By refusing to intervene more decisively in Syria, President Barack Obama claimed to have finally broken with the “Washington playbook” – his term for the foreign policy establishment’s faith in the efficacy of military force.
Refusing to follow the playbook is at once source of pride for the president and a source of ongoing outrage for critics across the political spectrum.
However, looking back to the 1990s, it seems Obama is actually hewing fairly closely to the playbook that ultimately led Washington to intervene in Yugoslavia’s civil war. This is not a playbook that demands immediate military intervention, but one that has Washington spending several years desperately trying to avoid it, while still investing just enough diplomatically and rhetorically to make the eventual use of force inevitable.
In the Balkans, it took four years from the time Serb and Croat forces first began fighting in 1991 to the start of the NATO air campaign that finally brought an uneasy end to the fighting. During this period, two successive presidential administrations sought to keep America out of a conflict where they saw little public support or strategic rationale for getting involved. In a differently configured but not dissimilar political climate, many isolationist voters insisted that the United States should not serve as the world’s policeman,
while internationalist realists like Secretary of State James Baker famously declared of the conflict, “We do not have a dog in this fight.”
Continued....
Originally Posted by OUTLAW 09
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