Angering the Europeans and splitting NATO, U.S. policy in the former Yugoslavia was -- until last week -- nothing if not decisive in one respect: The crisis did not justify risking the lives of American combat troops on the ground there.
It took the prospect of a military debacle during the evacuation of 23,000 United Nations peacekeepers and nothing less than the threatened collapse of the trans-Atlantic alliance to reverse the administration's adamant refusal to put U.S. ground forces into the desperately dangerous situation.
Also significantly, the decision came 24 hours after French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe acidly criticized "governments that want to give us lessons when they have not lifted a little finger to put even one man on the ground."
Clearly, he was talking about the United States.
The commission of troops is a judgment call that U.S. policy-makers are having to make ever more frequently these days, as trouble erupts around an unstable world.
When U.S. troops arrived in Haiti in September, their safety was deemed more important than that of those they were sent to protect, forcing frustrated soldiers to watch Haitians being beaten by militia thugs without being able to intervene -- until public outcry here forced a policy change.
Signal of weakness
Earlier, there was the recall of the USS Harlan County from Port-au-Prince when a paramilitary mob assembled on the dockside to "welcome" it. This was widely seen as a signal of weakness.
And last year, President Clinton ordered the withdrawal of U.S. ,, troops in Somalia as soon as the cost began to be counted in body bags.
All this raises the question: Is the United States becoming less willing to shed its blood in these post-Cold War days when wars are small and distant, peacekeeping can be dangerous, and U.S. interests are not always apparent?
Richard N. Perle, former assistant secretary of defense for international security, told an American Enterprise Institute seminar last week: "There is increasing evidence that our commitment to commit forces is declining even faster than the forces themselves."
The Clinton administration's agreement to replace North Korea's nuclear program with proliferation-resistant technology rather than risk armed confrontation to end that country's nuclear ambitions, said Mr. Perle, smacked of "paralytic unwillingness" even to consider fighting a war.
The Pentagon's "ludicrous" estimates of the human and financial cost of U.S. involvement in Bosnia were deliberately exaggerated, he charged, to prevent a unilateral U.S. lifting of the arms embargo against the Bosnian Muslims.
Eliot Cohen, director of the strategic studies program at the Johns Hopkins University, said: "The American military has gotten much more casualty-sensitive. It's partly a long-term reaction to Vietnam -- that's a large part of it -- and partly because of overall changes in the culture. People are just not willing to see many people get killed for anything except core values."
Overwhelming force
Certainly, the post-Vietnam era ushered in the Pentagon strategy of applying overwhelming military force, designed to ensure rapid victory with minimal casualties.
The Persian Gulf war proved that the strategy worked, and also introduced the notion of the "clean" war, with smart weapons doing much of the work, again limiting the human cost.
"It is not that Americans are averse to risking their lives," said Loren B. Thompson, security affairs director with the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, a moderate-conservative think tank in Virginia. "It is that they want a threat, or cause, that is proportional in importance to the risk."
This is where the new complexities arise. With U.S. troops as likely to be sent to help feed starving Africans or to restore democracy in the Caribbean as to fight a real war, the risks they face are not always readily assessable.
'Good Somalia'
Pentagon officers now talk of "good Somalia," when U.S. troops successfully staved off starvation for tens of thousands, and "bad Somalia," when they were ordered to hunt for the warlord Mohamed Farah Aidid and disarm a militant populace.
The result: A humanitarian mission turned into a bloody disaster when 18 American Rangers were killed in a gunbattle with Aidid supporters. The cost instantly became too high, and the troops were ordered out.
In Haiti, what was initially planned as an invasion suddenly turned into an uncontested arrival. To date, there has not been one U.S. combat fatality in Haiti, although more than 20,000 troops were landed, a military dictatorship was displaced and democracy was restored.
That, by any standard, is an outstanding success, but it started in confusion with U.S. commanders ordering their troops not to intervene in Haitian-on-Haitian violence for risk of being injured or killed.
This prodded the New York Times defense correspondent, Michael R. Gordon, to report "an important shift in the Pentagon's concept of military planning: a casualty-free operation."
He wrote: "With the American military fearful of losing public support for a contentious mission, holding down casualties . . . is now a criterion for success."
A senior European diplomat in Washington said: "There is now an acceptable level for U.S. casualties in terms of overseas intervention that is somewhere between zero and 18. This, indeed, will be a restraint in its response to overseas crises in the future."
Fear of casualties
Currently, fear of casualties in Haiti is keeping the Clinton administration from responding to appeals from President Jean-Bertrand Aristide for U.S. troops to disarm renegade army units and criminal gangs threatening the stability of the fledgling democracy.
The decision not to put U.S. ground forces at risk in Bosnia is now at the heart of the trans-Atlantic furor that has thrown the very existence of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization into question.
European nations that have contributed 23,000 peacekeepers to Bosnia have taken exception to the absence of GI Joe, and the persistent U.S. demands -- finally abandoned two weeks ago -- for more airstrikes, which could put European troops at greater risk.
Why aren't U.S. troops alongside the allied forces in Bosnia, notably the British and French? The short answer is that U.S. policy-makers decided that it would take hundreds of thousands of troops to impose a military solution to the crisis, making the casualty risk simply too great in comparison to the U.S. interests.
"We live in a world of choices," said a Pentagon spokesman, Ken Bacon. "One of the choices policy-makers are paid to make is when it is worth risking American lives and when it is not. We have made the decision it is not worth risking American lives [in the former Yugoslavia] at this time."
The formula used inside the Pentagon and the White House for deciding when to risk U.S. lives was defined most recently by Defense Secretary William J. Perry in a speech last month to the Fortune Forum in Philadelphia. He differentiated among vital national interests, national interests and humanitarian interests.
Vital interests include the danger of nuclear war or other threats to the survival of the United States and its allies, or to its economic interests.
These justify the risk of military conflict. Mr. Perry pointed to the confrontations with Iraq and North Korea as examples of the United States mobilizing major forces and being ready to commit them.
National interests include situations where the United States has a stake but not an overwhelming one, so that the risks of military intervention must be weighed against the benefits.
Too dangerous
In Bosnia the balance tipped toward the risks, persuading U.S. policy-makers that it was too dangerous. In Haiti, the benefits were deemed overwhelming, producing the U.S.-backed restoration of democracy.
Humanitarian interests arise when the United States feels compelled to use its military force to prevent a catastrophe of such dimensions that normal relief services cannot cope. The most recent example was the U.S. mission to Rwanda.
Pentagon officials acknowledge that they are now faced with a new global security equation, but they deny any major heightening of their sensitivity to casualties.
The military, they say, has always taken every conceivable step to prevent loss of life.
What has changed is that many of the challenges U.S. forces now face stop short of all-out war and present greater opportunities for weighing the risks and reducing the bloodshed.
Gilbert A. Lewthwaite, a Washington correspondent for The Baltimore Sun, covers defense affairs.