Free Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir by Christopher R. Hill

mightily to the fraying of the transatlantic relations. The breakup of Yugoslavia was fast shaping up as a major post–Cold War crisis gripping the young Clinton administration.
    But the complexity of it exceeded people’s patience in trying to understand it. On the one hand, there was the interest of the northern republics, Slovenia and Croatia, to exit a state consisting of poorer regions and republics that they felt were holding them back. To want to leave seemed fair enough, especially when these aspirations were consistent with long-standing U.S. sympathy for self-determination. But changing of international borders was not something lightly regarded in Europe, or in the United States or anywhere for that matter. Croatian and Slovene nationalists regarded Yugoslavia as a conspiracy to enshrine the hegemony of Serbia. Yet the origins of the Yugoslav state were far more complex, and in fact in the early twentieth century those two republics wanted to join forces with Serbia to resist the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
    From the Serb nationalist point of view, another narrative flowed, that of Yugoslavia being a conspiracy to make the great nation of the Serbs a one-eighth player among five other republics and two autonomous regions, in effect denying the Serbs their sovereign place in Europe. This latter narrative in Serbia, so cynically and shamelessly exploited byits leader, Slobodan Milosevic, ultimately worked with Croatian and Slovene nationalism to break up Yugoslavia.
    But breaking up is hard to do, and with the internal political maps of Yugoslavia not corresponding to the internal ethnic map, war, a phenomenon well-known in the Balkans, was a present danger. When the European Union countries gave diplomatic recognition to Bosnia, having encouraged the Bosnians to hold a referendum, they hoped that diplomatic recognition would end the matter. Instead, the Serbs sharpened their pitchforks.
    Many Serbs had lived in Croatia and Bosnia for centuries. When these republics seceded, Serbia claimed parts of each of them.
    Amid all this history, the supply of which certainly exceeded the demand for it, the State Department’s European bureau was far better set up to deal with the need for thoughtful, well-drafted, and typo-free memos to prepare senior officials for polite discussions with European senior officials than it was for the direct diplomacy required to deal with those responsible for murder and mayhem in distant Balkan villages.
    Bureaucratically, the Balkans was still handled as a kind of backwater, the issues tucked away in the so-called southern tier of the Office of Eastern Europe and Yugoslav Affairs, located on a floor below that of the assistant secretary. Meanwhile, offices that dealt with Europe’s “architecture,” including NATO, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and the European Union, were all located within shouting distance of the assistant secretary.
    Holbrooke’s first step was to make EUR more like the East Asian and Pacific Affairs (EAP) bureau, which he had run during the Carter administration—make the offices smaller and eliminate middle management, that is, the deputy directors, and thus remove the “layered look” and turn it into a bureau with an operational mandate capable of dealing with the real crises of the day.
    A week before I had been enjoying my new role as the deputy director in the Office of Eastern European Affairs. I was responsible for thenorthern tier of countries, which included all the Baltic states and the upper tier of east-central European states, including Poland, where I had served just three years before. But as much as I was interested in working on these countries, I realized that by the summer of 1994 they had lost a lot of their luster. There were no crises to manage. Soviet troops were fast withdrawing from bases in the now-independent Baltic States, and some of the relationships were burgeoning—namely, with Poland—with the