NATO’s Balkan Disaster: Wilsonian Warmongering Gone Mad

When ethnic Albanian guerrillas originally rejected the peace settlement for Kosovo that had been fashioned by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, a friend of hers told Newsweek that “she’s angry at everyone—the Serbs, the Albanians and NATO.” ¹ Rather than question the administration’s own handiwork, another Clinton administration official raged, “Here is the greatest nation on earth pleading with some nothing-balls to do something entirely in their own interest—which is to say ‘yes’ to an interim agreement —and they defy us.” ²

With such hubris infecting it, there should be no surprise that the administration so badly bungled policy toward Kosovo. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, largely at the behest of Washington, intervened in a conflict not its own. It started bombing for the wrong reason. It ignored history and acted hastily. It failed to develop contingency plans to cope with unexpected results. It gave no thought to the ultimate consequences of its actions.

It is important to analyze NATO’s Balkan debacle if the alliance is to be prevented from making a similar mistake in the future. Indeed, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair’s botched war in Kosovo demonstrates that NATO should not adopt the settling of out-of-area disputes as a new mission. The organization is incapable of maintaining peace in the historically unstable and strategically unimportant periphery of Europe. Not that doing so was ever a realistic goal: the causes of ethnic fratricide run deep and decisions to kill, maim, and displace one’s neighbors are rarely rational.

Until 1999 NATO adopted the sensible policy of nonintervention. All of the major powers erected firebreaks to war, limiting the Bosnian civil war to Bosnia. In contrast, the allied decision to intervene in Kosovo spread conflict to surrounding states and begat confrontation with Russia. Indeed, as in World War I, alliances have acted as transmission belts of war from the Balkans outward to the rest of Europe.

The aggressive policy toward Kosovo championed by the Clinton administration and, in turn, NATO was flawed in both principle and practice. In particular, the administration

• illegally embarked upon war, in contravention of the U.S. Constitution, the NATO treaty, and the United Nations Charter;

• launched an unprovoked assault against a nation that had not threatened the United States or any U.S. ally, lowering the bar for aggressive war worldwide;

• turned humanitarianism on its head, basing intervention on the ethnicity of the victims, allied status of the belligerents, relative strength of the contending political interests, and expansiveness of the media coverage;

• deepened European dependence on the United States to defend European interests that have little relevance to America;

• attempted to impose an artificial, outside settlement on warring parties with little or no reference to the intense passions that suffuse the conflict;

• sought to micromanage a guerrilla conflict while ignorant of the realities on the ground; and

• most important, put U.S. troops at risk without any serious, let alone vital, American interest at stake.

Any one of these failings should be sufficient to invalidate Washington’s, and NATO’s, decision to inaugurate war against Yugoslavia. Collectively they demonstrate that the Clinton administration and its allies have committed the greatest foreign policy mistake in twenty years, rivaling the Soviet decision to invade Afghanistan. This essay will analyze each of the administration’s failings in turn.

The administration illegally embarked upon war, . .

For all of its humanitarian rhetoric, Washington and its allies have consistently acted lawlessly. The threat to use force against Yugoslavia if it did not agree to the Rambouillet diktat was dubious enough. There was no international principle that authorized the NATO states to bomb Belgrade if it did not see the wisdom in Washington’s preferred ethnic accord. To the contrary, the 1980 International Convention of Treaties invalidates agreements achieved through coercion.

Far worse, however, was the carrying through on the threat and inaugurating war against another sovereign state. In doing so, the president acted unilaterally, without the approval of Congress, as required by the U.S. Constitution. He transformed a defensive alliance into a tool of offensive war, violating its basic purpose. And Washington initiated aggressive military action in violation of the United Nations Charter, which binds the members of NATO no less than other states.

