#readwise # A Perfect Failure  ## Metadata - Author: [[Michael Mandelbaum]] - Full Title: A Perfect Failure - Document Tags: [[Kosovo]] - URL: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/1999-09-01/perfect-failure ## Summary NATO's war in Yugoslavia had military success but failed politically, causing harm to the people of the Balkans. The war aimed to protect the Albanian Kosovars but ended up not achieving its humanitarian and political goals. The conflict raised questions about NATO's actions and the consequences for international relations. ## Highlights there are reasons for skepticism about the Clinton administration's assertion that Milosevic's spring offensive against the Kosovar Albanians, like Hitler's war against the Jews, was long intended and carefully planned. Milosevic had, after all, controlled the province for ten years without attempting anything approaching what happened in 1999. In October 1998, Serb forces launched an offensive against the KLA that drove 400,000 people from their homes. A cease-fire was arranged, and a great many returned. A team of unarmed monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) was dispatched to the province to give the Albanians a measure of protection. At the outset of 1999, the cease-fire broke down, violated by both sides. Although a concerted effort to reinforce the cease-fire and strengthen the international observers could not have ended the violence altogether, it might have limited the assaults on noncombatants and averted the disaster that Kosovo suffered. Containing the fighting could have bought time for what was necessary for a peaceful resolution of the conflict: a change of leadership in Belgrade. Removing Milosevic from office was by no means an impossible proposition. He was not popular with Serbs (the subsequent NATO assault temporarily increased his popularity), he did not exercise anything resembling totalitarian control over Serbia, and prolonged demonstrations in 1996-97 had almost toppled him. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01htc8m1ec5688krsh3br3k169)) --- **Albright later said that =="before resorting to force, NATO went the extra mile to find a peaceful resolution," but the terms on which the bombing ended cast doubt on her assertion: they included important departures from Rambouillet that amount to concessions to the Serbs==.** The United Nations received ultimate authority for Kosovo, giving Russia, a country friendly to the Serbs, the power of veto. **The Rambouillet document had called for a referendum after three years to decide Kosovo's ultimate status**, which would certainly have produced a large majority for independence; **the terms on which the war ended made no mention of a referendum. And whereas Rambouillet gave NATO forces unimpeded access to all of Yugoslavia, including Serbia, the June settlement allowed the alliance free rein only in Kosovo.** ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01htc8pdfr4g38pezkc116x5fb)) --- **==when the war ended, the political question at its heart remained unsettled. That question concerned the proper principle for determining sovereignty==.** The Albanians had fought for independence based on the right to national self-determination. The Serbs had fought to keep Kosovo part of Yugoslavia in the name of the inviolability of existing borders. **While insisting that Kosovo be granted autonomy, NATO asserted that it must remain part of Yugoslavia. The alliance had therefore intervened in a civil war and defeated one side, but embraced the position of the party it had defeated on the issue over which the war had been fought.** **This made the war, as a deliberate act of policy, a perfect failure. The humanitarian goal NATO sought -- the prevention of suffering -- was not achieved by the bombing; the political goal the air campaign made possible and the Albanian Kosovars favored -- independence -- NATO not only did not seek but actively opposed.** ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01htc8w0canmt53z1nzems3evx)) --- **Besides protecting the Albanian Kosovars, ==NATO aspired to establish, with its Yugoslav war, a new doctrine governing military operations== in the post-Cold War era. ==This putative doctrine of "humanitarian intervention" had two parts: the use of force on behalf of universal values== instead of the narrower national interests for which sovereign states have traditionally fought; ==and, in defense of these values, military intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign states== rather than mere opposition to cross-border aggression, as in the Gulf War of 1991.** The first of these precepts contained a contradiction. Because no national interest was at stake, the degree of public support the war could command in NATO's member countries was severely limited. Recognizing this, the alliance's political leaders decreed that the war be conducted without risk to their military personnel. Its military operations were thus confined to bombardment from high altitudes. But this meant that NATO never even attempted what was announced to be the purpose of going to war in the first place: the protection of the Kosovar Albanians. **As for the second tenet of "humanitarian intervention," it is, by the established standards of proper international conduct, illegal. The basic precept of international law is the prohibition against interference in the internal affairs of other sovereign states. Without this rule there would be no basis for international order of any kind.