The World After Kosovo
May 3, 1999
stratfor.com
SUMMARY
Whether in a week or a month, the Kosovo crisis is drawing to a
close. The basic outlines of the settlement are already visible. The
question now is what the world will look like afterwards. We expect a
much more sober, cautious, and even mildly isolationist U.S., facing
the fact that tremendous power is not the same as omnipotence. We
see a dramatic decline in European confidence in American
leadership. Germany was particularly concerned about Russia's
reactions and is likely to concentrate on maintaining its relations with
Moscow independent of NATO's decisions. The big winner was
Russia, a country that got money, respect, and the position of honest
broker. The most extraordinary outcome of Bill Clinton's Kosovo
adventure was that it turned Boris Yeltsin into a statesman, with his
representative, Chernomyrdin, taken more seriously in Bonn and
Rome than Clinton's Strobe Talbott. That was no small feat for the
Clinton foreign policy team.
ANALYSIS
The Kosovo conflict is drawing to a close. Whether a settlement will
take a day or a month, the key elements are now clear. There will be
a cease-fire prior to the implementation of any agreement. The
Serbs will continue to control Kosovo, and Serbian police will retain
some sort of presence. A lightly armed international peacekeeping
force will be permitted into Kosovo. Some NATO members will send
forces, several non-NATO members, including Russia, will also send
forces. The command structure of the force will remain deliberately
vague. It will be agreed that Albanians will be able to return to their
homes in Kosovo in stages. Many will refuse to go, hoping to be
resettled elsewhere. Others will return. Yet others will try to return but
will find it impossible. An ineffective peacekeeping force will remain
in place for a very long time, with an unclear mission. But the
bombing will end; the abuse of Albanians will end. The world will go
on.
It is time to think about what that world will look like after Kosovo.
Let's begin by considering carefully what has happened in Kosovo.
The United States' government had received reports that it found
credible of a terrible genocide underway in Kosovo and decided
that it had to intervene to stop it. The U.S. began by attempting to
dictate terms to the Belgrade government, drafting a document now
called the Rambouillet Accords. It gathered around itself its NATO
allies, and demanded that all sides agreed to those Accords. There
was substantial hesitancy on all sides, but in the end, the Albanians
agreed. The Serbs did not. Leading NATO, the United States
announced that unless the Serbs agreed to the Accords, precisely
as stated with no further negotiation, NATO would begin a bombing
campaign against the Serbs. The United States said this with full
confidence that Belgrade would capitulate. Belgrade did not. Now,
finding that NATO refuses to launch a ground war against Serbia,
and finding that it lacks sufficient air power to crush Serb resistance,
the United States will eventually be forced to accept a compromise
and call it victory.
This will end an era that began with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in
August 1990. The United States, under President Bush, determined
that the Iraqi invasion was unacceptable. His precise reasoning was
not as clear as one might think. Part of the reasoning was strategic.
Part of it was his repugnance at one nation seizing another. But the
core of the intervention was that in a global, strategic sense, it was
risk free. Certainly, there was a risk of casualties. However, there
were two assumptions on which the intervention rested. The first was
that if the United States chose to intervene, it could create, at will, an
international coalition to carry out the invasion. The second
assumption was that this coalition could in fact liberate Kuwait. In
other words, the issue that framed Bush's decision was whether
such an intervention was desirable and not whether such an
intervention was possible.
The intervention in Iraq was the first of a series of interventions that
included Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and now Kosovo. Not all of these
ended well. Somalia was, by any measure, a failure. The Haitian
invasion displaced the former government but no one would argue
that Haiti has been lifted out of its misery. Bosnia was intended to
be a short-term intervention but has become a permanent presence.
But none of these interventions have forced the United States to
face the core question: what are the limits of American power? The
Clinton administration faced the intervention in Kosovo as a
question of whether the United States would intervene and whether
we would permit Serbia to retain sovereignty over Kosovo. It failed
to ask the more important question of whether the United States and
its allies had the military power in place to achieve its political ends,
and whether the amount of military power required should be spent
in a place like Kosovo. The United States simply assumed, without
the meticulous analysis required, that it had the needed power. It did
not.
Thus, the decade begun in Kuwait ends in the skies over Serbia. No
American government will, in the near future at least, simply assume
that it has the military power needed to impose its will. This is,
obviously, a healthy lesson to learn. There is a vast difference
between being the greatest military power in the world and
omnipotence. The United States rules the seas and can, wherever it
chooses, rule the skies. This is not the same as being able to
compel other nations to capitulate on matters of fundamental
national importance. It must always be remembered that
demographics never favor intervention in Eurasia. American ground
forces are always outnumbered whenever they set foot in Eurasia.
Sometimes air and naval superiority along with superior technology
and training can compensate for this demographic imbalance.
Sometimes it cannot. Sometimes it can compensate only after a
build-up taking many months, as in Desert Storm. The casual
assumption that the general superiority of U.S. military power
inevitably translates into quick victory in any specific circumstance is
obviously wrong and the point has been finally driven home.
