What have the Balkans ever done for us? Until I saw this picture, I would have said pretty bloody little. Anger, wars, vampires, evil food, poisoned rivers, dictators, distrust, revenge and fear and it still features the only part of the world – mad northern Albania – where I’ve been offered a handgun for protection in a hotel because they’d lost the bedroom key.

Right back atcha, pal—what have you ever done for us? British policy in the Balkans has always been wrong-headed, hatched by the dimmest bulbs in the foreign office, whose understanding of the region seems to have come from a reading of Rebecca West’s disastrous Black Lamb and Grey Falcon and not much else. Stuff your sanctimony, pal, and ponder your own country’s turd-filled legacy to the world (Pakistan, Afghanistan, the modern Middle East come to mind) as you drift into cultural senescence and irrelevance, the distended state teat lolling about your wrinkled lips.

In case you’ve missed it, I’ve been somewhat busy:

• The Wall Street Journal Europe published a piece on Serbian domestic politics and the significance of the arrest of Radovan Karadžić.

• I’ve posted a piece on “the Georgia Crisis: 14 Days In” over at Doublethink.

More to come, I hope.

Greece announced earlier it will veto any attempt to allow Macedonia to join until the dispute over the name of this former Yugoslav republic is solved.

It’s a shame that this couldn’t’ve been resolved, given that Macedonia’s territorial integrity can tend towards the uncertain due to Albanian irredentism. Then again, it’s not much of a surprise that it wasn’t, given that Greece has rarely played a constructive role in the Balkans, especially in recent memory.

An EU diplomat with extensive knowledge of the region, said the visit had more important undertones. “The NATO invite and the Bush visit are coordinated. This is not because the West really cares so much about Croatia, but because they are protectively creating a safety cordon around Serbia and potential instability there,” the diplomat said.

That’s not the whole picture either. Admission into NATO makes a country’s borders virtually inviolable which ought to deter Serbia from lashing out at its neighbors. But almost more importantly, it discourages any of the new member countries from unilateral military adventurism outside their own borders—like Croatia intervening on behalf of its ethnic minority in Bosnia if that country begins to fray badly. I fully expect President Bush to sternly warn the PM and President against that sort of thing.

The West is standing firm on rejecting such proposals, but it’s not clear they’ll do much to prevent de facto partition.

“And kiss that child!”

Why is Hillary lying over something so verifiable? It’s so embarrassing and unnecessary.

I’d like to examine this argument in more detail, and I’ll try to post something longer over the weekend. Briefly, though, I would argue that Hillary is America’s best hope for a smart yet assertive foreign policy; McCain scares me for a variety of reasons; and yes, Obama is the least convincing of the three. I’ll stick to writing about Obama for this post, and hopefully get around to expanding on my thoughts later.

I find Obama most troubling of all, because though I believe that he is the most capable and intelligent candidate, I get the sense that his gifts for oration and inspiration can get the better of him sometimes.

In his letter to the Serbian Unity Congress, he states:

I support and shall help in every possible way development of the dialog between all sides in Kosovo because I believe that peace and stability can be reached only by solutions acceptable for all sides.

Unlike Dr. Hoare, I don’t see this as a pander. I think he has a genuine concern that America’s recent moves in the region are sowing the seeds of a broader future conflict. He is calling for Kosovars and Serbs to get together and work out their differences in good faith. It’s a nice sentiment, and a nice template for solving conflicts in theory. In the practice of international relations, however, we’re frequently not dealing with good faith interlocutors, and a harder-nosed realpolitik is oftentimes called for.

I worry that Obama’s proven ability to motivate people in the domestic setting is making him believe that he can replicate this on the world stage. I worry Obama believes that the Balkan tragedy of the 1990’s came about because the Great Powers didn’t insist on negotiations hard enough. I worry that he thinks that the Russians, who are saying very similar things to what he’s saying above on Kosovo, are being honest and sensible, rather than duplicitous and deceitful. I worry that Obama, listening as he does to the Samantha Powers of the world, has an idealistic and naive idea of how the United States ought to behave.

