Think again. With NATO mired in an ugly war against Slobodan Milosevic’s Yugoslavia, celebration is hardly the order of the day. As their limousines grind through gridlock from one scaled-down event to another, NATO’s leaders will have ample time to reflect on their new circumstances. Kosovo has changed everything; if some good is to come out of the meeting this week, all those in Washington–American hosts and European guests–need to reflect on where their spring adventure has taken them.
Kosovo is a new kind of war. It is not being fought in defense of any conventional definition of pressing national interest. It strains the language to assert that a vicious but localized civil war in southeastern Europe threatens the security of the United States. Indeed, it is hard to make the case that violence in the Balkans spells immediate danger to the nations of America’s allies in Western Europe. Like it or not, the Balkans are a place apart. In 1990, the last year of peace in the region, the former Yugoslavia absorbed just 1 percent of West Germany’s exports; more French and British tourists visited Thailand and Morocco than Yugoslavia. NATO is at war for humanitarian reasons, not those of security. As British Prime Minister Tony Blair wrote in NEWSWEEK last week, “In this conflict we are fighting not for territory but for values.”
“Values” may indeed be what “we” are fighting for. (The Yugoslav Army, it should be noted, is fighting not for values but for territory–to hold on to a province that even the NATO countries concede is legally part of Yugoslavia.) But “values” are a slippery concept on which to base the expenditure of blood and treasure. Reasonable, civilized men and women can disagree about which values are worth dying for.
For example: in a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors last week, Bill Clinton said, “We face a great battle between the forces of integration and the forces of disintegration; the forces of globalism versus tribalism; of oppression against empowerment.” Nice words, but as a guide to the deployment of national will, this is hopeless. It is hard to imagine a society that by American standards more systematically oppresses half its people–all its women–than Saudi Arabia. Are we now to be engaged in a “great battle” with the Saudis? If not, why not? If a majority of Quebecers decided to secede from Canada, would that be “tribalism”? Would we then be obliged to take up arms in defense of “globalism”? (Only Clinton, if indeed he himself, knows how the battle between “integration” and “disintegration” might shape up.)
There’s an easy riposte to all this. Sure, the values crowd asserts, there are shades of gray, but some situations are black and white–places where oppression by a government of its own people is so vile that the outside world is bound to act. Kosovo, perhaps, is an example of such horror. But if democratic governments are to place the lives of young men and women at risk, those governments are duty-bound to do more than work from case to case. We need a standard that allows us to judge which of the world’s many humanitarian catastrophes are worth a general war; so far we aren’t even close to having one.
Still, perhaps none of this matters. In Kosovo, after all, the United States and its NATO allies have decided that it is not worth putting young lives at much risk–that’s why we are not fighting a ground war. It would be nice if NATO’s leaders this week honestly admitted the consequence of that decision. Starkly put, to protect the lives of those in the NATO armed forces, we are prepared to sacrifice Serb (and Kosovar) civilians. We cannot know how many have so far died in “collateral damage” from the air war; the numbers, perhaps, can be measured by the scores rather than the hundreds. But if the bombing continues into the summer, there will be thousands dead on the ground. NATO’s bombers, of course, are as precise as they can be. (The German aerial bombardment of Belgrade in 1941, by contrast, left 17,000 dead in one night.) And as if to underline the care with which the air war is being conducted, Clinton last week said, “We have no quarrel with the Serbian people.” Somehow, one suspects that “the Serbian people” see things rather differently.
A new form of war, fought in a new sort of way–when they have absorbed those lessons, the dignitaries in Washington might consider one more instance in which Kosovo is novel. This is a war whose conclusion cannot be defined. For the last three weeks the press has been full of articles on Kosovo as the “endgame” of the Balkans crisis. The word should be banned. If the guns fall silent this week, nothing will have ended; the Balkans will not be at peace. In the best possible outcome, NATO forces (perhaps with Russians) will police two protectorates–Bosnia and Kosovo–for years, perhaps decades, to come. If things go badly, peacekeeping forces will be needed also in Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro; and Serbia, the largest statelet in the region, will be a wrecked shell of a place, inhabited by a sullen people nursing a bitter grievance.
Such a future may be worth it, a price we have to pay if Milosevic’s undoubted evil is to be eradicated. Perhaps. But it is nothing to celebrate.