Although the administration seemed to believe that all of these requirements were outmoded in today’s world, the administration’s calamitous bungling in Kosovo illustrates why war should require congressional approval, why NATO should remain a defensive alliance, and why the UN Charter properly outlaws aggressive war, irrespective of the goodness of the expressed intentions. Sovereign states make no more important a decision than to go to war, and decisions to do so should be widely debated, and those who make them should be held widely accountable. An organization created to protect a polyglot coalition from hegemonic aggression is not easily turned into a regional policeman. Finally, the UN prohibition against promiscuous international intervention provides one barrier, however weak, to the spread of conflict.

Like his predecessors, Bill Clinton resisted any attempt to restrict his war powers. In late 1993, he claimed that “the Constitution leaves the president, for good and sufficient reasons, the ultimate decision-making authority.” ³ The precedents for this are many, stretching back to Richard Nixon and Harry Truman, and, indeed, much further.

America’s founders, however, intended to take a different path. Article 1, Sec. 8(11), of the U.S. Constitution, to which the president swears allegiance, states that “Congress shall have the power . . . to declare war.” The president is commander-in-chief, but he is to fulfill his responsibilities subject to the control of Congress. Of this there is no doubt.

James Madison wrote in 1793 that it is necessary to adhere to the “fundamental doctrine of the Constitution that the power to declare war is fully and exclusively vested in the legislature.” ⁴ When Pierce Butler of South Carolina formally proposed giving the president the power to start war, Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts said that he “never expected to hear in a republic a motion to empower the executive to declare war.” ⁵ Butler’s motion was quickly rejected.

Explained Virginia’s George Mason, the president “is not safely to be entrusted with” the power to decide on war. Mason therefore favored “clogging rather than facilitating war.” ⁶ James Wilson, though an advocate of a strong presidency, approvingly observed that the new constitutional system “will not hurry us into war.” Instead, “it is calculated to guard against it. It will not be in the power of a single man, or a single body of men, to involve us in such distress.” ⁷ Similarly, Thomas Jefferson wrote that “we have already given . . . one effectual check to the dog of war by transferring the power of letting him loose.” ⁸

Of course, there will always be gray areas, but the existence of some unclear cases does not mean that there are no unambiguous instances where congressional approval is required, such as launching an aggressive war against Yugoslavia. Indeed, this is a particularly easy case, since it is not cluttered with UN resolutions and claims about the threatened safety of Americans. At the constitutional convention, Roger Sherman of Connecticut observed that “the executive should be able to repel and not to commence war.” ⁹ Yet President Clinton simply announced his plan to attack, without provocation, another nation, with nary a nod toward Congress.

The illegality of the administration’s war reaches beyond U.S. law. By its own terms, NATO is a defensive alliance. It was, the members explained, created for the purpose of deterring, not starting, war. The treaty preamble affirms the allies’ “desire to live in peace with all peoples and all governments” and support for the “purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations,” which bars aggressive war. The NATO treaty goes on to state that an “armed attack against one or more of them . . . shall be considered an attack against them all” and that they will exercise their right of self-defense under the UN Charter.

When the Senate voted to expand NATO in 1998, it also added, with little debate, “other missions when there is a clear consensus among its members that there is a threat to the security and interests of NATO members.” ¹⁰ Even here, however, it takes an enormous stretch to suggest that NATO is authorized to attack Yugoslavia.

Of course, enthusiasts of aggressive war, like Lewis Carroll’s Queen of Hearts, believe that words mean whatever they say they mean. Obviously, Belgrade posed no threat to any surrounding state, let alone any NATO member, but it has been argued that the conflict in Kosovo could expand, undermining Europe’s stability. While there is a theoretically conceivable daisy chain linking a minor guerrilla war at the periphery of Europe to the safety of the world’s leading industrial powers, it is long, convoluted, and utterly implausible. In fact, the daisy chain works only when Western Europe chooses to directly intervene.

Accepting the argument that human rights violations outside the NATO area implicate NATO “interests” would yield a nonstandard justifying intervention anywhere for anything. Nor does it pass the embarrassment test, when NATO member Turkey engages in similarly brutal behavior in suppressing Kurdish rebels. If support for protection of ethnic minorities was a serious European interest warranting military action, NATO would be concentrating on Ankara, not Belgrade.

