What Should the Middle East and Ukraine Learn from the Balkans?

Abstract

The UN-endorsed doctrine known as “Responsibility to Protect” is one important outcome from the Balkans, honored more in the breach than the observance in the Middle East and Ukraine. There are others: leadership is important to starting, preventing, and ending wars; prevention can work, if undertaken early with adequate resources; ethnic partition likely will not; international contributions can be vital; neighborhood counts; power sharing and decentralization can help. Applying these lessons to the Middle East is difficult, not least because there are so many warring parties involved. Ukraine is far simpler and could prove negotiable, but only if Russia, the EU, and the United States are prepared to engage seriously to restore the country’s sovereignty while allowing its regions a large measure of autonomy.