From the announcement ceremony last week in the Rose Garden, Shalikashvili sped back to Brussels, to his current headquarters as SACEUR (Supreme Allied Commander Europe) to prepare his forces to launch airstrikes against the Serbian forces besieging Sarajevo. As they have so often in the past, the Serbs backed off just enough to forestall NATO bombs, retreating from the mountain heights around the city. The aggressors will no doubt press on, however, squeezing the last drops of blood out of the Bosnians and further testing Western resolve in the post-cold-war era.
As SACEUR, Shalikashvili commands 2 million troops, 2,300 tanks and 5,200 warplanes in Europe-the NATO force that was built up to fight the Big One, a massive ground war against the Soviet Union on the plains of Europe. The war machine at his disposal is awesome, but it is also a relic. It is highly unlikely that the West will fight a large-scale conventional war any time soon. Operation Desert Storm–the kind of massive, overwhelm-’em-with-firepower kind of war that American generals have always preferred to fight–may have been the last great tank battle in history.
Shalikashvili, deskbound in Europe, missed Desert Storm. But he was called upon right after the war to command an operation that is a more plausible model for the military actions of the future. General Shali, as he is known (his full name is pronounced “shah-lee-kosh-VEElee”), was the commander of Operation Provide Comfort, the relief effort designed to rescue the Kurds from Saddam Hussein by creating a safe haven in northern Iraq. He performed this task brilliantly–and caught the eye of General Powell. Creating safe havens and no-fly zones, providing humanitarian relief, working with allies to intimidate, but not actually engage, potential aggressors: this is how America will have to project power in the ’90s and beyond, and it is a role that Shalikashvili understands as well as anyone in uniform.
As President Clinton observed in nominating Shalikashvili last week, the general understands ethnic and national rivalries. The son of an ardent Georgian nationalist, Shalikashvili and his mother fled Poland in a cattle car one step ahead of the advancing Soviet army in 1944. Clinton was clearly moved by their story–he pointed out that Shalikashvili had learned English by watching John Wayne movies in Peoria, Ill., where his family finally landed after World War II. It is no less relevant, perhaps, that the general is heir to two great warrior traditions-the German military aristocracy (a distant cousin, Hasso von Manteuffel, was a German commander during the Battle of the Bulge) and the pre-Bolshevik, Russian military aristocracy (his grandmother was a lady-in-waiting to the last czarina). By all reports, this highpowered lineage does not show. Shalikashvili is an unassuming man who is known for his ability to relate to the troops; he reminds some in the Pentagon of Gen. Omar Bradley, the legendary “GI’s general” of World War II. Significantly, he is the product of the draft and an army officer-candidate school, not West Point.
All this is an unconventional background for America’s top military man–but Shalikashvili has an unconventional job to do. Simply put, his role is to help Bill Clinton devise radically new ways to apply American military assets in a confusing and largely unstructured world. Clinton does not have a coherent vision of America’s changing role; neither does anyone else. He and Shalikashvili must operate in an era of sharply reduced military budgets, of intense opposition from Congress and the voters to any large-scale military involvement overseas, and of drastic new limits from U.S. allies and the world community on America’s freedom to act. For better or worse, this is the age of multilateralism: barring some preponderant crisis, no president can play Rambo in the 1990s. Clinton and his national-security team-Defense Secretary Les Aspin, Secretary of State Warren Christopher, CIA Director James Woolsey, national-security adviser Anthony Lake and, now, Shalikashvili–are forced to improvise the terms of U.S. leadership on a daily basis.
This is nowhere more evident than in Bosnia, the crisis no one will face. Clinton has talked tough but done little, while Serbian forces pursuing the atavistic goal of “ethnic cleansing” have steadily crushed the outmanned and outgunned Bosnian army and the Muslim enclaves it is trying to protect. In recent weeks the dimensions of an appalling potential tragedy have become clear: by winter, Sarajevo’s 340,000 inhabitants will be starving unless someone finally intervenes. But who will do it and how? The United Nations, with a minimal peacekeeping force of 9,000 British, French, Spanish and Canadian troops, is playing for time in hopes that the ongoing Geneva peace negotiations will somehow induce the Serbs to relent. Clinton is once again pushing for airstrikes to enforce the U.N. demands. NATO is deliberating: 16 different countries have a vote. Though much of the military muscle will ultimately be American, the “chain of command” runs from two commanders (one French and one American) in the region, through NATO headquarters in Belgium and to U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali.
And also, of course, to Washington where despite Clinton’s efforts to persuade the allies to take action, many in the Pentagon doubt that the limited plan approved by NATO will actually change the situation. The Pentagon, true to the lessons of Operation Desert Storm, wanted to hit Serbian forces high and low with all the smart munitions in its arsenal. The Europeans held out for less–a demonstration strike, followed by gradual escalation if the Serbs don’t take the hint. Full-scale military intervention, which would require at least 300,000 troops, is out of the question. Militarily, Bosnia is a lost cause, a defeat waiting for some form of fig-leaf legitimation in a treaty nobody seems ready to sign. “If we suggested massive military action, Congress would cut off our b—s,” says one U.S. official. “It would destroy this administration,” says another, “and the administration is more important than Bosnia.”
