#readwise # A Perfect Polemic: Blind to Reality on Kosovo  ## Metadata - Author: [[James B. Steinberg]] - Full Title: A Perfect Polemic: Blind to Reality on Kosovo - URL: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/kosovo/1999-11-01/perfect-polemic-blind-reality-kosovo ## Summary Critics of NATO's efforts in Kosovo have shifted focus to postwar challenges, emphasizing the need for a more tolerant Kosovo and stable southeastern Europe. Despite the war's toll, NATO's intervention prevented further atrocities and maintained credibility among its allies. NATO's actions in Kosovo aimed to end Serb repression and protect the region, leading to the potential for peaceful settlement in Kosovo's status. ## Highlights Principled critics understood that important U.S. interests were at stake and that the cause was just but questioned the way NATO conducted the war. Rejectionist critics simply saw no reason to be concerned about the expulsion or murder of a whole people on NATO's doorstep. Since the war ended, the principled critics have largely shifted the focus of their skepticism to postwar challenges, urging the allies, appropriately, to make good on their pledge to seek a more tolerant Kosovo, a democratic Serbia, and a stable, integrated southeastern Europe. Most accept that President Clinton's strategy ultimately succeeded: ethnic cleansing was not only reversed but reversed in a way that kept NATO together, prevented the destabilization of neighboring countries, and kept Russia engaged without sacrificing NATO's stated goals. But to the rejectionist critics, NATO's success remains an inconvenient fact that cannot be allowed to get in the way of preconceived notions. Michael Mandelbaum's article places him squarely in this category ("[[A Perfect Failure]]," September/October 1999). His broadside refuses to see the slightest redeeming feature in ending Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's brutal and destabilizing campaign of atrocities. It is built on sweeping assertions that crumble on examination, unsupported assumptions about U.S. Kosovo policy, and predictable digressions on everything from NATO enlargement to Haiti to Iraq -- all leading to a bitter and overly personalized trashing of Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright. The only unifying principle I can discern in this attack is, "If the Clinton administration is for it, it must be wrong." ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01htc9penhenha85y4f7q8nnsy)) --- **Start with Mandelbaum's most fundamental assertion: that NATO failed because the people of Kosovo and the Balkans "emerged from the war considerably worse off than they had been before."** This is a breakdown of logic so elemental that it boggles the mind. **Imagine if Mandelbaum had been around to apply the same standard to the end of World War II**: "Sure, the Nazis have been defeated," he might have written, "but millions are dead, half of Europe is under Soviet control, and most Europeans are a lot worse off than in 1939. What a perfect failure." NATO's victory is not an occasion for joyful celebration; too many people have lost their lives and homes in Kosovo over the last year for that. And there is much hard work ahead to build a peaceful society that respects the rights of all its people. But **==the real question in judging success is== not whether people are better off than they were before, but ==whether people are better off than they would have been had the West not acted==.** The answer to that question is clearly yes. Had NATO not acted, the Serbs would have continued their offensive; more than a million and a half Kosovars would today be sitting in camps or starving in the hills with no hope of return; Milosevic would be strengthened; and in a region with many unresolved ethnic tensions, **==potential dictators would have learned the lesson that massive violence will draw no response from the international community==**. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01htc9rxrak9f2m4bhqfs2tyb2)) --- Mandelbaum writes that we will never know if Milosevic actually intended to expel the Kosovars until we have "access to such records as the Milosevic regime may have kept." But **there is already a historical record of Milosevic's aims and methods: the record of his brutal campaigns against Croatia and Bosnia**, both launched long before a single NATO bomb fell on his forces. The same paramilitary warlords who did the dirty work in those campaigns led the charge again in Kosovo, including the notorious Arkan and his "Tigers" and the "White Lions" of Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Vojislav Seselj. What does Mandelbaum think these people were sent to Kosovo to do -- negotiate with Kosovar intellectuals over coffee and baklava? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01htc9tee62dcb0e71nmwg9w6d)) --- He forgets about the 40,000 troops and 300 tanks Milosevic massed around Kosovo as he pretended to negotiate for peace and about the tens of thousands of people they pushed from their homes in the five-day period between the end of the Rambouillet peace talks and the start of the bombing. Milosevic's goal may have been "simply" to crush the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) rebellion. But his method of crushing rebellions has long been well established: it is ethnic cleansing. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01htc9wb2k9xjcj8svt4g714yr)) --- The February talks in Rambouillet marked the end of this diplomatic process, not the beginning, as Mandelbaum implies. The administration's central position at the talks -- that a greater tragedy could be avoided only if Serbian forces withdrew from Kosovo while an international force was deployed -- was absolutely right. It was the conclusion drawn from a year of hard diplomacy, going back to March 1998, when, with America's European partners and Russia, the United States first asked Miloevic to pull his police out of Kosovo. If anything, Secretary Albright's assertion that "NATO went the extra mile to find a peaceful resolution," which Mandelbaum disparages, was an understatement. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01htcabgmvqjxwxhkd2tnvv2d6)) --- **NATO did not go to war in Kosovo over any principle of sovereignty. NATO fought to end Serb repression in Kosovo and to protect southeastern Europe from its consequences.** The allies have long argued that the status of Kosovo should be settled peacefully -- and thanks to NATO's actions, that can now start to happen. Kosovo's status could be settled far more easily if Serbia was a democracy and the Balkans were more closely integrated with Europe, goals to which the allies have made a long-term commitment. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01htcapyf3epm62y0kns38c7h9)) --- Since the conflict ended, the president has said that when governments single out an entire people for destruction or displacement because of their heritage or faith and America can do something about it, America should act -- in a way that takes into account both its interests and its values. Americans would rather not live in a world where whole peoples can be hauled off to the slaughter or driven into exile just because of who they are. And such tragedies can launch cycles of violence that throw whole regions into chronic turmoil, overwhelm the world's ability to help the innocent, and inevitably lead to future wars. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01htcasg1bpa000vye9tmbxze4)) --- **The most important thing America can do is work with other nations and institutions, from regional organizations to the United Nations, to strengthen the collective capacity to prevent -- and, if necessary, defeat -- outbreaks of mass killing.** That is the way to avoid both the heartlessness of doing nothing in the face of human suffering and the callousness of making promises we cannot keep. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01htcav7mvhpdqk53jcgdffhrm)) --- **One shudders to think of what might have happened had America and its allies followed a different path. The Balkans would have been wracked by continuous conflict, crowned by the ultimate triumph of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Southeastern Europe would be overrun by refugees and would become a fertile ground for turmoil and instability.** Ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, NATO would still be maintaining the Iron Curtain as its eastern frontier -- that is, if NATO still existed as a functioning, relevant alliance. The new democracies of central and southeastern Europe would feel abandoned by the West, left to fend for themselves in their search for security. America's relationship with Europe would be frayed at best, and its relationship with Russia would suffer under the weight of these mounting tensions. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01htcb0e4kmyzwc6djq4cwbxp2)) ---