TOASTING NATO
GEDMIN, JEFFREY
TOASTING NATO by Jeffrey Gedmin WHEN THE HISTORY OF NATO'S DEMISE is written, the entire affair, it will be said, was rich with irony. It was on the eve of the Washington Summit in April 1999....
...Germans, usually reluctant to intervene, have even been worried about premature peace...
...Across the Rhine, leading French intellectuals applaud the alliance for finally saying "enough" to Belgrade...
...Security Council as an excuse for inaction and remained obsessed with diplomacy, even though it failed and meant appeasing a dangerous tyrant in their midst...
...The Europeans rejected arming the Bosnians for self-defense...
...Reaching still further, President Clinton infamously proclaimed, "the United Nations controls what happens in Bosnia...
...Right now is that time...
...Foreign minister Hubert Védrine defends NATO's action and points out that "this tragedy in Kosovo has been smoldering for 10 years . . . [and] everything that has been attempted has failed...
...Of course, we can complain that the Greeks waffled...
...A victory for Milosevic would, contends Milan's Corriere della Sera, "diminish [NATO's] ability to avert other wars, whether in the Balkans or elsewhere...
...The new NATO would have a say about proliferation, terrorism, rogue states, and regional threats...
...And what of American leadership so far...
...But the Western alliance may yet die an ignominious death if President Clinton doesn't set aside his golf clubs and finally grasp what is at stake...
...The German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung beat American hawks to the punch in calling for air strikes deeper into Serbia, so that "the dictator [Milosevic] fears for his own life...
...President Clinton rules out ground troops...
...If [NATO] succeeds," writes editor in chief Michael Maier of Stern, "the Americans will be more than the world's policeman: As moral authority, they'll be able to promote and defend the Western value system worldwide...
...that the Italians worried about the impact the war would have on tourism...
...A dozen of NATO's 18 members are already participating actively in Operation Allied Force—with France, of all countries, joining the United States in the lead...
...In the case of Milosevic's presidential palace, we might even complain that West Europeans dragged their feet because the site is a "cultural landmark...
...French philosopher Pascal Bruckner argues, "In the face of horror...
...Meanwhile, we are becoming known as the superpower that doesn't do ground troops...
...Has anyone noticed how the tables have turned...
...After all, even the "indispensable nation," as secretary of state Albright liked to call the world's only superpower, needed its allies...
...The bloodshed was, others contended, "not within NATO's defense zone...
...Conflict in the Balkans, some said, was an insoluble clash over religion and ancient hatreds...
...They frequently used the authority of the U.N...
...Even a left-leaning popular German magazine seems to have gotten the idea...
...it would be "an unacceptable loss of credibility" for NATO and for the United States...
...officer involved in planning the campaign actually tells the Washington Post, "We didn't plan for the worst-case scenario...
...At this stage, only a decisive American-led victory and an unambiguous Serbian defeat will give peace an opportunity in the region—and permit the alliance a future after this month's 50th anniversary summit...
...Europeans seem to recognize that additional force is necessary...
...we must reaffirm that we share the same values as America...
...The Europeans—led by the Germans—prematurely extended diplomatic recognition to the breakaway republics Croatia and Slovenia, making war in Bosnia inevitable...
...NATO had won the Cold War—decisively and without firing a single shot...
...And spirits were high, until a 57-year-old Balkan banker and ex-Communist bureaucrat pulled the curtain down on what was being celebrated as the most successful alliance in history...
...Jeffrey Gedmin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and executive director of the New Atlantic Initiative...
...Defense secretary William Cohen states that air strikes will inflict "enough damage to reduce [Milosevic's] capacity to wage war against the people he's been killing...
...And the Atlantic community, with all its power, remained, as Albright said the year before, the "drive wheel of progress on every world-scale issue...
...or that the allies initially resisted targets in Serbia for fear of collateral damage...
...Its concerns would range far beyond simply defending itself...
...And NATO was positioning itself to meet the challenges ahead...
...NATO could come to an end now, not because of weak-kneed Europeans, but because of the failure of its leader, the United States of America...
...And when bombing makes the humanitarian nightmare worse (and Milosevic predictably shows no signs of surrender), a senior U.S...
...Europe seems to be grasping more quickly than Washington the implications of allied disunity and capitulation...
...We've come up with several excuses for our inability to deal with Milosevic...
...Europeans aren't bent on negotiating with a war criminal...
...Even Germany's Social Democratic chancellor Gerhard Schröder has held the line, enduring criticism from leaders of his party, while his Green foreign minister Joschka Fischer owned up early to the fact that only ground troops would likely get the job done...
...Heady stuff...
...Best of all, perhaps, we liked blaming the allies...
...Dismissing suggestions from the French press that Paris is "playing the Americans' game," Védrine calmly insists that it's the wrong time to argue "in terms of competition between Europe and the United States...
...And now, as the West dithers once more, Milosevic is on the march again...
...The allies have finally stepped up and the alliance faces an extraordinary moment...
...Of course, NATO is not dead, not yet anyway, even though the administration's start in Kosovo has been dangerously inauspicious...
...Western leaders were preparing to toast each other in the American capital when a defining moment inconveniently emerged, courtesy of Slobodan Milosevic...
...For a decade now, Milosevic has terrorized NATO's backyard, threatening to spread war and destabilize neighbors...
...Even as the West temporized over Bosnia in the early 1990s, Ibrahim Rugova, a leader of the Kosovar Albanians, was telling the world that ethnic cleansing in Kosovo was "still Milosevic's ultimate objective...
...Bruckner also warns that anti-American forces are already well positioned to take advantage of an American-led fiasco...
...The Belgian daily De Standard accepts the idea of ground troops precisely because the West's failure against Milosevic "would be worse than a defeat...
...But the fact is, we may look back soon and recognize that there was a time in this war, at a pivotal moment in alliance history, when Europe was with us...
...The alliance had just extended its zone of freedom and stability into the heart of central Europe...
Vol. 4 • April 1999 • No. 29
