Furiously in all directions: NATO wasn't set up for handling situations like Bosnia - and it isn't.

WHEN Western leaders try to deal with the problem of Bosnia, a terrible dilemma confronts them. Is it desirable to try to keep together an artificial grouping of nationalities that seethe with conflicting aims and values? And, even if that is desirable, is it not possible that the very act of pushing them back together again may actually strengthen the hostilities among them?

The grouping of nationalities I refer to is called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Threats to use NATO warplanes to bomb Serb artillery positions have brought this organization, for the first time, into the very heart of the Bosnia debate. For some politicians and military men, this is a chance for NATO to remind us of how indispensable it is: there is simply no other organization that can do the job. For others, it is an ill-conceived venture from which, given the lack of clear aims at the outset, NATO may emerge tarnished and politically weakened.

It is a hard judgment to make; the stakes are very high. As one senior British officer puts it: "Frankly, I don't care very much about what happens to Yugoslavia. But I care a hell of a lot about what happens to NATO." That officer is in favor of taking action, but only for the most reluctant of reasons: he fears that if NATO stands back any longer, it will become an international laughing-stock. "Our governments have spent billions of pounds giving us the best equipment and the best training," he says. "People are going to start asking what it was all for, if we say we're incapable of knocking a few drunken Serbs off a hillside."

Bosnia poses a type of problem very different from the problem the North Atlantic alliance was originally created to deal with. NATO, the most successful (one could say, the only truly successful) international organization of the last half-century, was created to counter a single and unmistakable strategic military threat. Although that threat has not evaporated, it has become shrouded in a fog of other more nebulous security concerns since the alleged ending of the Cold War five years ago. Recognizing this, the Alliance issued a new "Strategic Concept" in late 1991, in which it tried to redefine its role: "In contrast with the predominant threat of the past, the risks to Allied security that remain are multi-faceted and multi-dimensional, which makes them harder to predict and assess .... These risks are less likely to result from calculated aggression against the Allies, but rather from the adverse consequences of instabilities that may arise from the serious economic, social and political difficulties, including ethnic rivalries and territorial disputes, which are faced by many countries in central and eastern Europe."

Europeanizing NATO

WHAT THIS new doctrine implied was that in the future NATO would be concerned less with defense (the straightforward matter of protecting NATO members against possible attack) and more with security--a far more open-ended and uncertain concept. And it was not obvious that a transatlantic military alliance was the ideal piece of machinery for dealing with the delicate matter of security arrangements within Europe. Would it not be better, perhaps, to entrust this task to a new Europe-wide forum for discussion and negotiation, such as the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe? Or to a purely European political formation, such as the European Community (now renamed the European Union)? Or even to the Western European Union, a grouping which might roughly be described as the European sub-section of NATO but which, according to the Maastricht Treaty, might one day become the European Union's very own military machine?

All these suggestions sounded reasonable, until the war in Yugoslavia. Then, one by one, the grand-sounding European organizations tripped and fell. First to go was the CSCE, whose "Conflict Prevention Center" had been set up in Vienna in 1990, just in time to demonstrate that it was incapable of preventing conflicts. With its membership now nudging fifty (including such typical European countries as Tadjikistan) and its offices scattered among various European capitals, the CSCE resembles Nicholas of Cusa's definition of God: a circle whose circumference is nowhere and whose center is everywhere. Like the Almighty, it has remained, for the most part, invisible.

Next was the European Community. Though it seemed at first almost to welcome the chance to display its peacemaking skills ("Now is the hour of Europe!" cried its representative, the foreign minister of Luxembourg, at the outbreak of the Yugoslav war), its most decisive action was to supply a small number of "monitors" in white coats---christened "ice-cream men" by the bemused Yugoslavs whose deaths they proceeded to monitor.

As for the Western European Union, this body did indeed send a small flotilla to the Adriatic in 1992 to enforce the arms embargo against Bosnia and the other ex-Yugoslav republics. But the WEU, having no assigned forces of its own, has to borrow them off member states, which are almost all members of NATO. And since NATO was sending a flotilla to patrol the Adriatic anyway, this parallel action by the WEU had an element of redundancy bordering on the farcical.

NATO's own involvement began in the summer of 1992. Shocked by the television pictures of the Serb-run concentration camps, NATO politicians agreed to instruct the Alliance's military planners to make contingency plans for a deployment to Bosnia. At the same time, the UN formally requested NATO to prepare to execute missions in Bosnia under its auspices.

Three scenarios were considered at NATO's Brussels headquarters. The first was a peace-keeping operation in the event of the Vance-Owen plan's being accepted throughout Bosnia-- that is, by local commanders as well as political leaders. For this, a modest NATO force of no more than 20,000 men was required, to patrol roads and man checkpoints. The second scenario imagined a Vance--Owen plan accepted at the national level but ignored or rejected by local commanders here and there. To deal with this, NATO proposed sending a force of 60,000 to 70,000 men. And the third scenario involved sending troops to pacify a Bosnia in which no peace plan had been accepted at any level: here the NATO planners doodled for a while with their pencils, and then put the file back in the filing cabinet.