We would be very surprised if the Clinton Administration attempted
another humanitarian intervention after Kosovo. Indeed, one of the
lessons learned by all future administrations is that interventions
should never be casually undertaken until, and unless, the military is
given time to plan and implement the intervention, as Bush permitted
in Desert Storm. Moreover, since the implementation of an
intervention in Eurasia is always costly and time-consuming, what
appeared to be a good idea at first glance, might well turn out to be
a very bad idea in the long run. Merely wanting to do something
does not mean that something can be done. Moral obligations are
easy to assume. They are sometimes impossible to carry out. This
is a hard lesson to learn. Put differently, talk is cheap. War is hard.
We expect two parallel processes to emerge after Kosovo. We will
see a much more passive, indeed, isolationist United States. The
hair-trigger assumption of responsibility for Eurasian problems will
be replaced by a much more cautious calculation not only of moral
considerations, but also of costs and the national interest. The
second process, paradoxically, will be a substantial increase in
American defense spending. The Kosovo exercise has clearly
demonstrated that the draw-down in U.S. military forces has limited
American military effectiveness. Military options that were available
to President Bush are simply not available, in anywhere near as
lavish a quantity, to President Clinton. There is no question of any
further cuts in defense spending. The only issue now is how much
defense spending will be increased?
The United States will be withdrawing from its aggressive
leadership position not solely because it wishes to do so. It will be
withdrawing because it has seriously lost the trust of many of its
NATO allies. Except for the UK, the rest of NATO has been simply
appalled by the U.S. management of the entire affair. The end game
is being crafted by Germany, Italy, and Russia because the United
States simply locked itself into a position from which it could neither
retreat nor go forward. It very quickly became apparent that the air
war was not going to force a Serbian capitulation. Rather than
commence compensating maneuvers, the United States insisted on
rigidity and bellicosity, without developing a crushing military
strategy.
German policy is particularly likely to shift after Kosovo. Germany
has a fundamental interest in maintaining good relations with the
Russians. From a geopolitical and a financial sense, a hostile
Russia is the last thing that Germany needs. The near-confrontation
between NATO and Russia over Kosovo was a sobering
experience for the Germans. For a few days, they looked into the
abyss and the abyss stared back at them. Members of the
Red-Green coalition in Bonn are inherently suspicious of both the
United States and military adventures. They spent the last month
trying to demonstrate that they could be good citizens of NATO,
putting aside their ingrained, 1960s sensibilities. They emerged with
a clear sense that they were right to mistrust American leadership
and to worry about military adventures. One of the consequences of
Kosovo is that the Europeans in general, and the Germans and
Italians in particular, are going to be extremely cautious in agreeing
to future creative uses of NATO.
The big winner in all of this is, of course, Russia. It not only got $4.5
billion but it also got everyone's attention, which it didn't have since
the good old days of summits with Ronald Reagan. It has not only
reminded Europe of its very real military power, thereby setting up
the process for extracting money from the West, but it maneuvered
itself into the position of being an honest broker, trusted by both
Germany/Italy and the Serbs. Indeed, the Russians came out of the
crisis looking like sober statesmen, working toward peace and
stability. Now, when Boris Yeltsin can be made to look like a sober
statesman and facilitator, something has gone dramatically wrong in
American foreign policy.
We believe that the Kosovo conflict will become a definitive event in
European history. The failure in Kosovo will cause the United States
to recoil from casual interventions. More important, U.S. clumsiness
in Kosovo will cause the Europeans to shy away from American
leadership, particularly concerning European matters. The likelihood
of an American administration herding NATO into another military
adventure in Europe is minimal. This is a crucial change. There has
been a tremendous asymmetry between Europe as a
politico-military entity and Europe as an economic entity. NATO has
been the primary politico-military expression of Europe, the EU the
primary economic entity. This has made it extremely difficult for
Europe to express a coherent viewpoint. The EU and NATO were
simply not congruent.
The Europeans do have a vehicle for politico-military thinking, the
Western European Union, which excludes the United States and is,
therefore, far more congruent with the EU. But even that doesn't get
to the heart of the problem. Germany's interests are specifically
German. France's interests are French. The UK's interests are the
UK's and are quite different from the other two. We expect two
results from Kosovo. First, a strengthening of purely European
institutions at the expense of NATO. Second, a greater caution by
individual nations toward multinational commitments, including
purely European ones.
Kosovo will undoubtedly bring to a close what we might call the era
of casual intervention for the United States. There is nothing like
failure to increase sobriety. We suspect that this is the last major
foreign policy adventure for the Clinton Administration and would not
be surprised to see Albright, Berger and Holbrooke accepting
private sector positions in the near future. Most importantly, Kosovo
closes what we regard as the interregnum between eras. The Cold
War was not replaced by a unipolar world. That was a temporary
anomaly. The new era of one superpower and several great powers,
loosely united to limit U.S. power, is now beginning.
We'll tentatively christen this the New World Disorder while we wait
for the new era to name itself.
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