Croatia’s governing coalition, which includes the SDSS, the party of Croatia’s Serbian minority, may pay the price. The SDSS minister, Slobodan Uzelac, tendered his resignation from the government, which was rejected by PM Ivo Sanader. The SDSS will now vote whether to remain in the governing coalition, or whether to try to bring the government down in protest.

For some Croats, recognizing Kosovo is a moral imperative—memories are fresh of Croatia eagerly awaiting international recognition when it declared independence in 1991. For others, especially those with business interests in Serbia, recognition unnecessarily complicates things. The decision to finally recognize Kosovo, however, was probably a precondition set by Washington in exchange for smoothing Croatia’s entry into NATO.

Earlier this year, noises were being made in official circles that Croatia was not yet ready to be admitted within NATO’s ranks. Then, about a week or so ago, it was announced that George W. Bush would visit Croatia immediately following the Bucharest NATO summit where a decision on the country’s NATO accession would be made. Some quid pro quo was probably arrived at.

So is recognizing Kosovo a smart move for Croatia? It’s hard to say. Geostrategically, it’s important that Croatia has decided to firmly place itself in the U.S.-centered NATO camp, thereby rejecting any dalliances with a resurgent Russia, a rising power with clear designs on the Balkans. SDSS’s position—to delay recognition until after Serbian parliamentary elections—was not without merits, however, especially if a more moderate, pro-EU government was to arise in Serbia.

Peter Feith, the European Union’s special representative to Kosovo, said in an interview this month that the European Union was determined not to allow partition to become a political reality, and would work to ensure that Kosovo remained a multiethnic country in which both groups lived side by side. The European Union is soon to take over administration of Kosovo from the United Nations.

But many senior European Union officials admit privately that if the Serbs continue to push for partition, there is little the European Union can do to prevent it.

This, then, becomes yet one more example of Serbia’s uncanny ability to game the international system. The strategy has been consistent throughout the Balkan wars: create demographic facts on the ground to match your territorial objectives and then merely wait for the world to catch up with reality.

In both Bosnia and Kosovo, the end result may very well be Serbia annexing territories with majority Serb populations, majorities it created by starting expansionist wars. The bitter irony is that the only country to have escaped this fate is Croatia, a country whose military victory over Serbian irredentism is currently on trial at the Hague.

At this point, the outlines of a Kosovo endgame become discernible:

The U.N. said later it was pulling out of the Serb-dominated northern half of Mitrovica because of the shooting. NATO helicopters hovered above the city and NATO troops remained, but the U.N. withdrawal could fuel a widespread Kosovo Serb desire to split from largely ethnic Albanian Kosovo and rejoin Serbia. The Serb minority dominates about 15 percent of the territory in northern Kosovo, including about a third of Mitrovica, Kosovo’s second-largest city.”

Indeed, partition has been on the table for quite some time. The most strident nationalists in Serbia don’t realistically hope to have all of Kosovo re-annexed. The genie is out of the bottle in almost every way imaginable, and if 2 million Albanians refused to be governed from 1989 through a few weeks ago, there’s precious little to suggest that they could ever be persuaded to join Serbia now.

The strategy is transparent. Just like in Bosnia, war has created relatively homogeneous communities, and Serbia, after bitterly complaining at having its heartland torn from its embrace,¹ will graciously concede to annexing only those territories which have Serbian majorities in them. This would be a monstrously cynical play because, again, just like in Bosnia, the majorities in questions only arose as a result of a war instigated by the Serbs themselves.

Why would Serbia agree to merely getting the north of Kosovo? Besides expediency, there is the small matter of natural resources—it just so happens that a healthy number of the country’s lead and zinc mines are located in the regions which now conveniently have Serbian majorities. And though the Albanians will protest bitterly that the viability of their state is being compromised, I can’t see the Europeans (or the Americans) having much appetite for compelling the Serbian parts of Kosovo to remain under Albanian control.

I hope I’m wrong.