Book concludes NATO's Balkan campaign backfires
Researchers detail fatal miscalculations and consequences of intervention in Balkan conflict

A new Cato Institute book recommends that U.S. policymakers reject NATO's new strategic concept and concludes that NATO's increasingly promiscuous interventionism harms the United States and international relations as a whole. Ten foreign policy experts analyze NATO's intervention in the Kosovo conflict and argue that the alliance failed to achieve a foreign policy victory. The authors offer alternative solutions for the Balkans, such as a partition of Kosovo, and broader initiatives including European-run security institutions.

NATO's Empty Victory: A Postmortem on the Balkan War examines the circumstances underlying the conflict, analyzes decisions made by the Clinton administration at the Rambouillet negotiations and argues that NATO used faulty justifications for intervention.

"In framing its Kosovo policy," says Christopher Layne, contributor to the book and MacArthur Foundation Fellow in Global Security, "the Clinton team had only the most superficial understanding of the origins of the Kosovo crisis, the complexity of the dispute, and the nature of Serbian nationalism." He writes that, instead of mediating an agreement between two rival parties, the United States aligned itself with the Kosovo Liberation Army, which was known for terrorist activities and its "Greater Albania" agenda. His analysis suggests that the KLA's intent from the outset was to get the Western alliance militarily involved and to exploit that involvement for political gain.

The authors also criticize NATO for bombing Yugoslavia, which resulted in mass expulsion of ethnic Albanians, after the Rambouillet peace negotiations failed. "NATO's air campaign clearly helped to create the very tragedy it ostensibly was intended to prevent," writes Layne. Bombing occurred after the intelligence community had warned NATO officials that a humanitarian crisis would be the probable effect of their actions.

The authors suggest that NATO's offensive produced far-reaching, unintended consequences including negative political and economic fallout in the region, a trampling of the congressional war power and serious damage to U.S. relations with Russia and China. "Russian and Chinese leaders saw NATO's unauthorized intervention in the Balkans as politically marginalizing their countries," writes Ted Galen Carpenter, the book's editor and Cato's vice president for defense and foreign policy studies. "The air strikes on Serbia were viewed, not as the prosecution of a just war to prevent genocide, but as a brutal attack on a small nation that was incapable of striking back," Carpenter continues.

Calling NATO's goal of political autonomy for the Albanian Kosovars "unattainable," John Mearsheimer, author of a chapter and co-director of the University of Chicago's Program on International Security, argues for partitioning Kosovo. Other contributors advocate European-run security institutions to deal with future Kosovo-style problems. Carpenter concludes that "the alliance [NATO] has outlived its usefulness and . . . entirely new security arrangements are needed in post-Cold War Europe."

Ted Galen Carpenter is the author or editor of 10 previous books about foreign policy.

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