Proof of Concept
Collective Offense: Interventionism Set the Stage for NATO’s Demise (Part 1)
“Proof of Concept” is the first article in the four-part series, “Collective Offense: Interventionism Set the Stage for NATO’s Demise.”
This series builds upon previous articles, in which I explained how the war in Ukraine now faces two possible outcomes. Amateur-Hour Armageddon detailed how and why a direct Western intervention in Ukraine would be a disaster, potentially leading to nuclear war. Rubble and Rhetoric explained the hopefully more likely alternative that we avoid such an escalation, in which case Russia would settle the war on its own terms. That piece also described the Western media’s role in perpetuating this conflict, widespread misconceptions about military capabilities, and the range of excuses on which Western leaders will rely when failure in Ukraine forces them to abandon their foreign policy fantasies.
“Collective Offense” goes further and explains NATO’s dim prospects for survival, at least in any form recognizable to its current self. The four parts are:
1. “Proof of Concept”—the post-Cold War world and NATO’s interventions in the Balkans
2. “The Sandbox”—NATO’s twenty-year debacle in Afghanistan and the Libya intervention
3. “Absentee Landlords”—the interventionist leadership class and Ukraine
4. “Postmortem”—some of the geopolitical realities a post-NATO world will face
The most recognizable feature of NATO’s founding charter, the North Atlantic Treaty, is the collective defense provision found in Article V. The only time member nations agreed to use this option was in response to the attacks of 9/11. While this fact is noteworthy, it belies the greater reality of NATO’s post-Cold War history. The alliance was founded in the wake of WWII, as its first Secretary General famously said, “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”1 By the mid-1990s, the Russians had gone, as had many of the Americans, and the Germans were anything but down. While reunification remained a very costly and, at times, acrimonious process, Germany’s best qualities enabled the country to come together and resume its former role as a powerhouse of continental Europe.
Without the Soviet Union, NATO became a solution in search of a problem—and it found many. Some now ignore this reality, claiming instead that Russia’s aggression toward its neighbors, particularly its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, retroactively vindicates NATO’s refusal to “go quietly into the night” three decades earlier. Russia is irredeemably belligerent, they claim, and its geopolitical sabbatical of the 1990s and early 2000s masked this dark reality and tricked Western leaders. This revisionist view fails to account for the world’s fundamentally interactive nature. NATO’s leaders knew of Moscow’s post-Cold War concerns and chose to dismiss them. This does not mean NATO was obliged to yield to Russia’s claim to a “sphere of privileged influence” in Central and Eastern Europe. But it does mean NATO ignored the age-old dynamic of cause and effect.
If NATO chooses to “poke the bear,” it should do so wittingly, and with a plan for how to respond when the bear gets angry. Instead, NATO poked away for decades with little regard for the implications. NATO’s Russia policy meandered in geopolitical “no man’s land,” with no clear strategy to contain or cooperate with Russia. NATO mostly ignored the relationship, reviving it periodically and mostly when the alliance required Moscow’s cooperation, often to achieve goals not directly related to Russia or its interests.
All the while, NATO dismantled its European armies that had long stood on high alert, and the US effected its own worldwide reduction in force. This reorientation continued until prompted otherwise. In fact, in Donald Rumsfeld’s first seven months as US Secretary of Defense—that brief, pre-9/11 period—he implored the US Army to refocus on brigades of lightly-armored wheeled vehicles that could deploy quickly to global hotspots with no need for a vast, expensive logistical footprint. This was yet another step away from the heavy division and corps-sized formations that had typified the force in the preceding decades. Nations under threat do not disarm large, standing armies voluntarily, except to submit to an aggressor. Russia never duped NATO into letting down its guard; NATO did so because it was no longer under threat. At that time, Russia was a punchline throughout the West, one so potent it often required no accompanying joke to prompt laughter and mockery. Instead of disbanding, NATO recalibrated itself according to its view of this new world: Russia was too disorganized domestically, too impotent militarily, and too self-interested economically to respond to NATO in kind, if at all.