Within reasonable limits (options 1 and 2), the planners were happy to make plans: that is what planners are for. But was NATO happy with the idea of being drawn into the Yugoslav conflict? According to one NATO insider, the question is badly framed. "NATO is just an instrument, a military machine. You can't talk about NATO wanting this or that. It doesn't have policies of its own; it is just the servant of its member governments. Please remember that NATO is not a person sitting in Brussels with arms and legs."

And yet that answer itself helps one to understand why the military men at the Brussels headquarters were very wary of taking on any Bosnian tasks. NATO is the servant; its master is the agreed policy of 16 member governments--32 arms and 32 legs. On a contentious issue such as Bosnia, an issue essentially of foreign policy rather than defense, those arms and legs may put most of their energy into kicking and striking one another.

And 16 Heads

THE disagreements have been painfully obvious for the last two years: disagreements not only about what action to take, but also about who should take it. At one end of the spectrum there were countries that wanted something to be done, but did not want to do it themselves. The German government, which championed the cause of Croatia in 1991-92 and defended the right of the Bosnian government not to be bullied into surrender in 199394, refused to supply any troops of its own. The reason it gives is not the clause in its constitution which served as an excuse for non-participation in the Gulf War (a constitution which in fact allows Germany to act as part of "a system of mutual collective security . . to secure a peaceful and lasting order in Europe and among the nations of the world"), but the memory of German-occupied Yugoslavia in the Second World War. Italy, though also sympathetic to Croatia and Bosnia, refuses military involvement, also because of memories of that war. And the U.S. Government has taken a similar line, partly for a similar reason-- though the war it is remembering took place on the other side of the globe.

That leaves only two major military powers in NATO: Britain and France. Both countries have sent troops into Bosnia (2,400 and 5,200 men respectively), under UN command. But they did this more to satisfy their own television-watching electorates than to save Bosnia from destruction. Both have continued to uphold the arms embargo against the Bosnians; both have pursued the same basic policy, since last summer, of trying to persuade the Bosnian government to sign whatever piece of paper is pushed in front of it by Milosevic, Tudjman, and Owen at Geneva. And both have, therefore, fought a war of attrition against U.S. and German policy, urging those governments not to do anything (such as talk about lifting the embargo) which might raise the spirits of the beleaguered Bosnians.

So why is it that, since the NATO summit last month, France has been pushing for air strikes, and Britain (the most non-interventionist of all the NATO powers, excepting Serbia's poodle, Greece) has supported the idea?

Both France and Britain have felt frustrated by the petty humiliations of their UN troops in Bosnia, and have come round to the idea of specific interventions for specific purposes--not to change the nature of the war, but just to assist UN deployments in places such as Tuzla and Srebrenica. Both countries had begun to contemplate the utter humiliation of an impeded withdrawal (which might force them to leave all their heavy equipment behind), and could see the advantage of making a show of force at this stage.

But the main reasons for moving toward a policy of air strikes are more long-term, and more contradictory. What has finally swayed the mind of the British government is the plea from its military men to allow NATO to do something in order to restore its own credibility. Britain has always been deeply skeptical of any attempt to replace NATO with a purely European grouping, and will do anything to bolster NATO's reputation.

France, however, has pushed for air strikes for almost the opposite reason. The appeal of the idea for the French is that this will seem to be almost a European-only NATO operation, thus exposing the U.S. as somehow peripheral to Europe's security requirements. It was France that proposed sending a WEU force of 50,000 to Yugoslavia in September 1991. That proposal was vetoed by Britain. Had the U.S. suggested sending a NATO force of 50,000 American troops, we may guess that such a proposal would have been vetoed by France. So-called "Europeanism," i.e., anti-Americanism, remains the driving force of French foreign policy.

So it was that on February 7 the French tried to ensure that the decision on air strikes would be taken not by NATO but by a meeting of the European Union. (It was in fact deferred to the NATO meeting on February 8 at Britain's insistence.) And so too the French daily Le Monde reported on February 8 an extraordinary conversation between France's defense minister, Francois Leotard, and his Russian counterpart, General Grachev; Leotard asked the Russians to support France's attempt to establish a "neutral and impartial" policy toward the former Yugoslavia, and in particular to counter the policy of the U.S., which he suspected of smuggling arms, as it did in Afghanistan, to the Muslim forces in Bosnia. Even Le Monde, used to the contortions of French foreign policy, described this appeal to Russia as "curious."

Britain supports air strikes because it thinks, reluctantly, that this is the way to preserve NATO. France supports them because it thinks it is the way to undermine NATO, detaching its European members from America. Those who actually care about what happens to Bosnia will find this a worryingly unstable basis for future action. And those who care about NATO have even more to worry about. Looking at some of Europe's politicians, they may feel moved to murmur, like the Duke of Wellington: "They may not frighten the enemy, but by God they frighten me."