NATO's Empty Victory: A Postmortem on the Balkan War

The Clinton administration and the other NATO governments boast that the alliance won a great victory in its war against Yugoslavia.
Within days of the end of the fighting, policy-oriented scholars began writing up the lessons and meaning of the Kosovo conflict (March-June 1999). The arguments assembled in this collection probe deeper into the diplomatic and moral rationale for the NATO-led conflict with Serbia. Readers familiar with the CATO Institute, an independent Washington think-tank, will find that this text adopts its generally conservative line. A battery of foreign policy experts focus on what they perceive to have been the diplomatic miscalculations and the moral blunders in the lopsided, ill-advised conflict. These range from NATO's misreading of Serb and Albanian nationalism to the harming of the West's relations with Russia and China. John Mearsheimer's essay on partition as the only rational solution to the Serb-Kosovar problem, in particular, introduces a much-needed element of sober realism into the debate about the future of the Balkans. While these essays do not cover important recent events, they underscore the need for a sustained effort to overcome the weight of Balkan history in reviewing the recent conflict. For academic and larger public libraries.