Picking Winners and Losers
In the early days of the Clinton administration, critical foreign policy disputes among senior leaders exemplified the transitions playing out in the new, post-Cold War world. Madeleine Albright, then US Ambassador to the UN, famously clashed with Collin Powell, then US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, over the general’s disinclination to endorse a military intervention in Bosnia. Albright admonished Powell thusly, “What are you saving this superb military for, Colin, if we can’t use it?”2
Powell’s reluctance, and that of most of his contemporaries, was rooted in the Vietnam War. For this generation of uniformed leaders, any potential military operation was fraught without clearly-defined objectives and the wherewithal of political leaders to adhere strictly to these objectives. The latter, they knew from experience, was more easily assured than achieved. These were the officers who viewed the First Gulf War as a triumph, but also felt immense relief over its swift, circumspect conclusion.
In contrast, Albright and others were enthusiastic proponents of using military force to pursue foreign policy goals and, for such a purpose, the timing could not have been better. The Soviet Union was gone, but NATO remained intact—politics rarely presented such expedient solutions. This would not be the naked conquest of old, they insisted, but instead a strategy of intervention for the sake of achieving peace in troubled regions and enforcing stability more broadly, both of which were challenges during this time of global restructuring. They promised the policy would lead to net gains for humanity, despite any regrettable but limited collateral damage.
Many outside of NATO came to view this gameplan as nothing less than poorly sugar-coated militarism, the taste of which was not sweet. From the vantage point of these naysayers, the US had declared itself not only the world’s policeman, but also its primary arbiter of moral decency. Opponents of this interventionism concluded the US would not solicit, welcome, or even consider their input. In turn, they defaulted to the view that Washington’s stated aims were dubious promises, if not outright lies, typically designed to amass ever greater power and plunder. To them, NATO was shorthand for the US and its lackies. Worse still, they observed, this cabal now wielded unchecked political, diplomatic, economic, military—and even cultural—power.
A consequential outcome of the First Gulf War was that Western publics, at least for a time, became inured to their governments’ use of airpower abroad. Unlike with ground forces, air intervention was more limited, lessened the risk of Western casualties, and could be done “surgically;” leaders claimed. This is how NATO’s first intervention began. The “winds of change” were blowing mightily across the Balkans, creating severe turbulence in some locations, particularly Bosnia. NATO offered a readymade and nearby force, capable of monitoring UN resolutions in Bosnia by air. The arrangement initially seemed fortuitous, but NATO’s mission to monitor soon grew into a mission to enforce. NATO began this next step with limited air strikes, but eventually expanded to a largescale bombing campaign of Bosnian Serb forces. This air war helped to bring about peace via the Dayton Accords, but NATO then found itself supplying tens of thousands of troops to start the monitoring cycle anew—this time on the ground.
Albright became US Secretary of State in 1997, and her belief in interventionism remained as strong as ever. In a televised interview in 1998, she said:
“But if we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us.”3
Then, echoes of NATO’s mission in Bosnia reverberated—now in southern Serbia—where that country’s forces and an ethnic-Albanian insurgency battled for control of the province of Kosovo. NATO intervened in 1999, first with a seventy-eight-day air war against Serbia, and then with the deployment of another NATO-led ground force. To Washington and Brussels, the missions in Bosnia and Kosovo were successful proof-of-concept experiments in humanitarian intervention. The breakup of the former Yugoslavia had reanimated centuries-old enmities among the region’s various sects, leading to ethnic cleansing and the reemergence of concentration camps in Europe. But NATO’s interventions stopped these horrors and saved lives; leaders concluded.
