The first problem with other people’s elections is that Washington can’t control them. In an ideal world that shouldn’t matter–so long as the Americans don’t back one horse to win. In the Israeli election, Bill Clinton was a cheerleader for Shimon Peres, the Labor Party’s candidate. Peres lost to Bibi Netanyahu. Ultimately, embarrassment was avoided. The alliance between Israel and the U.S. is so close–and so important to Israel that Netanyahu graciously avoided the temptation to point out the error of Clinton’s ways.
Backing the wrong horse should not matter if the pony that wins can be relied upon to have a decent relationship with the U. S. It would matter a lot if the winning candidate decided to bear a grudge. Is that the case in Russia? Washington has not been dumb enough to publicly endorse Boris Yeltsin in the presidential race, but that hardly matters all the world and his dog knows that the administration would be in a flat spin if communist candidate Gennady Zyuganov were to triumph. Granted, Zyuganov does not need the excuse of American support for Yeltsin to be an awkward partner for the Americans. The more troubling question is whether Yeltsin himself is likely to be a significantly easier man to do business with. And that reveals the second problem with elections.
Call it the Hitler precedent–in memory of the fact that the Nazis came to power in Germany after impeccably free elections in 1932. In the long run, the fact that a leader of a particular country is elected may matter less than what he does with the power thus bestowed. Yeltsin, for example, may be campaigning for the presidency as if he had taken a course in schlock and spin-doctoring from the best of Washington’s shark-suited political consultants. But what really counts is what he does when–if fate so decrees–he’s back in the Kremlin. If, for example, Yeltsin continues to oppose the expansion of NATO to cover the ex-communist nations of Eastern Europe, the fact that he is elected would not change the truth that his policies would be antithetical to those pursued in Washington. But he would then be able to pursue such policies with greater legitimacy. Concentrating on the fact of elections, in other words, can grant a medal of good conduct to those who might one day behave badly. The fact that someone is elected can’t remove the obligations of any American administration to defend its own interests.
To be fair, those in the Clinton administration have long made precisely this point about Yeltsin. And for all their love of other people’s elections, they have also made another distinction–one of the first importance. “One man, one vote, one time does not a democracy make,” says a senior official. “It’s the second election that’s the most important.” That’s wise; countries like Cambodia and Mozambique–praised by Washington for having held free and fair elections when those with less faith doubted that they could–won’t prove themselves to be true democracies until they’ve gone through the whole process a few more times.
That throws some light on what’s now happening in Bosnia. Last week, six months after the Dayton peace accords were signed, leaders of the international community met in Florence and decided to press ahead with elections in Bosnia by the Dayton deadline of Sept. 14. Writing in support of that position in The New York Times, Secretary of State Warren Christopher said that “Without elections, there will be no unified Bosnian state, no national constitution… and little hope for greater cooperation among Bosnia’s diverse communities.”
Yes, but will there be such wonders if there is an election? Conditions in Bosnia are hardly conducive to the sort of voting Americans would countenance at home. In Serb-controlled areas, the press remains under the thumb of the political leadership– which still includes indicted but unarrested war criminals like Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic. Those refugees who try to return to their homes–supposedly a Dayton condition–are routinely prevented from doing so. It’s not hard to conclude that an election held in such circumstances would merely set in concrete the current, ethnically based map of Bosnia.
That’s why military men, at least, are beginning to sound almost heretical about elections. “One has got to be minimalist about this,” says Gen. Michael Walker, commander of the NATO ground forces in Bosnia. “You have got to take the first step.” But if elections are only a first step, what follows? Last week Defense Secretary William Perry uttered the uncomfortable truth. What follows is another, similar NATO military operation in Bosnia, which–the Europeans have made clear and Perry accepts– means American ground troops.
Time was when the Clinton administration thought that elections in Bosnia would be the signal to start pulling American troops out. At least some in Washington now realize that the mere fact of elections won’t solve all their problems in the Balkans. Or, for that matter, those anywhere else.
