In hope of the Ambassadorial luck

Serbia’s forthcoming Ambassador to the US, Vladimir Petrovic, says that he will focus on developing a close relationship with the  National Security Council in order to counterweight the State Department’s disastrous influence on the US policy making on Serbia.

So we have the NSC Affairs, for example, who prepare meetings with foreign leaders and in connection with the President’s foreign travel and advises and provides Presidential briefings on policy matters.

The presumption here is that Serbia can get more Presidential sympathy though the National Security Council (NSC) that is the tool of the President rather then with the State Department that is the tool of the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

So is the Ambassador Petrovic overly optimistic and if so, what are the obstacles to Petrovic’s mission?

For starters, under Obama, the NSC is packed with the Secretary of State who brings her State Department policy along with her personal baggage to the table.

Second, that the NSC sentiments of Serbia are in a shared animus with the State Department is attested in the recent book on the NSC history by David Rothkopf who, among other things, was the managing Director of the Kissinger Associates that have handled Serbia’s car import in the 1980s, the Yugo.

Says Rothkopf in Running the World:

The Albanian majority in the province of Kosovo… had been disappointed by the agreement in Dayton, which, in their view, failed to recognize their long-standing and [in Rothkopf's and NSC's view, my point] justified demand for independence. [page 372]

Rothkopf also cites the case of Carter’s VP meeting on the Iran crisis when he “lamented that there was not a single Iranian expert in the room”.

Although Rothkopf quotes General William Odom as saying that experts are inept policy makers in the high level policy meetings because they the are “in love with the people from the area” and thus prejudice the rationality… presidents still love them.

Which raises the obvious question: who gets to pick these experts and why. Witness, for example, recent “expert” testimony of Paddy Ashdown and Ivo Banac, two individuals who made a career in bashing Serbs presumably out of hatred, to the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe.

There are also limits what NSC staffers can do, not only because they cannot be recipients of money, but also, as Rozanne Ridgway who worked on various Reagan teams on Soviet Union says from her experience: “Unless the decision comes from the top, nothing happens. You can’t make policy from the bottom [NSC staff] up.”

Having Biden up on top sure threads heavy against what Petrovic hopes to develop with the NSC.

Finally, we do find in Rothkopf that presidents make informal agreements with other countries, or perhaps even entities such as Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian separatists. Brent Scawcoft was, for example, adamant to find out what “kinds of informal agreements we may have with other countries” as the Reagan administration was taking over from Carter.

Then, of course, there are secret executive agreements that the US presidents make with other countries and entities and such agreements do not have to be disclosed to the Congress nor the NSC.

“In year 1889 to 1939, of 1441 international compacts 917 were executive agreements and only 524 treaties,” informs us Arthur Schlessinger, a statistic that suggests the meaninglessness of treaties bunch of which Serbia signed in the past recognizing its borders to include Kosovo.

To illustrate these secret executive agreements and their potency, for example, in 1992, James Baker summoned Lawrence Eagleberger to launch a media campaign against Serbia only after the Saudi Sultan approached the Bush senior administration to aid the Bosnian Muslims against the Serbs and to warn Milosevic on attacking Kosovo (so-called Christmas warning) in time when Albanian separatists were not even armed nor did Belgrade, preoccupied with Croatia and Bosnia, have an inkling to attack Albanians.

We wish future Ambassador luck.