The war also violates the most basic tenets of international law as embodied in the UN Charter. As an association of sovereign states, the organization recognizes that borders are inviolable. According to Article 2 of the charter, military force may not be used against a country unless that nation itself has used force: “All members shall refrain . . . from . . . use of force against the territorial integrity . . . of any state.” Although NATO may act with the concurrence of the UN, Article 53 states that “no enforcement action shall be taken . . . by regional agencies without the authorization of the Security Council.”

The NATO states did not go to the UN, because they knew that they could not win its approval over the veto of China and Russia. Explained Ambassador Peter van Walsum, the Netherlands’ representative to the UN: “If, due to one or two permanent members’ rigid interpretation of the concept of domestic jurisdiction, such a resolution is not attainable, we cannot sit back.” ¹¹ Yet Article 25 of the UN Charter states that members “agree to accept . . . the decisions of the Security Council.” The fact that the NATO states do not like the UN’s decision in this case—in contrast to decisions made regarding Iraq, say—does not empower them to violate the charter.

Of course, some modern legal theorists argue that sovereignty is not absolute and that exceptions should be made for humanitarian purposes. That’s an appealing notion, but it raises serious practical issues—particularly the likelihood of spreading conflict in unpredictable ways, as NATO action has in Kosovo. Intervention in otherwise limited disputes automatically internationalizes and often expands them.

Moreover, even if such an exception was adopted, it would not apply to Kosovo. Before NATO’s intervention on behalf of the Albanian Kosovar insurgents, Kosovo’s civil war hardly compared to other international conflagrations. Death tolls in the millions (Angola, Sudan, Rwanda, and Tibet); hundreds of thousands (Burundi, East Timor, Liberia, and Mozambique); and tens of thousands (Chechnya, Congo, Kashmir, Sri Lanka, and Turkey) are common. The estimated twelve-month death toll of two thousand in Kosovo was exceeded even by the number of dead in Northern Ireland’s sectarian violence.

The founders vested the power to declare war in Congress because they feared presidents would do precisely what they are doing today—regularly taking the nation into overseas conflicts that have at most a tangential relationship to U.S. security. By the same token, the dismal experience in Kosovo validates NATO’s status as a defensive alliance and the UN Charter’s prohibition of aggressive war. The disparate nations of Europe were able to unite in the goal of deterring Soviet aggression; they are not likely to remain united in tasks like intervening in civil wars on the periphery of Europe. Finally, it is all too easy to loose the dogs of war; it is impossible to control where they go afterward.

. . . launched an unprovoked assault against a nation that had not threatened the United States or any U.S. ally, . .

Traditionally, war has been thought to be a last resort. Yet this administration is implementing the most militaristic program in at least two decades. The president used U.S. troops to try to rebuild Somalian society, bombed Serbian insurgents in Bosnia, warned of possible military action against North Korea, occupied Haiti, sent troops to the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) and Bosnia, has undertaken military exercises around the world, is conducting regular attacks on Iraq, and initiated aggressive war against Yugoslavia.

The president argues that Washington must not allow small conflicts to “fester and spread,” but U.S. policy has consistently failed. Somalia was a disaster; reconciliation is a fantasy in Bosnia; Haiti now enjoys a presidential instead of military dictatorship; diplomacy was what kept the peace in Korea; Iraq remains recalcitrant; and U.S. threats changed nothing in Kosovo, while Washington’s military intervention greatly exacerbated the conflict.

More fundamental, however, is the principle. What is the standard for making war? That is, what justifies the extreme step of unleashing death and destruction on another people? Traditionally it has been a military threat against the United States. Yugoslavia, however, has not acted against the United States or any of its allies. Grant that Serbian treatment of Kosovars has been atrocious—so has the Turkish handling of the Kurds. The conduct of Indonesia in East Timor has been equally bad, as has the behavior of two-score other governments in a variety of conflicts around the globe. Is war the right remedy in these cases?

