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No time to party
Nato's disarray over Kosovo is a sign of the deeper confusion within an alliance desperate to assert its ongoing relevance
The champagne is uncorked. Mingling with the clink of glasses we hear the gentle thud of mutual back-slapping. The talk is of a grand strategic concept, of a system of collective security fit for the coming millennium. Nato is celebrating its 50th birthday. Today it welcomes three new members from the former Soviet empire. The irony, it seems, has escaped this great military alliance. Even as it anticipates the 21st century, Nato is mired in the conflicts of the 19th.
In a week or two it may be fighting a war in Europe. The targets have already been programmed into the Tomahawk missiles. The bombers have been assembled on airfields and carriers across the Adriatic. On Monday, representatives of Kosovo's ethnic Albanians and Yugoslavia's Slobodan Milosevic reconvene in Paris. Only an unlikely retreat by Mr Milosevic or a refusal by the Kosovars to sign last month's settlement can forestall air strikes against Serbia. It is a grim and dangerous prospect.
True, Nato's warplanes intervened in Bosnia's civil war. And without the bombing of the Bosnian Serbs, it is hard to see how the Dayton accord would ever have been signed. But a direct attack on a sovereign state is of a different order. The Soviet empire is a decade gone. Nato still styles itself a defensive alliance. To characterise the destruction of Serbia's military infrastructure as an act of self-defence is to move beyond the decent bounds of sophistry.
I make this point as one who accepts a moral imperative to act against Mr Milosevic. Free of constraint, the Serbian leader would oversee a process of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo more vicious still than that in Bosnia. The ethnic Albanians' case for self-rule is irrefutable. Beyond a short interim period, it is hard to see how they can be denied independence. A few years ago, autonomy within the former Yugoslavia might have been enough. The tragedy is that the west refused to recognise that fact before the Kosovars were driven to armed insurrection.
Of course, there are those who will always aver that the west has no interest in preventing ethnic slaughter in the Balkans. Something similar was once said of the fate of Czechoslovakia and Poland. And what, I wonder, would the isolationists say if Mr Milosevic's victims were Jews rather than Moslems?
To admit the case for intervention, though, is not to feel easy with Nato's strategy. The plan, as I understand it, is for two nights of concentrated bombing to destroy successively Serbia's air defence system and its military command and control infrastructure. The blows would be struck on the first night by American cruise missiles, on the second by warplanes from as many alliance nations as can muster them.
Beyond that the end game, if there is one, is at best opaque. Richard Holbrooke, the US special envoy, has failed once again to persuade Mr Milosevic that the threat is credible. At the back of the minds of Nato's politicians and military planners has been the thought that air strikes might prompt the Serbian armed forces to sue for peace. If the attacks go ahead, it is whispered, Mr Milosevic could be toppled in a military coup. I hear uncomfortable echoes here of the failed efforts to dislodge Iraq's Saddam Hussein. True, Mr Milosevic was restrained last autumn by his military commanders. But they were subsequently sacked.
And if the bombing achieves nothing or - worse still - encourages Serbian forces to launch all-out war against the Kosovo Liberation Army, what next? Well, one senior alliance figure remarked this week, after a pause, there would be more bombing. And then? The reply this time was little more than a shrug. No wonder some European governments seem to harbour hopes that the KLA may yet refuse to sign the Rambouillet deal and thus give Nato an escape clause. One thing is certain: Nato ground troops will not be sent into Kosovo without the consent of both sides.
All this leaves an overwhelming impression of an alliance without an overall strategy, of plans made in haste and bargains struck in desperation. Students of the Eastern Question will say that conflicts in the Balkans are intractable. They have a point. But to my mind, the present disarray over Kosovo is emblematic of a deeper confusion.
Next month in Washington Nato will update its mission statement. The new strategic concept will assert that the alliance is as relevant today as it was when it was established to stand against a Soviet-led invasion of western Europe. Its goals have been recalibrated to meet the new threats of regional instability, terrorism, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Nato will still be a defensive alliance, but one which sometimes has to strike to defend.
I am told the draftsmen have given elegant coherence to this redefinition of collective security. But we will not have to look hard to see the cracks. Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia join the alliance today. But the door is barred indefinitely to the other former communist states queuing behind these privileged three. I have not heard two Nato foreign ministers agree how soon, and to whom, it might be reopened.
There is precious little common ground either on the alliance's geographical reach. Washington wants Nato to have the freedom to operate to more or less wherever it decides. Britain's Tony Blair is inclined to agree. Flexibility, it is called. France and Italy, among others, want the lines drawn far more tightly.
Then comes the crucial question of under whose authority, on what basis in international law, Nato can act. This has been dodged over Kosovo. It has been left to each of the 16 members to make up their minds as to why air strikes are legitimate. For the future, the US view seems to be that Nato can more or less make its own legal framework. If it secures support from the United Nations Security Council, all well and good. But Washington's attitude to the UN is encapsulated by its refusal to pay its arrears. And it is not going to allow China or Russia to exercise a veto over the projection of its military might.
The French, ever suspicious of US hegemony, are not alone in feeling queasy at what one senior European diplomat lately referred to as intolerable arrogance in Washington. Anti-Americanism is spilling out too from unrelated disputes over trade and from charges of cultural "imperialism".
The tensions are visible in efforts by Washington's allies to build a European dimension to Nato. This effort, kickstarted last year by Mr Blair, has moved further and faster than most anticipated. It does mark an important first that the Nato force currently in Macedonia is led by a Frenchman. And if they enter Kosovo, allied ground troops will be under British command. But these "facts on the ground", as Nato types call them, have not dispelled the mutual suspicions.
The US is determined to remain Europe's main power. We pay, we lead. The Europeans, for all Mr Blair's initiative, seem bereft of the will to develop their military capabilities. I don't see governments in Paris, Bonn and Rome re-assessing the peace dividend.
These awkward realities can be finessed in the Washington communiqué. And if Nato goes to war, public solidarity will be an imperative. The alliance has its strengths. I can't think of a better guarantor of western security. But now is not the moment for champagne. |
