Does America Have Ukraine's Back?

Does America Have Ukraine's Back?

Apr 29, 2014 02:00 am | Nikolas K. Gvosdev

Nikolas K. Gvosdev

In March 1992, as war loomed on the horizon, the various factions met in Lisbon to try and craft a deal that would hold Bosnia together and avert the predictable tragedy. Reluctantly, the country's Muslims, Croats and Serbs grappled with the creation of a decentralized country in which each ethnic group would have predominance in different cantons, bound together in a loose federation. At the last minute, the agreement was torpedoed. Many asserted that the president of Bosnia, Alija Izetbegovic, whose own authority (and that of the Muslim community over all of Bosnia) would have been diminished by the accord, had rejected it, having supposedly received assurances from the Americans (who did not like the overt partition of Bosnia on ethnic lines) that Washington would support the Bosnian government in the event of war. Three years later, after a brutal and devastating conflict in which the Bosnian government was dealt a series of devastating blows, a U.S.-sponsored peace agreement at Dayton ratified the division of Bosnia into distinct ethnic entities.
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