MARINA DEL REY, CALIF.--As a continuation of former President Clinton's foreign policy legacy, U.S. troops stationed in Kosovo to protect Kosovars have been dragged into the Kosovar attacks on Macedonia. It would be easy to blame only Clinton for this mess, but the fault really rests on America's decades-long sacrificial foreign policy, said Robert W. Tracinski, an Ayn Rand Institute fellow and Creators Syndicate columnist.
"Our goal in the Balkans is not to promote American interests, but to sacrifice them," said Tracinski. "We sent troops to Bosnia primarily to appease our European allies. The mission was sold as a test of our commitment to others, and to prove how 'humanitarian' we could be, to prove that our foreign policy is not designed to protect our interests. Acting to protect our interests is a grievous fault in the eyes of the consensus-obsessed foreign policy establishment."
Tracinski said that if the foreign policy goal in the Balkans was to sacrifice American interests and offer up our soldiers' lives for the rest of the world to dispose of, then we chose the right way to go about it. No complex analysis, no sober judgment, no scrupulous responsibility is required to figure out how to sacrifice our interests.
"All that is required is to look at the television, see news coverage of ragged refugees, hear the panicked demands of our allies, and feel that 'somebody needs to do something,'" said Tracinski. "All that is necessary is to react emotionally.
"We could have predicted the current mess even before the commencement of the air war against Serbia. The Kosovo Liberation Army's stated goal is dominance for Kosovo's Albanians--that is, the same philosophy of ethnic separatism that motivated the Serbs. And before we even heard of Kosovo we could have predicted how events in the Balkans would unfold because they have been unfolding the same way for centuries. But our foreign policy makers have rejected rational principles and American self-interest as the basis for our foreign policy--and so we are getting dragged ever deeper into the Balkan quagmire."
Ayn Rand Institute fellow and Creators Syndicate columnist Robert W. Tracinski is available for interviews.
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