Nearly three years after Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, Kiev’s outlook appears worse than ever. Ukrainian forces, facing manpower shortages, are losing territory at a faster pace than in the first 30 months of the conflict.
Now, Kiev looks at an evolving political situation where future support is less certain. President Donald Trump has promised to end the war in Ukraine, and several prominent figures in the MAGA movement are calling for an end to shipping billions of dollars to Kiev as Americans struggle.
If Kiev is going to make a deal to end the war, it will be decidedly worse than the one that was on the table in 2022. In April, just two months after the invasion, an agreement between Moscow and Kiev was nearly completed that would have seen Ukraine retain all its territory except for the Crimean Peninsula, which was annexed in 2014.
Over the past three years, the Kremlin has annexed four additional regions in Ukraine that Putin says will never be returned to Kiev.
Ukraine fighting a three-year war at the insistence of the West only to get a worse deal is not the first time an American “ally” in Europe was pushed to fight a war for no reason.
30 years after the Dayton Accords were signed, it is important to look back at the Bosnian War because it teaches an important lesson about the current war in Ukraine. The following is an excerpt from Scott Horton’s new book, Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine, on the negotiations in Bosnia during the George HW Bush and Bill Clinton administrations.
Kyle Anzalone
Lisbon Deal
In July 1991, Serb Democratic Party (SDS) leader Radovan Karadžić and Adil Zulfikarpašić from the Muslim Bosniak Organization (MBO) signed the Zulfikarpašić-Karadžić agreement which would have kept the union between Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro. However, as mentioned above, Bosnian President Alija Izetbegović initially supported but then opposed the deal, killing it. This process repeated itself early the next year after the Badinter Commission, when, in February 1992, the Carrington-Cutileiro plan, or “Lisbon deal,” was struck by Portuguese Foreign Minister Jose Cutileiro between Bosnian Muslim, Croat and Serb representatives. The deal said that Bosnia-Herzegovina would remain united politically but would be divided into three ethno-religious cantons with a very weak central government in the capital city of Sarajevo. The supposedly intransigent Bosnian Serbs were represented at the meeting by Karadžić, who said, “Either we remain in Yugoslavia, or else we will get a sovereign state in Bosnia-Herzegovina which will form an alliance of states, that is a confederation, together with the other two states.” The Bosnian Serbs were willing to accept independence from Yugoslavia and reduce the proportion of land they controlled from approximately 60 percent to only 42.5 percent.
Said by the U.S. to be the aggressors in this part of the war, the Bosnian Serbs were satisfied with this compromise. Zimmermann says “Karadžić was ecstatic” over this deal, which would give the Bosnian Serbs plenty of autonomy in a new system “based on three constituent nations and joined by a common government and assembly.”
Izetbegović had said he would support the arrangement, originally accepting and signing the Lisbon deal; then, two days later, on American advice, he killed it, this time starting a war. It was Amb. Zimmermann who was responsible. As recounted by State Department official George Kenney, then-head of the Yugoslavia desk, “Zimmermann told Izetbegović, ‘Look, why don’t you wait and see what the U.S. can do for you?’ meaning, ‘We’ll recognize you and then help you out. So don’t go ahead with the Lisbon agreement, don’t accept the Cutileiro plan, and just hold out for some kind of unitary Bosnian state.’” Canadian Amb. Bissett added, “Upon finding that Izetbegović was having second thoughts about the agreement he had signed in Lisbon, the Ambassador suggested that if he withdrew his signature, the United States would grant recognition to Bosnia as an independent state.” Izetbegović was convinced. He then “withdrew his signature and renounced the agreement.” Two days later, on March 30, he called for a referendum on secession. Just a few days after that, on April 4, he announced a full military mobilization. On the 6th he declared independence. The war was on. Referring to the peace deal that finally ended the war two and a half years later, Damjan Krnjevic-Miskovic wrote: “One still hears it said that ‘the difference between the Lisbon and the Dayton agreements is simply two years of mass graves.’”
Though he denied it in his book, Zimmermann later admitted his error to the Times. “Our hope was the Serbs would hold off if it was clear Bosnia had the recognition of Western countries. It turned out we were wrong.” He confessed, “He said he didn’t like it. I told him, if he didn’t like it, why sign it?” In retrospect, “the Lisbon agreement wasn’t bad at all.” That was too bad, because, as the paper said, “after talking to the Ambassador, Mr. Izetbegović publicly renounced the Lisbon agreement.”
After citing another Times report which said the U.S. had intervened to ruin the Lisbon deal, Tucker and Hendrickson wrote that “Izetbegović’s repudiation of the… agreement… was the immediate trigger for the war,” but that “[t]he war may have occurred in any event. The Lisbon formula was vague in crucial respects, and contained no agreement respecting the boundaries of the three cantons.” Still, they wrote, that “cannot detract from the judgment that American diplomats acted in an extremely irresponsible manner… If war was to be averted, an agreement respecting cantonization was the last step at which it might have been.” The two also noted that even though the Bosnian referendum was necessary to satisfy the requirements of the EC and U.S., the referendum itself was unconstitutional. The constitution “had conferred a right of secession but made it dependent on the mutual agreement of the nations composing Yugoslavia… [T]o move to secession without the consent of the Serbs was a plain violation of its terms.”
They also showed that there is nothing in the international law that confers upon the United States or anyone else the authority to intervene or to take sides in civil wars or wars of secession in other sovereign nations, and that the U.S. recognition of Bosnia’s independence was “an illegal intervention in Yugoslavia’s internal affairs, to which Belgrade had every right to object.” Otherwise, “the contrary view may only be asserted on the debased view that international law is whatever the United States and the Security Council says it is and that we are free, like an Alice in the grip of deconstructionism, to have words mean anything we like.”
With the Germans making initial inroads in the newly independent Croatia and Slovenia, and taking a strong lead in the EC on the issue, the U.S. government wanted Bosnia to be their project along the same lines, even though the intelligence agencies, and even the Germans, were warning that Bosnia would “blow up” into civil war. David Binder wrote that Secretary Baker, by recognizing Bosnian independence, “literally created… Bosnia-Herzegovina… with the blessing of President Bush, with considerable input from Lawrence Eagleburger and Warren Zimmermann.” Despite the warnings from leaders on every side of the issue, Zimmermann had gone ahead and recommended recognition of Bosnian independence. Of course this led directly to war between the Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Serbs. In his own defense, Zimmermann deployed the circular argument that the war he helped provoke would have happened anyway, since the Bosnian Serbs’ landgrabs, launched after Izetbegović’s declaration of independence, would have caused what up until then had not happened.
Roger Cohen wrote in the Times that “[w]ith the precedent of 1991, when a much smaller Serbian minority went to war to resist joining a Croatian state, this international decision on Bosnia looks as close to criminal negligence as a diplomatic act can be.” He added, “Indeed, international recognition and the outbreak of the Bosnian war were simultaneous: the world put a light to a fuse.” He must have meant President Bush.
Once the war started, factions of the JNA stayed in Bosnia and merged with Bosnian Serb forces, making them better equipped than their new enemies and leaving open the argument that Serbian troops were participating in a deniable role as members of local Bosnian Serb forces, though the majority of them were still Bosnian.
The Bush and Clinton administrations went on to sabotage a series of peace offers between 1992 and 1995, until Clinton finally signed the Dayton Accords in November 1995, which, as the Times conceded, looked much like the Lisbon deal from three years before, only with less land for America’s chosen Muslim allies and an indefinite NATO military presence.
Source: AntiWar.
