Some members of the Armed Services Committee insisted the Clinton administration answer questions about specific U.S. interests in the Balkans, and why U.S. forces should protect them.
Most of those cuts will come in Europe, which will make the U.S. presence in the Balkans increasingly difficult to sustain and raise doubts about Bush's commitment to NATO, much less to an enlarged NATO.
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"It's the Monte Carlo of the Balkans, " says Alain Bourdin, chief financial officer of the Korston Group, which has set up a jet chartering service to fly wealthy Russians to its casino in Montenegro during the week and weekends.
Under criticism for the U.N. military's performance in the Balkans, Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali wanted the Eastern Slavonia operation to be part of the Bosnian NATO mission.
Before the 1998 elections, Richard Holbrooke, the Clinton administration's special envoy to the Balkans, reflected on the problem.
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So far, the government has managed to display Britain's military prowess in the Balkans without acknowledging the existence of a crisis.
And the EU's role in delivering stability in the Balkans.
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Meanwhile, it bears noting that in recent years Japan has contributed much more to Europe's security, largely through aid to the Balkans, than Europe has to East Asia's.
Having been deployed in the Gulf and Falkland's War, as well as the Balkans, elite forces such as the SAS are considered ideal for intelligence-gathering operations within Afghanistan.
Though Slav Macedonians have a long-running feud with Greece over their use of the name Macedonia, they now find themselves aligned with Greeks (and Serbs) in their fear of Albanian nationalism, whose emergence as a new factor in the Balkans has gathered pace since the failure of Serbia's murderous drive to crush the Kosovars.
Because of this identification, Mr Halberstam holds back from asking some really hard questions about America's policy in the Balkans, including its role in the final months of the Bosnian war.
NATO's intervention in the Balkans, not to mention their utter dependence on America for things like electronic warfare, airborne radar and satellite intelligence, does anyone have to worry about Europe getting too big for its military boots?
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As the recent assassination of Serbia's Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic demonstrated, the Balkans will continue to be unstable, turbulent.
If people in Macedonia and elsewhere in the western Balkans lose hope of ever joining the EU, says Macedonia's deputy prime minister, Ivica Bocevski, everybody should start worrying about regional stability.
Last month Bush promised to enlarge NATO and to keep U.S. troops in the Balkans as long as necessary.
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Nothing in the Bosnia agreement-in-principle deals with fighting in the Balkans or NATO's continued bombing of Bosnian Serb military targets.
On the war in Kosovo, Mr Allen has struggled to strike an awkward balance between the conservative Republican orthodoxy that the United States should stay out of the Balkans and Virginia's strong military tradition.
He is now three-for-three: his trips this year to North Korea, Haiti and the Balkans have, in the words of the Center for Security Policy's directory, Frank J.
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Not only is the U.S. unwilling to commit combat troops to ground action in the Balkans, but NATO is unlikely to consider such a move, he said.
In the past few years, his support for Serbia in Bosnia and his refusal to recognise Macedonia because of its name squandered Greece's chance to help make the Balkans safer.
We're not in a contest for anything, we haven't got a vacancy, we've got a leader that's respected from Spain and the Balkans through to the United States and we're working together to deliver to those people who worked for us and elected us.
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Early reviews of "Shruggy Ji" have likened its music to that of Washington-based Go-Go, and the band's sound is often compared to the music of New Orleans or the Balkans.
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To make up for the labour shortages in Italy's north, many thousand of immigrants from Central Europe and the Balkans are flowing in, legally and illegally.
The same imbalance applies now in the Balkans, notwithstanding last year's strategic defence review, which argued for retaining an ability to project British power overseas.
For example, members of NATO, along with Russia, are worried about suggestions that Bush might pull U.S. peacekeeping troops out of the Balkans, and try to implement a space-based missile defense system.
Unlike the Balkans, however, Indonesia contains 220m people, and is far and away the world's largest Muslim country: this would be chaos on an epic scale.
The talks are expected to focus on the Middle East, the stand-off over Iran's nuclear programme, North Korea's missile tests, energy security and the Balkans.
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