** But if the rule is inviolable, rulers can mistreat people in any way they like as long as the mistreatment takes place within legally recognized borders. Thus, in recent years international practice has begun to permit exceptions, but only under two conditions, neither of which was present in NATO's war against Yugoslavia. One condition is a gross violation of human rights. **The Serb ==treatment of Albanians in Kosovo before the NATO bombing was hardly exemplary, but measured by the worst of all human rights violations -- murder -- neither was it exceptionally bad==. Far fewer people had died as a result of fighting in Kosovo before the bombing started than had been killed in civil strife in Sierra Leone, Sudan, or Rwanda** -- African countries in which NATO showed no interest in intervening. Thus NATO's war did nothing to establish a viable standard for deciding when humanitarian intervention may be undertaken. Instead, it left the unfortunate impression that, in the eyes of the West, an assault terrible enough to justify military intervention is the kind of thing that happens in Europe but not in Africa. A second condition for violating the normal proscription against intervening in the internal affairs of a sovereign state is authorization by a legitimate authority. This means the United Nations, which, for all its shortcomings, is the closest thing the world has to a global parliament. But **==NATO acted without U.N. authorization, implying either that the Atlantic alliance can disregard international law when it chooses -- a precept unacceptable to nonmembers of the alliance== -- or that any regional grouping may do so (giving, for example, the Russian-dominated Commonwealth of Independent States the right to intervene in Ukraine if it believes ethnic Russians there are being mistreated) -- which is unacceptable to NATO.** ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01htc94529jy4sb0dr4k7fa7zx)) --- **The bombing of Serbia, moreover, continued an ugly pattern that the Clinton administration had followed in Haiti and Iraq, a pattern born of a combination of objection to particular leaders and reluctance to risk American casualties.** As with Milosevic, the administration had opposed the policies of the military junta that had seized power in Haiti and of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. As in the case of Yugoslavia, invading those two countries to remove the offending leadership was militarily feasible but politically unattractive for the Clinton administration. **In all three countries, the administration therefore took steps short of invasion that inflicted suffering on the civilian population** -- the crushing embargoes of Haiti and Iraq were the equivalents of the bombing of the Serb infrastructure -- without (until October 1994 in Haiti, and to the present in Iraq) removing the leaders from power. **If there is a Clinton Doctrine -- an innovation by the present administration in the conduct of foreign policy -- it is this: punishing the innocent in order to express indignation at the guilty.** ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01htc97ty9q3ndwhc4mb6k207y)) --- **==As for Russia, the war accelerated the deterioration in its relations with the West== that the ill-advised decision to extend NATO membership to Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic had set in motion.** In return for permitting a reunited Germany within NATO, Mikhail Gorbachev was promised that the Western military alliance would not expand further eastward. The Clinton administration broke that promise but offered three compensating assurances: that NATO was transforming itself into a largely political organization for the promotion of democracy and free markets; that insofar as NATO retained a military mission, it was strictly a defensive one; and that Russia, although not a NATO member, would be a full participant in European security affairs. The war in Yugoslavia gave the lie to all three: NATO initiated a war against a sovereign state that had attacked none of its members, a war to which Russia objected but that Moscow could not prevent. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01htc9c243naek00qqs165zzwf)) --- Whereas NATO expansion had angered the Russian political class, **the bombing of Serbia by all accounts triggered widespread outrage in the Russian public**. Thus the sudden postwar occupation of the airport at Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, by 200 Russian troops evoked enthusiastic approval in Russia **and signaled a shift in the politics of Russian foreign policy in a nationalist direction.** ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01htc9d1983r0nyh4vyymxrm5y)) ---