Victory, But at a Price by Fareed Zakaria

June 14, 1999, U.S. Edition

Victory, But at a Price
Give credit where it's due: intensive air attacks and diplomacy forced Milosevic to deal. But how long will the U.S. stick around?
By Fareed Zakaria

Why did a war that seemed to be going so badly turn out so well? The endgame is already friction-filled; last weekend NATO generals met for difficult talks with their Serb counterparts to arrange a transfer of power in Kosovo. And winning the war may well prove to have been the easy part, compared with rebuilding Kosovo and policing the region. But NATO has won a decisive victory against Slobodan Milosevic. For this its leaders deserve much credit. Not only did they stay united but, having begun the war disastrously, they learned their lessons fast. Over the last three weeks, the gap between NATO's goals and its means snapped shut. First, NATO expanded its military means, dramatically intensifying the air war. At the start of the conflict, it was flying about 250 sorties a day into Yugoslavia. By last week it was flying more than 600. Perhaps more important, NATO shifted the focus of its attack away from empty buildings in Belgrade and onto Serb forces in Kosovo. In the first seven weeks of the war, the bombings had destroyed fewer than 20 Serb tanks. In the next three weeks they destroyed more than 100.

As important, NATO compromised on its goals. Having gone to war over the Rambouillet accords (which the Serbs had refused to sign), Western leaders, at a meeting of the G-8 on May 6, put forward Ramboullet-lite--a revised set of core conditions to end the war. They withdrew the requirement for a referendum in Kosovo, to which the Serbs were unalterably opposed. They compromised on the nature of the military force that would protect the Kosovars. Having originally demanded an all-NATO force, they now agreed to a U.N. force that would include NATO, but also troops from neutral countries. They also assured Belgrade that they would stand by their pledge at Rambouillet to demilitarize the Kosovo Liberation Army.

Having intensified the war, NATO also intensified its negotiations, particularly with Moscow. (Indeed, moving Russia from its initial position as Yugoslavia's broker--and thus leaving Belgrade utterly isolated--was the most impressive part of Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott's tireless shuttle diplomacy.) After much initial talk of never dealing with Milosevic, in the end NATO cut a deal with him. The European Union representative, Finland's Martti Ahtisaari, met with Milosevic six days after he was indicted as a war criminal.

Victory has a thousand fathers but Bill Clinton will be the proudest. He is, after all, the leader of the country that waged the bulk of the war. He was also its chief strategist. In choosing to use limited means for limited goals, Clinton steered a course between inaction and overcommitment--which looks canny in hindsight. Not only did the air war maintain NATO's unity, it also ensured that Russia and China would not veto a U.N. mandate for the war. It was the surest way to preserve domestic support. Despite his rhetoric, Clinton knew that Kosovo was almost exclusively a humanitarian mission. With a much better feel for the popular mood than his critics, he recognized that the public would support such a war as long as it was cheap.

To critics who savaged him for not waging a ground war, Clinton can persuasively say, I achieved your goals but without paying the price that you seemed a little too eager to pay--American lives. To those wary of going to war because the strategic stakes were not high enough, Clinton can say, maybe, but the costs were not so high either.

But are the costs really so low? The air campaign added up to little as wars go; around $4 billion. More incredibly, not one American died in combat. But what comes next will not be so cheap. The European Union has estimated that rebuilding Kosovo will cost at least $30 billion. In addition, Macedonia and Albania, hard-hit by the war and the refugees, rightly expect Western aid. And then there is Serbia. The NATO bombardment has set Yugoslavia back into an almost pre-industrial state. A Belgrade research unit estimates that the costs of rebuilding could run from $50 billion to $150 billion and will take decades. In a post-Milosevic Yugoslavia, Western Europe and the United States would probably end up paying most of the bills. In the meantime, the new refugees will be impoverished Serbs streaming out of their shattered country.

NATO is now the next in a long succession of outside powers--the Hapsburgs, the Ottomans--to impose order on the southern Balkans. Having taking on a colonial mission, NATO will come up against the limits of nation-building in an age (and area) of spirited nationalisms and dysfunctional politics. It already rules one protectorate in Bosnia, it will take on another in Kosovo and have some responsibility for the stability of Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro. The debate over NATO's post-cold-war role is now irrelevant. Whatever the rhetoric, in reality it will be a Balkan reconstruction and policing organization.

Was it worth it? Since this was a humanitarian mission, the test lies in its success on that score. There were 45,000 refugees outside the borders of Kosovo when the war began. Now there are almost 800,000. If a full 80 percent go back, the net effect of the war will have been to quadruple the number of Kosovar refugees. (We don't know what Milosevic would have been able to do had there been no war. We know what he wanted to do, but it was only because Kosovo became a war zone--and Western observers, journalists and diplomats were expelled--that he was able to do it.)

In 1992, the Bush administration circulated a defense planning guideline that serves as a useful reminder of the basic purpose of American foreign policy in a one-superpower world. It argued that the United States must act in a manner that simultaneously reassures and deters potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role. What seemed inconceivable for seven years has become likely after 70 days. The war in Kosovo has, in the words of former Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, a pro-Western voice, set [U.S.-Russian relations] back by several decades. Polls suggest he's right. Seventy-two percent of Russians now have an unfavorable opinion of the United States, up from only 28 percent before the war. In China we have seen an eruption of anti-American fury that is eerily reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution. And the lesson that Europe has taken from this war is that it is too dependent on the United States. Last Thursday, for the first time in their history, the 15 countries of the European Union agreed to make Europe a military power with independent command, control and troops. Independent, that is, of the United States.

If the central reality of the post-cold-war world has been America's unrivaled power, the war in Kosovo has produced the first stirrings of Great Power resentment, challenge and competition. But this will be dealt with far in the future, by future administrations. For now, President Clinton will take a bow.