Indeed, the administration did not threaten war to stop human rights abuses. Rather, it wanted to force compliance with an international diktat to establish an unstable, jerry-rigged autonomous government to be backed by a permanent foreign occupation of what is considered internationally to be indisputably Yugoslavian land.

Were any other nation to make such a demand, Washington would consider it high hubris. Were any other nation to make such a demand of the United States—to, say, occupy southern California (Azatland to Mexican irredentists) in order to monitor relations between an Anglo-dominated government and a growing Hispanic population—Washington would consider it to be justification for war. Indeed, the national government unequivocally rejected British and French attempts to mediate the Civil War and threatened war should those nations recognize the Confederacy.

The fact that NATO justifies its action on humanitarian grounds changes nothing. Ever since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, military intervention across borders has been defined as aggression. “This may not sound like a very lofty principle, but for 350 years it has been the basis of what order first Europe and then the rest of the world has known,” observes columnist David Frum. ¹² This standard offered an important, however limited, way to maintain the peace.

The administration and its allies have swept away even that minimal barrier. In principle, any aggression anywhere can be justified as righting some wrong. Russia could invade the Baltic states or Ukraine in the name of protecting ethnic Russians or move on Turkey to safeguard the Kurds. China and Pakistan could invade India to defend the Kashmiris. India could invade Sri Lanka to protect the minority Tamils from the Singhalese-dominated government.

In these and innumerable other cases, the West could offer no principled objection. Of course, the United States and its allies might quibble over whether the human rights violations justified armed intervention. But if two thousand dead in Kosovo warrants war, what civil war, armed insurgency, or sectarian strife does not invite intervention? Anyway, NATO would have no standing to complain, having asserted the right to be judge and jury in Kosovo.

Warmongering in the name of peace is an oxymoron. Washington should restrict this most serious of threats to the most serious of dangers. By bombing Yugoslavia for not accepting the administration’s preferred settlement plan, the president has trivialized war, the most monstrous of human practices.

. . . turned humanitarianism on its head, . .

It has often been said that the world is a dangerous place, and it certainly is, although not particularly to the United States. Most members of the industrialized West, especially America, are at peace.

Unfortunately, conflict wracks many other countries around the globe. The world has seen mass murder in Burundi, Cambodia, Rwanda, Sudan, and Uganda; brutal insurgencies in Angola, Congo, Ethiopia, Liberia, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, and Sri Lanka; bloody wars between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Ethiopia and Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia, and India and Pakistan; endless civil war in Afghanistan; violent separatist campaigns in Indonesia (East Timorese), Iraq (Kurds), Mexico (Chiapans), Northern Ireland (Irish Catholics), Russia (Chechens), Spain (Basques), and Turkey (Kurds); and varying strife in Algeria, Burma, Georgia, India, Tajikistan, Tibet, and elsewhere.

Then there is Kosovo. Without doubt, the situation is tragic—the one constant of guerrilla insurgencies and civil wars is their brutality, by both sides. The Serbian government has caused significant civilian casualties in Kosovo, but its conduct does not exist in a vacuum. In June 1998 a U.S. diplomat in Belgrade told me, “If you’re a Serb, Hell yes the KLA [Kosovo Liberation Army] is a terrorist organization.” Each cycle of violence has spawned another.

The resulting suffering of Kosovars is obvious, but, at least until NATO intervened, the fighting in Kosovo barely rose to the status of atrocity. It certainly did not constitute genocide, a term routinely used with wild abandon. At least three times as many people died in January alone in Sierra Leone than in Kosovo in 1998. Nearly as many people died in one three-day battle between Tamil guerrillas and the Sri Lankan government last fall as in Kosovo in all of 1998. By any normal standard, events in Kosovo were less important than those in many other nations around the world.

Indeed, it is impossible to take seriously the moralizing by the administration and NATO. Washington and leading European governments are normally willing to tolerate genocide and mass murder around the globe. The West is also ever ready to ignore brutal civil wars and antisecessionist campaigns conducted by allies. NATO members are offended only when other nations play by the same rules.

