For a while there, America and Russia seemed to be eyeball-to-eyeball over Bosnia and then, of course, Moscow blinked.
As a matter of fact, U.S. officials didn't outstare the Russians as much as simply ignore their threats to relaunch the Cold War if NATO's bombing of the Bosnian Serbs around Sarajevo wasn't called off.When the bombing was finally stopped last week, it was because the Bosnian Serbs were judged to have fulfilled NATO's ultimatum to withdraw their heavy weapons from around the Bosnian capital, not because of anything menacing out of Moscow.
But the brief U.S.-Russian sparring match may turn out to be the most important consequence of the entire Bosnian conflict and may have vast implications for the future of their relations.
It showed that Western diplomats remembered an essential lesson in dealing with Moscow: The Russians rely initially on bluster and bloodcurdling warnings to get their way. When these fail, they back down.
As a blusterer, Boris Yeltsin, a comparatively well-meaning if often erratic operator in other respects, isn't very different from such predecessors as Josef Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev. Stalin tried to intimidate America and its European allies by blockading Berlin in 1948 but gave up in face of the Berlin airlift.
Khrushchev sought to drive the allies out of the same city in the late 1950s with a lot of bluff and loud talk. When that didn't work, he installed missiles in Cuba in 1962. But President John F. Kennedy forced him to withdraw them - an episode that led to the Soviet Union's worst humiliation prior to its outright collapse three decades later.
Come to think of it, the czars in their time behaved in much the same way. Throughout Russia's history, bombastic threats have been hallmarks of its rulers.
Sometimes, Moscow does what it threatens to do but only when the outcome is considered a sure thing, that is, when the victim is judged too weak to fight back. However, the Russians have learned, after the dust-ups they got themselves into in Afghanistan and Chechnya, that picking even on little guys can be highly dangerous.
In the case of Bosnia, it didn't take much to call Yeltsin's bluff. Western diplomats know the Russians can't rekindle the Cold War, even if they wished to - which they don't. They haven't got the kindling. (This is literally true. Only last week, it was disclosed that some of the army's biggest bases are suffering power cutoffs because they can't pay their electricity bills.)
The Russian president's menaces were an obvious nod to the nationalist nut cases in parliament and portions of the media that pretend they're ready to go to war against America and its NATO allies to defend their "little Slav brothers," the Serbs of Bosnia. Their real target isn't the North Atlantic Treaty Organization but Yeltsin himself, whom they want to weaken further by branding as an accomplice in a Western plot to humiliate Russia.
Visitors to Russia these days note that its citizens are exhausted by the trials they've undergone in recent years. Their main concern is personal survival, not what happens in Bosnia or whether Russia retains status as a world power.
For three centuries, Russian leaders have used expansionism and saber-rattling against their neighbors to divert the attention of their own people from their miserable living conditions and slender expectations.
By telling Yeltsin in the Bosnia case to shove off, the West was actually doing him and the Russian people a huge favor.
It was a way of informing Moscow's political class that their threats no longer impress any but the faint-hearted - so they should stop worrying about their faded standing in global power politics and concentrate instead on striving to make life materially better for their long-suffering population.
Strange as it may seem, not a single Russian regime, starting with that of Czar Peter the Great 300 years ago, has ever made the people's well-being its No. 1 priority. It would be something new and different. It might even work.