NATO’s Slippery Slope

At The National Interest Ted Galen Carpenter outlines the bad precedents set by NATO intervention in the former Yugoslavia:

Washington, DC perpetuated and deepened its Balkan blunder a few years after the Bosnia intervention when it intervened in Kosovo. Civil strife in Serbia’s restless, predominantly Albanian province, simmered and then flared in the mid-and late-1990s. This time, Washington didn’t even make a gesture of deferring to the leading European states, but took the policy lead early on. Ultimately, the United States led a seventy-eight-day air war against Serbia, compelling Belgrade to relinquish control to a largely NATO occupation force operating under a fig-leaf resolution that the UN Security Council approved. Russia reluctantly acquiesced to that peacekeeping resolution, despite Moscow’s ties to Belgrade and Russian interests in the Balkans going back well into the nineteenth century.

There has been a clear slippery slope in NATO interventions, from Bosnia where there was at least a humanitarian justification to Kosovo where there wasn’t, to Libya where it was a pretext for regime change and has resulted in persistent chaos.

5 comments… add one
  • Was Libya really a NATO thing? I thought it was mostly an Anglo-French thing with the U.S. along for the ride.

  • Operation Unified Protector was a NATO operation that went substantially beyond the notionally empowering UNSC resolution.

  • Gustopher Link

    Is there really much doubt about how Serbia would handle ethnic unrest in Kosovo after they sponsored war crimes and genocide in Bosnia? I think you need to go back and review what was happening in Kosovo before the intervention — we didn’t just do it Willy-Nilly.

    And, compare Libya to Syria — both had dictators fighting a slowly losing war against increasingly radicalized rebels. We chose different approaches to each and the results of kind of both suck.

  • The Albanian Kosovars were just as bad as the Serbian Kosovars and engaged in as much ethnic cleansing. We entered into a civil war and took a side. That’s not prevention of genocide. That’s facilitation of genocide.

    That’s what we did in Libya, too—entered into a civil war and took a side. Libya had been two Ottoman provinces. We entered into the Libyan civil war on the side of the Benghazi province, opposing the Tripoli side. That didn’t prevent the slaughter of civilians. It arbitrated which civilians would be slaughtered.

  • bob sykes Link

    The results of our R2P dementia have been utter chaos in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Central Asia and Africa. We ourselves have killed tens of thousands of civilians, razed dozens of cities, displaced millions of people and destroyed whole economies.

    All out of arrogance

    It ought to be clear even to Americans that the US is a rogue terrorist state and the chief source of war and misery on the planet.

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