Foggy Bottom rhetoric on Kosovo.

This attempt at policy-insurance via rhetoric barely masks the series of awful truths that America’s Kosovo policy seeks to avoid: that both propositions underlying the province’s independence are wholly false; that there is nothing sui generis about Kosovo’s circumstance; that Kosovo is “seen as a precedent for […] other situation[s] in the world today”; and that the application of that precedent is tremendously damaging to Europe as well as to actual American interests abroad. In contemplating these thing, what emerges as tremendously interesting and appalling is the rhetoric on the subject that emanates from the U.S. Department of State.

"Kosovo and the Utility of Denial." By Joshua Trevino, The Brussels Journal, 3/3/08.