1 gen 1995 anni - U.S. troops enforce peace in Bosnia

Descrizione:

Politically weakened after the congressional losses in the 1994 midterm elections, Clinton believed he could still make a difference on the international stage, where post–Cold War developments created historic opportunities. A wide arc of independent states had emerged out of the collapsing Soviet empire, bridging Eastern Europe and central Asia. The majority of the 142 million people living in these post-Soviet states were poor, but the region boasted a sizable middle class and a wealth of natural resources, especially oil and natural gas.

EXAM TIP
Evaluate the role of the U.S. as the world’s leading superpower in the world since the 1990s.

Among the challenges for the United States was the question of whether to support the admission of some of the new states into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Many observers worried, justifiably, that extending the NATO alliance into Eastern Europe would damage relations between the United States and Russia. Clinton, by encouraging NATO membership for the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary — all formerly within the Soviet bloc — nevertheless launched a process of NATO expansion that continued under his predecessors. By 2010, twelve new nations — most of them in Eastern Europe — had been admitted to the NATO alliance. Nothing symbolized the end of the Cold War more than the fact that ten of those nations were former members of the Warsaw Pact. As some observers had feared, however, NATO’s expansion damaged U.S.-Russian relations, and Russian leaders made no secret of their disdain for the West’s encroachment.

The Breakup of Yugoslavia
Two of the new NATO states, Slovenia and Croatia, had emerged out of the communist nation of Yugoslavia, a country that had uneasily perched on the fringe of the Soviet bloc. The gradual breakup of Yugoslavia also led to the first post–Cold War conflict in Europe. Slovenia and Croatia had declared independence in 1991, and in 1992, the heavily Muslim province of Bosnia-Herzegovina followed suit. But the province’s substantial Serbian population — largely Orthodox Christians — refused to live in a Muslim-run multiethnic state. Slobodan Milosevic, an uncompromising Serbian nationalist, launched a ruthless campaign of “ethnic cleansing” to create a Serbian state. Europeans and Americans failed to react swiftly to the murderous Milosevic, but Clinton finally organized a NATO-led bombing campaign and peacekeeping effort in November 1995, backed by 20,000 American troops, that ended the Serbs’ vicious expansionist drive. Four years later, a new crisis emerged in Kosovo, another province of the Serbian-dominated Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. NATO intervened once more, with the United States leading the way, to preserve Kosovo’s autonomy. By 2008, seven independent nations had emerged from the wreckage of Yugoslavia.


July 29, 1999. U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright greeting U.S. troops during a visit to Camp Bonsteel in the U.S. sector of Kosovo, in the former Yugoslavia. Between 1989 and 1992, eight independent nations emerged from the breakup of Yugoslavia, igniting religious and ethnic tensions that lasted nearly a decade.

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