Clinton Legacy Watch # 38: A Debacle in Kosovo, A Shattered NATO ?

(Washington, D.C.): Two months from tomorrow, President Clinton is scheduled to host
festive
ceremonies intended to honor the fiftieth anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization,
indisputably one of the most successful politico-military alliances in history. Unfortunately, in the
wake of NATO’s current debacle concerning Kosovo, the self-congratulatory rhetoric at the
commemorative events planned for Missouri and Washington are likely ring hollow. As things
stand now, a wake for NATO as we have known it may be more in order than a
celebration.

The Alliance Then and Now

It bears remembering that the Alliance’s success was not predetermined. Instead, it was
largely a
function of predominant American power, its application for coherent, durable purposes — and
institutional arrangements that allowed that power to be exercised effectively within alliance
councils. Thanks to these factors, NATO withstood concerted Soviet efforts to defeat and
destroy the alliance from without, incessant French sabotage from within and the inherent
difficulties of consensus-based decision-making to provide the security necessary to permit
Europe to rebuild. Equally important, two generations of generally steady American leadership
and tangible evidence of the United States’s commitment to Free Europe afforded this country’s
allies the stability needed to prosper.

By contrast, the Clinton Administration has pursued policies characterized by feckless
indecision,
hollow threats and unreliability that have enormously diminished the U.S. role and influence in the
Alliance, perhaps irreversibly so. While this phenomenon has been evident from the beginning of
Mr. Clinton’s first term, rarely has it been more vividly on display than in the present fiasco over
Kosovo.

Meltdown Over Kosovo

After weeks of bluster by President Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright about
the
unalterable deadline that would — if allowed to pass without a “strong peace agreement” —
inevitably result in NATO air attacks against Serbia, the date came and went last weekend with no
accord in sight. This event illustrates not only the President’s diminished credibility in the wake of
his now well-established mendacity. It also reflects the fact that, thanks to his mismanagement of
U.S. foreign policy over the past six years, the United States no longer is able to call the shots in
negotiations like those now underway in Rambouillet, France.

Neither will it do so if American forces actually are deployed to Kosovo as part of the 28,000
troops NATO is poised to send there. Indeed, the latest trial balloon to be launched by the
international negotiators is that, as a sop to an intransigent Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, the
deployment may not be a NATO one after all. According to one report, it might actually be
commanded by a Russian officer — a development that would mark the mutation of
the Alliance
beyond recognition, and probably beyond sustainability as a Western defensive enterprise.

Albright’s Prognosis

At the moment, however, that unappetizing prospect is a secondary problem. More
immediately,
the Alliance must work its way through the morass delineated on Sunday by Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright. In remarks on CNN, Mrs. Albright described three possible outcomes at the
Rambouillet negotiations:

(1) The Serbs say “No” to a deal, but the Kosovars say “Yes” to the
agreement the so-called
Contact Group is trying to foist upon them. Under these circumstances, Mrs. Albright claims that
NATO would bomb the Serbs. Milosevic has correctly discounted this possibility. He
understands that the divisions within the Alliance, to say nothing of the increasingly shrill
opposition being expressed by the Russians, the Chinese, the Greeks, the Bulgarians and the
Macedonians, make it likely that, if air strikes occur at all, they will be of the pinprick variety of
previous Clinton bombing campaigns.

Certainly, they will not constitute part of a concerted campaign aimed at toppling the
Milosevic
regime — the one outcome that might bring a measure of peace, to say nothing of justice, to the
Balkans. If anything, such an approach will probably serve to shore up Milosevic’s otherwise
declining popularity.

Worse, it seems clear that no one has a clue what will happen next if the U.S. and
NATO do
start hitting Serb targets in Kosovo, or even in other areas of Serbia. At the very least,
such a
situation is hardly conducive to the sort of peaceful setting the Clinton Administration insists must
prevail in Kosovo if American forces are to go or stay there. Neither NATO’s interests nor
America’s will be served by the sort of humiliating spectacle that characterized previous
withdrawals of U.S. forces under fire from Saigon, Beirut and Somalia.

(2) The Serbs say “Yes,” but the Kosovars say “No.” In this case, Mrs.
Albright says
international support for the Kosovars would be cut off and steps would be taken to prevent their
proto-army from getting weapons. Not since her predecessor, James Baker, declared the U.S.
commitment to the “territorial integrity” of the then-unraveling Yugoslavia in 1991 has there been
an utterance more certain to produce further genocide at the hands of Serbian forces. ¹ It strains
credulity that NATO will be prepared in that circumstance to put in a huge ground force to
seal the Albanian border so as to deny the Kosovars the means to defend themselves.

(3) Both the Serbs and Kosovars say “Yes.” Since neither side will be
unhappy with the deal
under discussion at Rambouillet — the Serbs because it infringes upon their sovereignty, the
Kosovars since it forecloses their ambition for independence — it seems virtually certain to be
largely honored in the breach. That would bring us back to Outcome (1) above, in which the
United States will find itself either embroiled in a ground war in the Balkans or forced to cut and
run.

The question then becomes: What will President Clinton be willing to pay Milosevic to spare
his
Administration one or the other of these abysmal outcomes? Will he offer to lift sanctions (in
keeping with the general unraveling of sanctions regimes elsewhere, including Iraq, Libya, North
Korea and Iran), thereby rewarding aggression? Or will Mr. Clinton offer an infusion of cash to
help rebuild the Serb economy — or at least enrich Milosevic and his clique?

The Bottom Line

If ever there were a time for adult supervision from the Congress, this is it. As Henry
Kissinger
has argued in a powerful column opposing the deployment of U.S. forces in Kosovo which
appeared in today’s Washington Post: “Support for a strong foreign policy and a
strong NATO
will surely evaporate if we fail to anchor them in a clear definition of the national interest and
impart a sense of direction to our foreign policy in an period of turbulent change.”

The one bit of good news coming out of the Rambouillet mess is that the delay has
afforded
Congress an opportunity to go on record rejecting the idea of deploying U.S. peacekeepers
in Kosovo before the Clinton team formally commits the U.S. to doing so and begins
to
insert Marine units there. The House and Senate should instead express support for
ending the
despotic regime of Slobodan Milosevic, an outcome that will be deferred — not advanced —
should the U.S. strike yet another deal with him, use military power fecklessly against Serbia
and/or abort an ill-considered Kosovo deployment in the wake of attacks that will surely be
mounted against Americans on the ground there.

¹ See the Center’s Decision Brief entitled
Baker’s Whistlestop Campaign for Freedom’s Foes:
Next Stop Belgrade? (No. 91-P 112, 12
November 1991).