A New Imperial Presidency? Insights from U.S. Involvement in Bosnia

Abstract

In August 1995, President Bill Clinton caught a lucky break. A few days after Congress voted with veto-proof majorities to lift the arms embargo on Bosnia, the Croatian government launched an offensive against its dissident Serbian minority. Neither the Serb government in Belgrade nor Western nations responded, despite the fact that this Croatian operation was similar to the earlier Serbian cleansing that had received such negative attention in the Western news media. With the clean ethnic borders more or less in place, Serbia and Croatia appeared finally ready to move toward a settlement that had plagued the two countries since the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991. However, when the Serbs continued to attack Muslim military positions in Sarajevo, Clinton was able to advance his alternative to congressional pressure to lift the arms embargo to the Western allies-namely, air strikes against the Serbs. The air strikes had the dual impact of blunting the efforts to override the vote on lifting the arms embargo and providing the military muscle to bring the warring sides in the Bosnian conflict to the bargaining table. After several weeks of U.S.-sponsored negotiations at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, the principals representing the three factions in Bosnia-Croats, Serbs, and Muslims-initialed a peace agreement on 21 November 1995. A few days after the formal signing of the Dayton Peace Accords in Paris on 14 December, President Clinton ordered the deployment of more than 20,000 United States troops as part of a NATO-led Implementation Force (IFOR) of 60,000, which was charged with patrolling and enforcing a cease-fire and a zone of separation between the newly created semiautonomous entities