ABSTRACT
Bill Clinton’s version of liberal internationalism was, as we saw in the previous chapter, assailed from a variety of standpoints. By turns, it was attacked as imperialist, cynically over-restrictive, foggily idealistic and expensively irrelevant to core American interests. Another line of critical argumentation relates particularly to the regional conflicts to be discussed in this chapter: Bosnia, Kosovo and Northern Ireland. Robert Kaplan in 1993 published a book entitled, Balkans Ghosts. Bill Clinton reportedly emerged from a reading of Kaplan’s grim history with the words: ‘They’ve been fighting each other for 500 years. . . . We need to stay out of there.’1
