eorge W. Bush and his chief foreign policy adviser, Condoleeza Rice, deserve two cheers for directness. They have left no doubt that a Bush administration would remove the 11,400 US peacekeeping troops on duty in Bosnia and Kosovo. Admirable as their clarity may be, however, they are propounding a bad idea that would cause considerable damage to the trans-Atlantic alliance that has long been the bedrock of American security.
''The governor is talking about a new division of labor,'' Rice told The New York Times. ''The United States is the only power that can handle a showdown in the Gulf, mount the kind of force that is needed to protect Saudi Arabia, and deter a crisis in the Taiwan Straits. And extended peacekeeping detracts from our readiness for these kinds of global missions.''
This rigid ordering of priorities may reflect the preferences of some Army officers, but the reality is that US peacekeepers in the Balkans represent fewer than 10 percent of the US military forces stationed in Europe and fewer than 20 percent of the NATO peacekeeping soldiers serving in Bosnia and Kosovo.
Because a decade has passed since a Warsaw Pact invasion of West Germany was the primary threat to Europe, the work of NATO peacekeepers in the Balkans can hardly be considered a hindrance to the NATO mission of protecting the democratic states of Europe. On the contrary, the sole substantial threat to European stability since the early 1990s has come from the Balkans.
The need to cope with that threat has become NATO's principal reason for being. But disputes about how to share the burdens of the Balkan mission have riven the Atlantic alliance. For a long time, European allies with soldiers on the ground in Bosnia vehemently opposed American proposals to lift the arms embargo on the region or to bomb Bosnian Serb perpetrators of ethnic cleansing. This quarrel within NATO became nasty at certain moments, threatening to undo the solidarity the allies had developed over more than four decades of Cold War cooperation.
At the core of the quarrel was a basic imbalance. Europeans resented Washington's willingness to place European soldiers at risk when there were no American troops in Bosnia to share that risk. As a result of this rift over Bosnia, the European allies are now engaged in creating a 60,000-strong European defense force that will be capable of acting independently of Washington.
This attempt to counter America's sway in NATO could only appear validated when candidate Bush said in the second debate: ''I hope our European friends become the peacekeepers in Bosnia and the Balkans. I hope that they put the troops on the ground so that we can withdraw our troops and focus our military on fighting and winning war.''
To allies who are already providing 80 percent of the troops and most of the money to revive war-torn Balkan societies, Bush's proposed division of labor betokens an American unilateralism that naively encourages Balkan extremists to wait out America's notorious impatience.
The Clinton administration may be criticized for mishandling relations with America's allies. But if Bush were to proscribe any US role in peacekeeping, he would make strains in the Atlantic alliance much worse, sacrificing America's national interests to the parochial institutional interests of the Army brass.
