reporters, he deliberately and pointedly added, “We [meaning the Clinton administration! are not about to do that.” ²

The futility of UN and NATO buck-passing on Bosnia was, in part, a reflection of the post-Cold War paradox of international security. The Cold War United Nations was deadlocked by the Security Council vetoes of the Americans and Soviets, reflecting their bipolar competition for global political and military preeminence. The end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union opened the door to cooperation between Russia and its Security Council partners in support of UN peacekeeping. However, the United Nations carried a structural limitation from its founding into the new world order. The United Nations was built as an organization of state governments, constituted to deal with the problem of interstate war and other threats to peace and security. The largest challenge facing the United Nations after 1990 was not interstate war, but violence within territorial states. This violence was rooted in political controversies related to ethnonationalistic and religious civil wars, environmental deterioration, proliferation of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, mass starvation and malnutrition, and other agenda items for which Cold War reflexes were clearly inappropriate. ³

Not all of these issues posed security problems for the United States, Russia, and other great powers, but some did. A new context for security and defense decision making clearly had arrived with the departure of the Cold War and the disestablishment of Soviet military power. NATO and the Soviet Union had imposed on Europe a security glacis that prevented not only the outbreak of a major war but also the development of small wars that could escalate into a major regional conflict. For example, as long as Yugoslavia remained a unitary state under the firm grip of national communists, its ethnic and religious differences were submerged within a larger political community. When the communists lost their grip on Yugoslavia and on other states in Southern and East Central Europe, nationalism filled the power vacuum. First Slovenia, then Croatia, and finally Bosnia declared themselves to be independent states with unique ethnic bases of legitimacy.

In Algeria and in Egypt, nationalists clashed with Islamic fundamentalists. Nationalism was one of the major forces driving the Soviet Union toward a breakup into 15 former Soviet republics, now independent states seeking territorial integrity and political sovereignty. Three of those states, in addition to the Russian Federation, had nuclear weapons: Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Civil wars marked efforts to stabilize government authority in Azerbaijan, Moldova, Georgia, and other former Soviet republics contiguous to Russia along the arc of Russia's “near abroad.” Ethnic, including tribal, disputes previously thought to be confined to the third world appeared in East Central and Western Europe, including ethnic Hungarians in Romania, Basques in

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