Yugoslavia Resources at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives

Rosenblatt, Lionel, Soros, George

The latest eruption in the former Yugoslavia was in Kosovo, a region which was ethnically 90 per cent Albanian, but which contained Kosovo Field, a national shrine for the Serbians. The Serbians, under their dictator Slobodan Milosevic, had attacked in force to prevent Kosovar secession. What should we--America, but also the West generally--be doing? Mr. Buckley and Father Neuhaus engage in a profound examination of the moral criteria--which include the practical criterion of, Will your policy achieve what it intends? RJN: "There are clear criteria as to what constitutes a just war and what constitutes justifiable actions within the context of a war.... I am afraid that if one looks very carefully at what we have done over the last seven or eight years in Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, but particularly now with respect to this present intervention, this bombing, where we're dropping bombs into a thousand years of passionately entangled history in the Balkans, it doesn't meet any of the criteria of a justified war."

Professor Rostow's current book, Toward Managed Peace, argued that our need actively to pursue our national-security interests had by no means evaporated with the end of the Cold War. The events of the day before this taping--Boris Yeltsin had dismissed the Russian Duma--certainly bore him out. This thoughtful discussion ranges from the current fiasco in Yugoslavia--where neither the United Nations nor NATO was able to put an end to Slobodan Milosevic's "ethnic cleansing"--to "the major diplomatic mistake of the 20th century--and that's a field that has a great many major diplomatic mistakes ... : the 1918-1919-1920 period in Russia when we should have helped, obviously on a very large scale, the promising new democratic regime of Prince Lvov and Kerensky to succeed. The Allies, exhausted by the First War, made a few feeble gestures and then retreated and allowed this cancerous development of the Soviet regime to take place."

Haass, Richard N. September 19, 1997

Shultz's biography includes: US secretary of labor, 1969-70; US secretary of the treasury, 1972-74; US secretary of state, 1982-89; Jack Steele Parker Professor of international economics, Graduate School of Business, and distinguished fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, 1989- ; Chairman, Governor of California's Economic Advisory Board; Economist; Co-author, Putting Our House in Order: A Guide to Social Security and Health Care Reform.