but these U.S. leaders preferred that European allies
take the lead when voters in a disintegrating Yugosla-
via chose hard-line nationalists such as Slobodan
Miloševi 6 (Serbia) and Franjo Tudjman (Croatia),
and then followed them into war. As violence en-
gulfed the states of the formerly communist Yugosla-
via in the early 1990’s, the United States champi-
oned limited U.N.-authorized measures, such as
arms boycotts and no-fly zones. These did little to
stop a series of wars in which violence most often was
directed against civilians: Vicious “ethnic cleansing”
drove groups apart.
Under U.N. Resolutions 819 and 824, U.S. allies
France, the Netherlands, and Britain proved willing
to deploy their troops as part of a lightly armed U.N.
Protection Force in “safe areas” designated for civil-
ians, notably the Bosnian cities of Sarajevo, Biha 6 ,
Goramde, Tuzla,Mepa, and Srebrenica. Clinton re-
fused to put armed forces on the ground in harm’s
way, though U.S. air power did help reinforce U.N.
demands that Serbian militias, especially, desist
from attacking civilians. Finally, after Dutch peace-
keepers were humiliated by a Serb-run massacre of
some eight thousand Muslim civilians at Srebrenica
in 1995, the United Nations sought and received suf-
ficient air support from U.S. fighter aircraft under
NATO command, and the Serbian government ac-
cepted a cease-fire.
At Dayton, Ohio, the Clinton administration then
brought together the heads of government of
Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia and
forged a peace agreement. For the rest of the 1990’s,
contingents of U.S. armed forces joined NATO al-
lies’ personnel (and others, such as Russians) to su-
pervise the implementation of peace terms under
these Dayton Accords of November, 1995. As part of
the peace agreement, the United States insisted that
each of these states pledge to cooperate with the In-
ternational Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugo-
slavia, a special U.N.-authorized war crimes tribunal
at The Hague, Netherlands, that was established to
try those responsible for war crimes in the former
Yugoslavia.
Human Rights Versus U.S. Interests The prefer-
ence to act through formal organizations such as the
United Nations, treaty organizations such as NATO,
or ad hoc multinational coalitions sometimes im-
peded effective responses to crises. When inter-
ethnic tensions turned into a Hutu-led genocide di-
rected against Tutsi neighbors in the small central
African state of Rwanda in April, 1994, division
among allies paralyzed the U.N. Security Council.
No effective response was taken, and over 800,000
Rwandans were massacred—a crime so large that,
though the United States played no direct role what-
soever, President Clinton later felt compelled to
apologize to the Rwandans. As was the case with the
former Yugoslavia, after the killing stopped in
Rwanda, the United States supported a multilateral
solution: creation of a U.N.-authorized tribunal to
hold legally accountable those most responsible.
Great division existed within the United States
over whether conflicts in such places as Somalia,
Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Rwanda merited U.S.
involvement, as no treaty obligations were present
and few material interests were visible. Madeleine
Albright, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations
(1993-1997) and later secretary of state (1997-2001),
gave voice to the view that U.S. power was so preemi-
nent that U.S. interests could be defined to include
protection of international human rights. Few lead-
ers in the armed forces or the intelligence commu-
nity embraced this expansive sense of vital U.S. inter-
ests.
Those who conceived that the United States best
could achieve its purposes by embracing a more lim-
ited sense of its interests were most successful in
shaping U.S. policy toward China. After the collapse
of the Soviet Union into fifteen smaller and weaker
republics in 1991, China remained the principal po-
tential rival to the United States. Though China was
still led by its Communist Party, a program of eco-
nomic change initiated by one of its leaders, Deng
Xiaoping, raised hopes that it, too, was on a path of
reform. The Clinton administration, in a move op-
posed by human rights groups, chose to embrace
closer economic ties with China, expressing hopes
that the plant of eventual democracy might take root
there if nourished by the emergence of a prosperous
middle class and capitalistic evolution. Over the
course of the decade, both countries enjoyed tre-
mendous economic growth and skyrocketing trade,
with U.S. imports from China growing from less
than $5 billion in 1990 to more than $163 billion in
1999.
This approach to China reversed entirely the or-
der of change in Russia, where political change had
occurred prior to major capitalistic economic re-
form. Indeed, President Bush initially reacted cau-The Nineties in America Foreign policy of the United States 347