In 1991 the West encouraged the breakup of Yugoslavia. Then the United States and Western Europe decided that Serbs were not entitled to likewise secede from Croatia and Bosnia, the latter of which became the site of a particularly bloody conflict. NATO eventually lent its air force to Muslims in Bosnia and helped impose the bizarre Dayton agreement, under which three antagonistic groups are supposed to live together in an artificial state ruled by international bureaucrats. The same hypocrisy is being played out in Kosovo—Washington unreservedly supports Britain, Spain, and Turkey, for instance, in dealing forcibly with violent separatists; has placed no pressure on FYROM to offer autonomy to its ethnic Albanians; and ignores mass violence most everywhere else around the globe.

Contrast the U.S. policies toward Kosovo and Turkey. Slobodan Milosevic is a demagogic thug, but, in fact, the behavior of his government toward Albanians looks not unlike that of Turkey, a NATO member and U.S. ally participating in the assault on Yugoslavia, toward the Kurds. However, the administration has voiced no outrage, demanded no occupation, initiated no bombing. Although America need not act everywhere if it desires to implement a policy of humanitarian intervention, surely some objective standards are necessary. The administration has articulated none.

In practice, Washington seems prepared to use military force under three conditions:

• those being killed are white Europeans;

• the perceived aggressor is not a U.S. ally; and

• there is saturation media coverage of the conflict.

This makes a mockery of the humanitarian pretensions advanced by Western leaders. It is cynicism, not charity.

In addition, there is nothing compassionate about sending others off to fight. It’s one thing to ask young men (and now young women) to risk their lives for their own political community. It is quite another thing for armchair warriors to have them die righting international wrongs for other nations.

The administration’s unprincipled humanitarianism creates severe practical problems, as well. It tends to intensify local conflict. For instance, Kosovar leaders understand the importance of positive media coverage. An adviser to Kosovo leader Ibrahim Rugova, Alush Gashi, admitted to me in June 1998 that the prospect of NATO intervention “depends on how we look on CNN. People need to see victims in their living rooms.” The Albanian diaspora also recognizes the importance of political lobbying, something more traditionally associated with a desire for farm subsidies at home than bombing campaigns abroad. Thus, complex foreign events are manipulated by foreign parties and domestic interests for policy ends, in this case, U.S. intervention.

In any case, NATO intervention in Kosovo immeasurably worsened the humanitarian situation. The alliance turned a limited tragedy into a widespread disaster, as Belgrade responded to Western aggression by killing hundreds to thousands of Kosovars and turning hundreds of thousands of Kosovars into refugees. Allied bombing inflicted widespread destruction in Kosovo, killing Yugoslav civilians and reducing their nation to rubble. Pentagon spokesman Ken Bacon was forced early on to acknowledge that it was “difficult . . . to say that we have prevented one act of brutality.” ¹³

. . . deepened European dependence on the United States, . .

NATO celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 1999. Having successfully deterred Soviet aggression, its members are asking, what next for the alliance?

There is no longer a hegemonic threat requiring U.S. aid for Europe. Even a hawk like the Weekly Standard’s William Kristol admits that no comparable threat to the Soviet Union “is likely to emerge for many years, if not decades.” ¹⁴

Moreover, the Western Europeans are fully capable of dealing with Moscow now and in the future. The European Union has a combined population of more than 400 million, a gross domestic product of more than $8 trillion, and a combined military of more than 1 million soldiers. Add the polyglot nations of Central and Eastern Europe, and the task facing even a revived Russia becomes insurmountable.

NATO advocates must therefore devise new duties for the alliance, a situation that has contributed to the debacle in Kosovo. At the ridiculous level, some analysts argued for war to preclude the Yugoslav civil war from intruding on NATO’s anniversary celebration. For example, early in 1999 Robert Hunter of the Rand Corporation complained that “if fighting in Kosovo goes on unabated at the time of NATO’s fiftieth anniversary summit in Washington this April, the focus will not be on its new strategic concept or grand visions. Kosovo will overshadow both celebration of the past and plans for the future.” ¹⁵ It is hard to imagine a poorer rationale for military action: send young men off to war so the rest of us can dance the night away.

