Gravitas

Gravitas

Today it describes the impression that an individual conveys to others about his/her competence, ability to deal with issues, experience, power, strength, and reliability.

A decade ago when I was part of a committee to choose new career American Ambassadors, we looked, above all else, for this sense of personal “gravitas.” American political campaigns are filled with evaluations of which candidates have or lack it.

This hard-to-measure, non-physical quality is valued so highly because one’s effectiveness and ability to accomplish his/her goals is directly related to the presence or absence of gravitas. An Ambassador with it, for example, is far more likely to persuade a reluctant foreign government to take difficult measures than another Ambassador without it.

A classic example (which may or may not be fair) is the charge that our Ambassador in Iraq in the crucial period before Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 was perceived by Saddam as lacking this gravitas and thus her warnings to him to avoid aggressive military steps were not taken as seriously as they should have been.  On the other end of the spectrum, Richard Holbrooke defines the word. While only an Assistant Secretary of State, those with whom he interacted perceived him as if he were the President himself.

Countries are viewed through this prism as well. And the reality is that collectively, the United States has lost much of its international gravitas over the past seven years of the Bush Administration. It slipped away, primarily in the sands of Iraq. The stress on our military and the continuing quagmire there guarantees that we are unable to even contemplate any additional sort of ground war elsewhere.

But perhaps more importantly, the Administration has been incapable of taking decisive, substantive policy initiatives in any other area. The only possible conclusions are that either the key personnel in the Administration simply don’t know how to effectively use the powers that they do have or that the leadership is so focused on Iraq and the slide of Presidential authority and popularity that it is essentially “frozen in place.”

A recent example of this weakness is the trip by the Secretary of State to the Middle East. It just wasn’t serious. It was more like diplomatic tourism. For decades, one of the signatures of American foreign policy was the strong, predominant role we had in trying to broker peace between Israel and its neighbors. Henry Kissinger’s Shuttle Diplomacy, the Camp David Agreement of President Carter are but two examples.

Until now, every American Administration for decades has had a sustained, major initiative to try to move this process along. Now, the American Secretary of State is listened to politely and ignored. Every time this happens, it reinforces the impression that the United States is no longer the serious player in world policy that it once was.

The recent fiasco in Washington during the concurrent visits of Prime Minister Dodik of the Republika Srpska and the Bosniak Representative on the Collective Presidency of Bosnia Haris Silajdzic illustrates well both this lack of American gravitas and how actions by our officials inadvertently make the problem even worse.

We meant well. Dodik and Silajdzic have been engaging in an escalating war of words, which has helped to highlight the strong differences, which still exist in Bosnia today among the three ethnic groups. The wounds of war, far from healing, have been reopened lately with the issuance of the ruling of the International Court of Justice on the genocide suit brought against Serbia by Bosnia and also by developments in Kosovo.

It was important, therefore, to get both of them to tone down their rhetoric. It is equally important to help them reach compromises on key issues such as revision of the Constitution and Police Reform so that Bosnia as a whole can move forward economically and politically.

As Special Assistant to the President and Secretary of State for Bosnian Peace Implementation in 1996 and 1997, I remember very well the clout that the United States had at that time and our ability to cajole, persuade, and ultimately force the respective ethnic groups to reach agreement after agreement in implementing the Dayton Peace Treaty.

The respect for our government, solidified through the actions of Richard Holbrooke and others, was such that it rubbed off on its emissaries, such as me. We were fully backed, as necessary, by higher levels of the U.S. Administration up to the President himself. What I said was taken far more seriously because of this perception of American power and our active presence and interest in the region. Without that degree of support, my mission would have been impossible.

That was then. This is now. What my former colleagues in Washington tried to do with Dodik/Silajdzic was to emulate the practices, which we routinely did ten years ago.  This time, however, there were two fatal flaws. First of all, they did not take into consideration the drop in American prestige around the world and the collective perception that we are not as powerful as we were before. Neither Dodik nor Silajdzic felt the need to comply with our demands.

Secondly, U.S. officials showed an alarming lack of understanding of Bosnian politics. By not including the Croats in the discussions, they broke one of the cardinal rules of dealing with Bosnia over the past fifteen years.  All three ethnic groups watch each other’s relations with the outside world very carefully and are all are both suspicious and envious of any activity, which does not include them.

Just as importantly, the U.S. Administration entered into negotiations on issues which are of utmost political and ideological importance to the respective leaders of the Bosnian Serbs and Muslims with absolutely no effective or important carrots or sticks which to persuade them to reach any sort of compromise. Moreover, they did so with no real coordination with the European Union, which now has the lead in Bosnian affairs.

The official State Department statement on the talks was that “The United States is disappointed that President Silajdzic and Prime Minister Dodik were unable to reach agreement on these issues.

By failing to overcome their differences, they are making it impossible for Bosnia and Herzegovina to proceed on its path to full integration into Euro-Atlantic structures…” In other words, the talks were a failure or as the headline in the Financial Times states “Bosnia talks end in disarray.”

This result was very predictable. In fact it was predicted by almost every political expert one Bosnian newspaper polled. For the talks to have succeeded at this time, it would have been necessary to do the following:

a)                             Be able to involve higher levels of the Administration at key times in the talks

b)                            Have a clear bottom line on what we wanted to accomplish which took into account the stands of the Bosnian participants

c)                             Have worked out in advance with the European Union a clear, concrete, and meaningful set of carrots and sticks

d)                            Given the current EU role in Bosnia, have a representative included in the talks

e)                             Include a Bosnian Croat representative in the talks.

Dodik, who had planned an extensive series of meetings with businessmen, Congressmen, and foreign affairs specialists found his schedule turned upside down. He even ended up cancelling a speech at the Council of Foreign Relations because of the pressures exerted upon him in the State Department meetings.

This reportedly included a threat by the U.S. Ambassador to Bosnia to have him removed from office, using the “Bonn Powers.” Silajdzic, who has had far longer experience in dealing with the vagaries of the Washington political scene, was probably less discombobulated. Nevertheless, he also got in a parting shot by using the occasion of a speech at CSIS to raise the specter of Muslim extremism growing in Bosnia if things weren’t changed as he wanted them to be.

Both went home having maintained or even hardened the radically different political views which have brought both to power in their respective communities. Certainly, it was another blow to chances of cooperation in Bosnia. But the biggest blow was to…U.S. gravitas.