Except, of course, to the Bosnians. To be fair about it, virtually everyone in Washington now accepts that Bosnia is a powerful example of how not to make foreign policy, multilaterally or otherwise. So is Somalia, where U.N. forces have been plagued with internal bickering and bedeviled by hit-and-run opposition from the elusive Mohammed Farah Aidid. “What we’ve witnessed in Somalia is an example of what we don’t want to get into in the future,” one of Powell’s aides says. The peacekeepers’ many problems are the reason the administration is now finishing a presidential directive intended to beef up and smooth out U.N. military operations the world over, The directive would allow American troops to operate under U.N. command. But it has a loophole: U.S. forces can refuse orders the Pentagon deems “imprudent and unsound.”
The larger issue is, when do regional crises become urgent enough to require intervention by the United States and the United Nations? In the case of Bosnia, the right time was a year or more ago. Shalikashvili is a realist and, like any politically astute general, a team player. Though he favored more assertive action earlier, he does not think the United States should intervene in Bosnia now-partly because such a policy probably could not succeed and partly because he recognizes it is politically impossible. But he sees Bosnia as the kind of foreign-policy dilemma that will be all too common in the near future, and he believes that such politically caused disasters undermine the moral legitimacy of the United Nations, the United States and all the Western democracies. These risks are intangible but real: the Islamic world’s outrage at the plight of Bosnia’s Muslim population, for example, is currently helping radical fundamentalists shake up the Middle East.
Pentagon watchers guess that Shalikashvili will be more willing than Colin Powell to consider the use of American power in difficult, militarily ambiguous situations. Powell is the Pentagon’s chief exponent of the primary strategic lesson of Vietnam. If and when the United States decides to intervene, this theory goes, it must always go in full tilt and no holds barred. That is what Powell told George Bush about Kuwait, and that is what the United States and its allies did to Saddam Hussein-use massive force and maximum firepower to achieve a limited objective. It worked-but the Persian Gulf may have been a uniquely favorable military situation with little value as a model for interventions of the future.
“If Powell is the Vietnam school, Shali is Vietnam-plus,” a senior Pentagon official said last week. “Shali has digested all the lessons of Vietnam, but he knows we now have to move beyond them.” Still, he is “keenly aware of the limits of military force as an instrument of policy, and it’s extremely important that the civilian leadership is constantly reminded of that. But Shah also knows that just because the use of force can be difficult, we cannot allow ourselves to be immobilized on that account.” That is what Bill Clinton seems to want-a military chief who is prudent but willing to search for new and more flexible solutions to international problems. What Clinton needs, a senior administration official says, is a JCS chairman who will say, “This option is militarily doable. That option, no way. But if you look over here, there’s another option that would be militarily doable, though not in the way you’ve been thinking.”
Shali, in short, seems destined to get along well with the boss. Add to that all-important criterion his experience in hammering out coalition military policy in Europe, and he seems admirably equipped for the job. His nomination sends a welcome message to NATO, which now, as always, has its differences about the right amount of U.S. leadership. “It is a new world,” one European diplomat says. “There is no need for the United States to direct every coordinated action.” U.S. officials concede the difficulties of trying to form allied consensus on Bosnia or any other burning military issue. “We shouldn’t get Pollyannaish about it,” a NATO official says. “The world is still made up of nations–we’re far from [seeing it work] as one force.”
And the plot, inevitably, will thicken. Since the end of the cold war, ethnic and national tensions have been spewing out all across Eurasia–particularly, though not exclusively, in the former Soviet Union. These tensions clearly complicate Boris Yeltsin’s hopes for reform and could ultimately threaten the survival of his government. As a result, the Clinton administration is considering aggressive multilateral diplomacy to help mediate disputes among the former Soviet republics. For now, at least, this policy will draw the fine at honest-broker diplomacy, and only when requested by the governments involved. Washington would support but probably not contribute troops to modest U.N. peacekeeping operations. But as former State Department official John Bolton says, “We are the central multilateralists. The idea that there’s some collective international will out there is just fairyland stuff”
And as Bolton also says, the true measure of America’s diplomatic clout will always be “the military resources we are willing to commit.” Does this mean the United States must someday be prepared to send peacekeeping forces to referee a dispute between, say, Russia and Ukraine? That could involve Shalikashvili and the Pentagon in an interventionist’s nightmare. As Helmut Sonnenfeldt of the Brookings Institution says, getting caught “between the Ukrainians and the Russians would be dangerous for us,” which is surely an understatement. So here is what could ultimately be the most important skill in Shalikashvili’s military repertoire: the ability, on the basis of his deep knowledge of Europe’s tragedies, to tell a young president from Arkansas when to keep his powder dry.