Others, with only slightly less embarrassment, advocated intervention in Kosovo as a means to provide the alliance with a new raison d’être to replace its role as an anti-Soviet deterrent. “If NATO cannot meet this challenge and defeat it,” asks Kristol, “why does the alliance still exist?” Without victory in Kosovo, he claims, “NATO will cease to be a serious alliance.” ¹⁶ Similarly, worries Joshua Muravchik of the American Enterprise Institute, “NATO will be sunk if it loses.” ¹⁷ Columnist Jim Hoagland of the Washington Post claims that “to back out [of Kosovo] would wreck the alliance.” ¹⁸ Retired U.S. diplomat Morton Abramowitz says any retreat “would be a deadly blow to NATO.” ¹⁹

But there is no reason to suppose that NATO could not preserve its central defensive role irrespective of the outcome in Kosovo. The Europeans will continue to have a strong incentive to organize for their own defense, and Russia will continue to have a strong incentive not to threaten their security. Where NATO’s credibility will suffer is in the perception that it is willing to attempt to resolve interminable and marginal conflicts that are out of area. But the organization shouldn’t be trying to do that.

Indeed, NATO was originally conceived of as an organization to deter and win wars. It turns the purpose of the alliance on its head to advocate going to war to preserve itself. The alliance has become the end and war the means.

Even more important for the United States, however, is America’s military role in Europe. NATO was created a half century ago to provide a defense shield behind which the Europeans could rebuild. The alliance was never intended to provide a permanent subsidy, especially one to populous and prosperous states after the opposing hegemonic threat had disappeared. It made no sense for the United States to take the lead in Kosovo, since events there are obviously more relevant to Europe than America.

Of course, the Europeans might not have acted, and in the eyes of some that reluctance to act demonstrates the necessity of American leadership. However, by acting when the Europeans choose not to, the United States guarantees continued European passivity. So long as they can induce Washington to subsidize their defense and moderate their conflicts, they have no incentive to organize independently. Indeed, it is obviously against their interest to solve problems without America, since that would discourage U.S. paternalism in the future.

Instead of constantly bailing Europe out of its troubles—troubles which, in contrast to those in times past, do not threaten its very existence—America should exercise tough love and set the Europeans free to make their own decisions and bear the resulting consequences. If the United States does not, it will be forever hostage to local conflicts that are irrelevant to American interests. Let the Western Europeans sort out the problems of the Balkans, and anywhere else, if they believe doing so to be worth the cost.

. . . attempted to impose an artificial, outside settlement on warring parties, . .

Despite NATO’s humanitarian pretensions, the alliance actually intervened to impose its preferred settlement on Kosovo. Washington et al. developed a nearly one-hundred-page agreement setting forth a variety of complicated government institutions and convoluted enforcement processes. The plan might have represented a creative response to a law school final exam question; it did not represent the aspirations of the Albanian or the Serbian people. As such, the system would have been inherently unstable and could have been sustained only with a permanent foreign occupation. Hence the attempt to impose it by force.

The administration’s diktat never had a chance. One Western diplomat expressed bewilderment at Milosevic’s refusal to sign: “He’s detached from reality.” Indeed, the official complained that “we walked right up to the edge of appeasement.” ²⁰

But it obviously is he and his colleagues who were detached from reality. The Rambouillet accords offered virtually nothing to Yugoslavia. Belgrade’s influence over the province would be negligible, while Kosovo could participate in Yugoslavian national politics. The plan offered Kosovo independence on the installment plan: after three years the province would either be free or the KLA would restart the guerrilla struggle. Despite Rambouillet’s terms, there was no chance that NATO troops would go door-to-door to disarm the KLA, and even if they did, the guerrillas could wait in northern Albania. Moreover, Belgrade had to accept a large-scale occupation of its territory by the armed forces of nations that had threatened to attack it—and to grant those troops the right of free passage through the entire country, making Yugoslavia essentially occupied territory. No nation with a modicum of self-respect could agree to such terms.

