US isolationists invoked fabricated ancient-history claims to justify abandoning Bosnia.

Evidence

The Balkanist mask, donned and removed by the Clinton administration, was put back to work by the isolationist wing of the Republican party. All of Bosnia (and its four million human lives) was not worth one American soldier, exclaimed one candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. One congressman proclaimed that “they have been fighting” in the Balkans for fifteen hundred years, oblivious to the fact that none of the major religious and ethnic groups in Bosnia had yet settled in the Balkans by that time. The culmination of the Balkanism frenzy was reached by Congressman William Goodling of Pennsylvania, who announced it “all began in the fourth-century split of the Roman Empire.” — Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, 334

Categorization

• SEED: Potential essay angle: how pseudo-history of ‘ancient hatreds’ functions as a rhetorical tech for moral disengagement — the fabricated timeline claim is checkable and damning.

Related

• Balkanism falsely frames Balkan violence as fated by history or blood (similarity 0.80)