Tuesday, March 27, 2018
Kosovo Again...
Has anyone been keeping up with these events? The first I heard about it was this evening at Mass when the priest prayed for "...peace in the world, and for the situation in Kosovo." I had thought a resolution of sorts had been reached several years ago. Nothing is ever really over, apparently.
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Not good. Russia's rhetoric is pretty belligerent.
ReplyDeleteBack when Yugoslavia was breaking up and was mostly terra incognito in the U.S., and when the PBS Newshour may still have been a half hour, McNeill and Lehrer had two distinguished professorial-looking gentlemen on to explain everything. All was quiet, expository and civilized as we went through Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia, and then someone said "Kosovo," and all of a sudden these gray-haired academics with their elbow patches were screaming at each other. Kosovo is another centuries-old grudge that will never make sense to outsiders.
ReplyDeleteKatherine and all: this brief Balkans primer from last year by Walter Russell Mead provides a bit of perspective on what seems to be happening in Kosovo, and what the US interest, if any, would be in it.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.hudson.org/research/13784-europe-s-next-crisis-the-balkans
Mead article: I hadn't thought of Turkey's interest in the issue. Is Mead right about that? After all, Russia and Turkey are kinda, sorta, new best friends; they would find themselves on opposite sides here.
DeleteSeems they may be frenemies: on opposite sides but united in a desire to foment discord to discomfit, or worse, the EU.
DeleteThanks for the link, Jim. It seems that diplomacy and international cooperation are out of fashion. Me-first-ism rules the day. Not that I want the USA to get in any more military involvements. But a little behind the scenes diplomacy wouldn't hurt.
DeleteKatherine - you and others might be interested in this taxonomy of conservative foreign policy approaches, courtesy of Ross Douthat. He identifies four flavors: the paleocons (isolationists), the realists (just what the label suggests), the neocons (in favor of American power for idealistic purposes) and the hawks (in favor of American power as a first rather than a last resort).
DeleteI suspect Trump, in his own skin, is a paleocon - isolationist, not much interested in foreign alliances or even foreign affairs in general. Douthat suggests that Bolton is a hawk. I don't doubt that hawkishness plays well on Fox News, which may be the president's main source of information, but a hawk advising a paleocon ... I'm predicting this match will not play well with the principals and will be short-lived.
Here is Douthat's descriptions, and his views on Bolton.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/24/opinion/sunday/john-bolton-hawk-war.html?rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2Fross-douthat&action=click&contentCollection=opinion®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=collection
As all this applies to the Balkans: it's hard to imagine Trump would want any part of it, whereas Bolton might be more inclined to bomb the region back to the stone age.
When I read this yesterday, which I take to be a Serb provocation with Russian back-up, I thought of the years and months leading up to WW1. Wherein the Serbs were always pushing to enlarge (or recover depending on your history) Bosnia as well as peripheries of the Ottoman Empire. They provoked Austria (of the Austria-Hungarian Empire), shot the Archduke, Austria sent an ultimatum with backing from Germany, and voila armies on the move in August 1914. Throughout the Russians (than a tsardom) were supporting whatever the Serbs were up to.
ReplyDeleteIt may be the Kosovars (aka Albanians) are not peace-loving either: like the Serbs except Muslim.
I thought the EU had been managing this impossible situation pretty well, so curious to know what set off this tangle.
Which reminded me of the joke Stalin told Milovan Djilas, the Yugoslav diplomat and author:
ReplyDeleteIn one of the wars, a Serb and a Turk ended up chasing each other all around a mountain, swinging their swords at each other. When both were out of breath, they paused, and the Turk asked the Serb, "What are you fighting for?" The Serb replied, "Land! What about you?" "I," said the Turk, "am fighting for honor." And the Serb replied, "A man always fights for what he doesn't have."
Well, Stalin thought it was a hoot.
It is fascinating and troubling the way this part of the world seems to live off myths and a history of a tribal kind. Is it resentment? Has everyone sick of the whole scene left for foreign places, like Germany or the U.S. What is it that keeps sticking in everyone's craw? Or is that just a naive question?
ReplyDeleteWhen Muhammad Mossaddegh was prime minister of Iran in the Fifties (before the CIA coup that overthrew him), he refused to deal personally with Greek diplomats because he was still ticked off over what Alexander the Great did to Iran (Persia). Really.
ReplyDeleteThat's a riot. Wait until Mossaddegh got a load of Eisenhower the Great and Kermit Roosevelt. Keep obsessed with obsolete enemies and the new ones'll getcha.
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