The experience in Bosnia, a nation that exists only in the imagination of Western officials, should have served as a caution. It is Bosnia that “animates our policy towards Kosovo,” Nicholas Burns, U.S. ambassador to Greece, told me during a trip to Athens earlier in 1999. Burns said that the Clinton administration “learned a very bitter lesson in the Bosnian war, that if diplomacy is not often coupled by the threat of force or the willingness to use force in an unstable environment like this [Kosovo], diplomacy is often ineffective.” ²¹

Yet Washington encouraged the Muslims to kill the Lisbon agreement, which would have settled the Bosnian conflict before the worst of the fighting. Moreover, the Serbs settled at Dayton primarily because the balance of power on the ground had shifted toward the Croats and Muslims.

Even though the United States has spent $12 billion and occupied Bosnia for four years, the Dayton scheme is a bust. As my Cato Institute colleague Gary Dempsey puts it, “Reintegration is grinding to a halt.” ²² Nationalists dominate politics and refugees are not returning home; there is little home-grown economic growth.

The kind of democracy being taught more represents Boss Tweed than George Washington, as the West simply forces Bosnians to live under a government that represents none of them. The so-called high representative in Bosnia, Carlos Westendorp, has chosen the so-called country’s currency and flag. Earlier in 1999, Westendorp dismissed the elected president of the Serbian republic. Not surprisingly, there is no local support for this “country” imposed from outside, and there is no end in sight for a mission that was originally supposed to last just a year. The withdrawal of U.S. troops, warns the Clinton administration, would lead to Bosnia’s collapse.

. . . sought to micromanage a guerrilla conflict while ignorant of the realities on the ground, . .

There is no better evidence of the administration’s overweening arrogance than its belief that it could finely calibrate its intervention in a bitter civil war in an unstable region. The administration obviously believed that NATO could push Yugoslavia hard enough to force autonomy for Kosovo, without pushing so hard as to yield independence. Then NATO thought that it could unleash war while keeping the conflict confined to Kosovo. It is hard enough to design such a program in theory, let alone implement it in practice.

First, it was inevitable that providing the KLA with an air force would increase pressure for not only an independent Kosova but a larger Albania, incorporating Kosovo, the nation of Albania, western FYROM, eastern Montenegro, and perhaps much more. However brutal Yugoslavia’s policy in Kosovo, Belgrade had no expansionist ambitions. To the contrary, it was simply attempting to hold on to what it had. The KLA, in contrast, was the most destabilizing force in the region.

The KLA’s agenda was clear. In 1998 spokesman Jakup Krasniqi said his organization was “fighting for the liberation of all occupied Albanian territories,” including the western section of FYROM, whose population is one-fourth Albanian, “and their unification with Albania.” ²³ Even the moderate Kosovo political leadership was unlikely to accept autonomy, whatever the formalities of any agreement. Many residents of Albania, from which KLA recruits and supplies are flowing into Kosovo, and much of the international Albanian diaspora, from which financial support is flowing into Kosovo, also support this wider agenda.

Administration protestations against Kosovan independence did nothing to dampen transnational ethnic sentiments. The threat of air strikes obviously aided the cause of Kosovo independence. The choice of Robert Dole as an envoy to the Albanian negotiators also sent a clear signal of administration favor for the Albanian cause. Implementation of Rambouillet would have merely become a new starting point for the struggle for Albanian independence.

If Rambouillet was likely to prove destabilizing, war was certain to do so. Not only do conflicts almost inevitably develop in unpredictable ways, but they usually escalate and always irredeemably change the status quo. There was nothing wrong in the administration hoping for the best. But believing the best case was not only likely, but certain, and failing to prepare any contingency plans was criminally negligent, even reckless.

