word consult had to be dropped; the allies would have to be told. To do it would require a substantial use of the president’s resources and energies, and much of his attention. The one thing Christopher remembered saying was The only way to do it, Mr. President, is for you to get directly involved. When Christopher finished, no one spoke in his behalf, a sign that the phone call he had got in Germany had been accurate. In some way that he did not understand, the play had changed while he was overseas, and everyone in the upper level of the bureaucracy knew that except him. The clearest indication of that was the silence of the vice president, who might normally have been expected to back him up. Bosnia, it appeared, was even lower on the list of presidential priorities than he had imagined when he set out for Europe.
The trip was immensely damaging to the Clinton administration and particularly to Christopher himself. It was supposed to be an exchange of views, but as Richard Perle, a former assistant secretary of defense, said tartly a year later before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, “It was an exchange all right: Warren Christopher went to Europe with an American policy, and he came back with a European one.”3 Christopher had set himself up as a target either willingly or unwillingly. He was scarred by it, and that made him, some members of the Clinton inner circle thought, if not personally more dovish on Bosnia than he had been before, certainly more cautious about halfhearted attempts to change the policy. The lesson, the team around Christopher believed, was that a trip like that should never be taken again. The United States would not consult. It should decide in advance on its policy and then explain that policy to its allies.
The Clinton people, apprehensive about foreign policy in general, began to back off Bosnia immediately in accordance with the president’s own lack of commitment. When a young man in Policy Planning, John Fox, an outspoken activist, expressed his disappointment about the new administration’s failure to move ahead on Bosnia, his superior, Sam Lewis, remarked, “You must remember that the foreign policy president now lives in Houston.”
Bosnia, Christopher was soon to testify to the Congress, “was the problem from hell,” and his trip would cast a shadow over much of his tenure as secretary of state. Later he would talk about how it took more than two years to escape that trip’s repercussions and its effect on a host of other issues. Some colleagues thought he never entirely recovered from it. He became the perfect target for blame for critics of the Clinton policies. He seemed out there almost alone taking hits. He never responded to criticism; he was the most stoic of men, who accepted that part of his job was to be a punching bag for the man he served. When criticism was leveled at him, it meant that he was doing his job. His stoicism was perhaps generational, something born of the World War II era. He did not complain, that was not part of his makeup, and showed no self-pity.
Christopher was the most disciplined man any of his aides had ever seen. He got up early every day, ran for several miles, and was at his desk working by 6:30 A.M. If there was a fair amount of criticism of him in the press, and there often was, he used it as a goad to work even harder. When he went home at night, his desk was always clear of paper. At the end of a long, hard day, he might sit in front of a television set in his office, having a single glass of wine. The sign that he was relaxing was when he took his jacket off. He and a few close aides would watch the news, and night after night, there would be a quick, inevitably oversimplified report about him, more often than not, his aides believed, detailing the worst thing that had happened that day. Christopher would watch silently, then say that it had not been their best day, but they would all be back here at the office at 7 A.M.
Having hit a wall with its first rather timid move, the administration now began to back away from Bosnia with a policy called containment, which meant trying to keep things from getting worse without doing very much about it. After all, went the rationale, these people had been killing each other for centuries and we could do little until they decided to stop. That kind of rhetoric had been used in the Bush years and had come from Eagleburger, but the insurgents in the State Department, who had been fighting the old policy and hoping for a change with the Clinton administration, were surprised to find it now coming from the Clinton people.
There was also a new moral ambivalence in Christopher’s words that mirrored the political ambivalence of the administration. On May 18, 1993, he went before the House Foreign Affairs Committee and spoke about the acts of genocide committed by Muslims against Serbs. That startled some of his subordinates who had long been wrestling with the problem of the atrocities the Serbs were inflicting on the Muslims. It went against everything that had been said in the campaign, which they had believed was now policy. However, Christopher, knowing that the administration’s policy was uniquely vulnerable, had, on the day before he had to face the committee, sent out an urgent request to the department’s Human Rights Bureau seeking additional information on Bosnian Muslim atrocities against Serbs. Nothing showed more clearly how the Clinton people were now backing away from their earlier promise than that request. There were, it now seemed, two dogs in that fight and we did not have a favorite.
The summer of 1993 was the start of a bad time for Warren Christopher. The failure to act on Bosnia and the contradiction between American speeches and American actions hung over the department like an immense cloud. The Washington press corps, as norms of entertainment began to dominate old-fashioned journalistic norms, might not be nearly as serious as it once had been. Its attention was focused more than ever on scandal and celebrity, and it was less interested in the rest of the world. But the press corps that covered the State Department was a notable exception. It held to the old norms, and its people were deadly serious about America’s relationship with the rest of the world. Its members may have liked Christopher personally and may have felt some sympathy for his dilemma in working with so disengaged a president, but they were tough on him. That summer, as America’s failure in Bosnia dominated the larger arena of foreign policy, some senior members of the press corps began to do an imitation of the secretary of state at a press conference, a man searching the room for an Asian or an African face, someone likely to ask about any part of the world except the Balkans.
Thus the Clinton people began their first year in office with the major foreign policy crisis of Bosnia still unresolved, and a major philosophical split dividing them and the military. If they had taken over the White House, they had yet to take over the government—that was a very different thing. They were relatively good when they paid attention, but they were not paying a lot of that to foreign affairs. Preoccupied with deficit reduction and other domestic issues, and giving short shrift to all sorts of dangerous places, they would in time commit a grave foreign policy blunder.