The Foreign Service Journal, December 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2020 67 keen sense of history and a strong desire to avoid the kind of deep rifts between the White House and the State Department that had plagued the Nixon and Carter administrations. “I had witnessed the negative examples of the past, and I did not want to repeat them,” he recalls. Elected on a campaign promise to focus on the American economy, the new president was disinclined to devote time to international affairs during his first year in office. His inat- tention came at a price: Unsuccessful military operations in Somalia and Haiti embarrassed the White House and elicited sharp criticism of an administration that Lake now concedes was initially “disjointed” in its handling of foreign policy. These early setbacks would then be overshadowed by developments in Bosnia, where Clinton faced a burgeoning crisis that had first started during the tenure of his predecessor. President George H.W. Bush’s national security team had recoiled from the conflict, as Bosnian Serb forces laid siege to Sarajevo and embarked on a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing across the fledgling country. Initial American and European entreat- ies to end the bloodshed foundered, exposing a dithering lack of resolve to address the worst human suffering in Europe since World War II. “The breakup of Yugoslavia posed the first major post–Cold War test for the United States and its Euro- pean allies,” wrote Ivo Daalder, who served under Lake on the National Security Council staff during the Dayton negotiations and later authored a book on Bosnia policy: “It is a test they failed miserably.” “Diplomacy that is not backed by power can be feckless,” Lake comments dryly, speaking in unabashed realpolitik terms, “but power without diplomacy can be homicidal.” At the begin- ning of his career, he had watched successive administrations use military force inside a political and diplomatic vacuum in Vietnam. Three decades later, as Lake oversaw interagency deliberations on how to end the violence in Bosnia, he con- fronted the opposite problem. Only a credible threat could bring the warring sides to the negotiating table, but propos- als to use American military power in the Balkans faced stiff resistance on several fronts. European allies, who had deployed lightly armed troops to Bosnia as part of the United Nations Protection Force, were fearful of retaliatory measures against their soldiers by the more heavily armed Bosnian Serb forces; senior leaders in the Pentagon were wary of mission creep and the prospect of deploying ground forces; and Secretary of State Warren Christopher sought to focus on containing the conflict rather than ending it. Lake, along with Vice President Al Gore and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright, pushed vigorously but unsuccessfully to break the impasse. After two years and minimal progress on Bosnia, the White House was running out of time to act. By 1995 conditions on the ground were worsening, and the war was at risk of becom- ing a political liability for the president at the outset of his 1996 reelection campaign. Sensing an opportunity to chart a new course, Lake gathered a group of aides in his West Wing office on a Saturday morning in June 1995, much as Kissinger had sum- moned Lake 25 years before. But this time, the outcome would be markedly different. “The goal was to take a more flexible diplomatic approach to end the war, combined with removal of some of the barriers to the use of military force,” recalls Lake, who led a daylong discussion on ideas and options. The result was the so-called “endgame strategy.” Buttressed by support from Albright and Gore, Lake pre- sented the plan to Clinton in August, and he promptly approved it over the objections of the Department of State. The president immediately dispatched Lake to Europe to sell the strategy to the Allies and assuage lingering concerns in the region. “We pushed on open doors,” Lake recounts modestly of his meetings with senior officials in the United Kingdom, France, Russia and else- where, where he succeeded in winning broad international sup- port. His trip paved the way for a negotiating team led by Richard Holbrooke to conduct shuttle diplomacy and convene the lead- ers of Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia for negotiations at Wright Pat- terson Air Force Base outside Dayton, Ohio. What resulted would become one of the most significant foreign policy achievements of Clinton’s presidency—the 1995 Dayton Accords. Twenty-five years after Anthony Lake’s conscience com- pelled him to resign from the U.S. Foreign Service over the Vietnam War, his enduring commitment to American diplo- macy helped end the Bosnian War. After devoting his life to public service, he remains firm in his belief that principles and pragmatism are both essential elements of American foreign policy. “We can aspire to live up to our ideals without living under illusions,” says Lake, conveying a tempered optimism. “Cynicism is a form of surrender.” n The son of a New Deal Democrat father and an Eisenhower Republican mother, Lake had ideas and aspirations that were influenced by John F. Kennedy.