This perspective contained some truth, but necessarily ignored glaring realities. All sides had committed atrocities in a series of wars so complex—and with such deep, tangled roots—the details remain unintelligible to most outsiders. Nonetheless, the Clinton administration tidily picked winners and losers from a deadly mosaic that was anything but neat.4 While the peace NATO imposed upon Bosnia and Kosovo had halted widespread violence in both locations, each required ongoing monitoring, backed by the mostly-unspoken threat of another forceful intervention. The Dayton Accords produced a bifurcated Bosnian government that, even nearly thirty years later, faces the ever-present danger of unravelling, more or less along lines similar to those of decades before.
In Kosovo, however, NATO’s intervention had led to the creation by force of a new country. At the time, NATO’s view of the Kosovo matter was rather businesslike. This remote corner of the European chessboard had broken into several new nations. Even Bosnia had declared independence only shortly before NATO’s intervention there. Partitioning Kosovo from the rest of Serbia seemed a logical next step in the application of this nascent peacemaking formula. The situation even came with a familiar foe, at least in ethnic terms. These Serbs were different than those in Bosnia, but the two groups were close enough to provide the narrative continuity NATO policymakers needed to reassure domestic audiences. This was not so much a new intervention, they claimed, but an extension of the previous one that had halted a slaughter.
But NATO’s air war was not limited to Serbian military targets. The bombing damaged many thousands of private residences and businesses, hundreds of kilometers of roadways and railways, cultural monuments, hospitals, and schools—and produced civilian casualites.5 Attacks on power plants made it difficult to maintain the supply of electricity.6 NATO even bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three.7 To Serbs, this had not been "surgical" at all. In fact, much of this damage occurred in areas far removed from the those in which Serbian forces and ethnic-Albanian fighters had been engaged in combat. NATO's air campaign was an attempt to bring the Serbs to heel by inflicting pain across their society. And it worked.
The most far-reaching effect of NATO’s intervention in Kosovo occurred outside the region. Peace in many parts of the world rests unsteadily on our collective ability to resist the reinterpretation of political boundaries. Otherwise, there would be much more conflict over “Greater This” and “Greater That,” all stemming from impassioned but conflicting claims to ancestral homelands, and intertwined histories of violence. This is particularly true in the Balkans.
Kosovo was an exception only by virtue of its patron’s exercise in raw political and military power. The very one-sided accusations of atrocities in Kosovo, once so dominant in the West, have become less tenable in recent years. Even Hashim Thaçi—once a longtime darling of NATO who occupied many of Kosovo’s high offices, including foreign minister, prime minister, and president—now sits in The Hague awaiting trial for war crimes allegedly committed in the late-1990s.
A military alliance that began for the purpose of collective defense against an enemy, by this point long gone, had redrawn the map of Europe for Kosovo and had done so at gunpoint—primarily from the air.8 NATO did this even as not a single one of its member nations faced a threat from this Balkan backwater. This new world did abide by a “rules-based international order.” But, as always, plebeians and patricians faced entirely different sets of rules. According to NATO, would-be nationalistic projects elsewhere in the world were not permitted. Kosovo was a one-time exception.
Some sources use “the Soviet Union” in place of “the Russians.” In this particular context, the distinction is irrelevant.
Madeleine Albright, Madam Secretary: A Memoir, September 16, 2003, p.182.
US Department of State, “Interview on NBC-TV ‘The Today Show’ with Matt Lauer," February 19, 1998: https://1997-2001.state.gov/statements/1998/980219a.html.
For more on the Balkans, see my article, “The Moon Is Serbian.”
Many sources detail the destruction of NATO’s bombing campaign. For reference, here is one: https://balkaninsight.com/2019/03/22/78-days-of-fear-remembering-natos-bombing-of-yugoslavia/.
“NATO Strikes at Yugoslav power plants,” CNN, May 23, 1999, http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/europe/9905/23/kosovo.01/.
I take no position over causes or motivations for NATO’s 1999 bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Serbia.
Four NATO members—Greece, Romania, Slovakia, and Spain—still do not recognize Kosovo’s independence, all due solely to their own domestic political reasons unrelated to Kosovo. But I must ask, does this matter?