. . . and put U.S. troops at risk without any serious, let alone vital, American interest at stake

To paraphrase Germany’s Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the Balkans is not worth the bones of a single healthy American rifleman. Yugoslavia obviously posed no direct threat to the United States or any U.S. ally.

Some argue that there are indirect dangers: failing to act risks another continental, if not global, conflict. Contended former German foreign minister Klaus Kinkel: “Everything must be done to ensure that another awful conflagration does not explode in Europe.” ²⁴

It is a paranoid fantasy to imagine Serbia alone inaugurating such a conflict, however. Only if other states join in could the war become a serious one.

Fear of a broader conflict was, of course, the same argument used to justify Western intervention in Bosnia. Yet the Yugoslavian civil war, running from Slovenia through Bosnia, lasted longer than World War I without expanding beyond Yugoslavia. Even if the conflict in Kosovo had spilled over into Albania and FYROM, no major power would have joined, in stark contrast to World War I. The worst case was a Greek-Turkish war, but neither country was interested in intervening in Yugoslavia. Should Ankara and Athens exchange blows, it is far more likely to occur over the Aegean islands, Cyprus, or territorial sea claims.

Perhaps the most frightening aspect of NATO’s intervention in Kosovo is that it mimics World War I. Then, alliances took an assassination in Sarajevo as an excuse to spread war to every major power in Europe, to Japan, and to the United States. During the Bosnian civil war, in contrast, every one of those countries stayed out. In Kosovo, however, NATO jumped in, confronting Russia.

As noted earlier, NATO’s intervention on behalf of the KLA naturally energized advocates of a greater Albania. It has also weakened Yugoslavia relative to Belgrade’s potential antagonists, particularly Albania, Bosnia, and Croatia. The result is likely to be further rounds of violence, whatever the resolution of the current conflict.

In any case, Balkan instability is a European, not an American, problem. The United States has a vital interest in preventing a hostile hegemonic power from dominating Europe. Washington does not have even a minor interest in preventing Europe from having to deal with the detritus in the Balkans left over from the Cold War. Instability on the periphery of Europe has other consequences—economic and cultural, for instance—but they are minimal. To call this a vital interest, as does the administration, suggests that it is incapable of setting priorities.

Indeed, intervention in the Balkans risks losing the far more important game involving Russia. Moscow’s future development remains uncertain and worrisome. Yet NATO attacks on Yugoslavia, which shares long-standing Slavic ties with Russia, have greatly exacerbated Russian tensions already inflamed by the expansion of NATO. Of even greater concern, America’s willingness to meddle in areas of serious, if not vital interest, to Russia (including the Transcaucasus) risks inflaming domestic nationalism, thereby encouraging development of a less cooperative regime in Moscow. That consequence is evident in the sharp rise in anti-Americanism in Russia.

Although Washington’s dominance remains undiminished, continuing U.S. arrogance—a belief that every other nation can be treated as if it is of no account and can be told what to do—is likely to create a loose but ever-growing coalition of states determined to resist U.S. hegemony. China, France, India, and Russia are all obvious candidates; the prospect of Washington seeking to impose its will militarily on numerous small countries is likely to create even more converts.

Conclusion

“We’re in the middle of trying to deal with a very complicated situation,” explained Albright before NATO’s decision for war. ²⁵ But she and her colleagues never understood those complications. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a circumstance in which U.S. military intervention was less appropriate. Not surprisingly, NATO officials bungled every step of the way.

The result should provide a sobering lesson for governments throughout NATO. Wilsonian warmongering is neither desirable nor achievable. These governments should concentrate on preserving the peace that they are so lucky to enjoy.

That is particularly true for the United States, with its historic tradition of nonintervention. As Secretary of State John Quincy Adams observed in the nineteenth century, America should be the well-wisher of the liberty and independence of all, but “need not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” To do so, he warned, would destroy the essential values that set the United States apart: “The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. She might become dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.” ²⁶