U.S. and NATO Intervention in Kosovo: Causes and Outcomes

Introduction: Background and Origins of the Kosovo Conflict

Kosovo is a province of Serbia and was the central area of the former Yugoslavia, a region in which approximately 90% of the population is ethnic Albanian, with the remainder being Serbs. Under the former Yugoslav government, the region enjoyed a considerable degree of autonomy. However, that autonomy was revoked by President Slobodan Milosevic in 1989 as part of his campaign for a "Greater Serbia." The Kosovo region had been the site of a historically and emotionally charged defeat by the Ottoman Empire in 1389 and therefore holds great significance for Serbian nationalists. Once Kosovo lost its autonomy under Milosevic, conflict ensued as ethnic Albanians strove to have their cultural rights restored.

The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) drove the conflict toward the radical extreme by engaging in armed violence and demanding full independence, while the Serbs were fiercely determined to keep the province. The United States and NATO entered the situation when hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians were forced from their homes in what threatened to become a continent-wide humanitarian disaster. The conflict also risked drawing in neighboring countries — Albania, Macedonia, and Russia — all of which have ethnic or religious ties to the Serbs, with the possible involvement of Iran due to the Muslim Albanian population in Kosovo.

NATO had been opposed to Kosovo independence on the grounds that it might set a precedent for secession in other parts of the world, yet acknowledged that an internal resolution was unlikely. From the outset it was recognized that Milosevic would not be moved without NATO military force — his track record gave little reason for optimism. The KLA, though not highly organized at first, had gained ground by the time the U.S. and NATO became involved. U.S. European allies wanted the United States to serve as a peacekeeping force, but the Clinton administration had to work hard to secure congressional approval for military intervention, even as military commanders remained uneasy about risking soldiers' lives in a conflict where neither side particularly welcomed the Western presence.

Secretary of State Albright's Case for Intervention (1999)

In a statement before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 20, 1999, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright addressed U.S. and NATO policy toward the crisis in Kosovo. She noted that the potential dangers of the situation had been recognized throughout the 1990s, and that Slobodan Milosevic had "first vaulted to prominence by exploiting the fears of ethnic Serbs in this province" before, in the latter 1980s, moving to strip Kosovo Albanians of their autonomy. The Kosovo Albanians initially sought peaceful means to recover their rights, but by 1992 fighting had broken out elsewhere in the Balkans, and former President George H. W. Bush had issued a warning against Serbian military repression in Kosovo. At the same time, Milosevic had instigated three additional wars by attacking Slovenia and Croatia and triggering an ongoing and devastating conflict in Bosnia.

Early in 1998, Milosevic initiated a more extensive and violent campaign of repression against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, resulting in a humanitarian crisis in which tens of thousands of people fled their homes. The KLA had also strengthened and provoked further unrest. The United States, its allies, and Russia sought to end the cycle of violence through diplomatic means. Although Milosevic agreed to a ceasefire and the withdrawal of his security forces, along with the entry of an OSCE verification mission, it soon became clear that he never intended to honor this agreement. Rather than withdrawing, his security forces repositioned for a new offensive. In early 1999, those forces massacred the village of Racak. Albright stated that while blocking diplomatic efforts, Milosevic was simultaneously executing a "barbaric plan for expelling or forcing the total submission of the Kosovo Albanian community," ultimately forcing the withdrawal of the OSCE mission before launching a new campaign of terror.

Albright described the resulting images — families uprooted and placed on trains, children separated from their parents, refugees recounting how loved ones were led away — as representing people with the same fundamental rights and humanity as anyone else. President Clinton had repeatedly urged recognition of Kosovo's vital role in Europe's future. The region, as Albright noted, is "a crossroads where the Western and Orthodox branches of Christianity and the Islamic world meet," where World War I began, where major battles of World War II were fought, and where the worst fighting in Europe since Hitler's defeat had occurred. The stability of Kosovo directly affects the security of U.S. allies — Greece and Turkey to the south, and Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic to the north. Kosovo was also surrounded by small, struggling democracies being overwhelmed by the flood of refugees created by Milosevic's policies.

Belgrade's rejection of a peace plan that the Kosovo Albanians had accepted — a plan that included KLA disarmament provisions and safeguards for all Kosovars, including ethnic Serbs — created what Albright described as a critical test of NATO, whose strength and credibility had defended freedom and ensured security for five decades. For this reason, she argued, the decision to use force against Milosevic's regime was "necessary and right." Albright outlined five policy objectives for U.S. diplomacy at that point:

1) to ensure that NATO remains united and firm; 2) to help leaders in directly affected countries cope with the humanitarian crisis; 3) to prevent a wider conflict; 4) to ensure that NATO's message is understood around the world; and 5) to build a solid foundation for a new generation of peace — so that future wars are prevented, economies grow, democratic institutions are strengthened, and the rights of all are preserved. The specific goal was the transformation of the Balkans from the continent's primary source of instability into an integral part of the European mainstream (Albright, 1999).

Paul Starr's 1999 essay "The Choice in Kosovo," published in The American Prospect, observed that since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Americans had been uncertain about the proper basis for U.S. foreign policy, especially regarding the use of military power. With the defeat of communism no longer a unifying rationale, the central question became whether the United States should "follow the dictates of national interest narrowly understood, or do democratic values and commitments to human rights oblige us to conceive of our role more broadly?" Starr also raised the question of whether it was a mistake to draw a sharp distinction between national interests and humanitarian concerns, given that American security depends on an international moral order and the rule of law — and, if the U.S. did intervene for humanitarian aims, how far it was willing to go and whether it was prepared to put American soldiers at risk.

Seven Weeks into U.S. and NATO Involvement

Starr argued that the United States faced a critical test when the Serbs began their assault on Kosovar Albanians in March 1999 — one more consequential, in his view, than the test posed by Iraq in 1991. In the Gulf War, the U.S. confronted a clear act of international aggression threatening to place vast resources in the hands of a hostile regime. In Kosovo, there was no obvious strategic or economic interest compelling intervention, and Milosevic, unlike Saddam Hussein, did not threaten any nation outside his own region. Given that the Kosovar Albanians are predominantly Muslim and that the U.S. had no strong ties to the region, Starr considered it highly unlikely that the United States would have intervened had the majority in the Republican House controlled foreign policy. He cited Representative John Kasich's remark that since the people of the Balkans had been fighting each other for centuries, the U.S. was unlikely to settle their differences. Critics of involvement raised the specter of "another Vietnam."

Seven weeks into the operation, the U.S. and NATO were conducting the campaign entirely from the air, wary of any ground involvement and determined to avoid failure. The NATO air campaign prompted New York Times columnist Tom Friedman to argue that every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road, and war-related factory should be targeted, with the message to the Serbs that every week spent ravaging Kosovo would set their country back by a decade. Yet, as Starr noted, the war had been entered with humanitarian aims, so bombing the enemy "back to the Middle Ages would undermine the original rationale." Starr proposed a riskier but more effective alternative: mobilizing overwhelming ground force, which he believed was more likely to secure Serbian surrender, result in fewer civilian deaths, and achieve full autonomy for Kosovars within an international protectorate.

Nevertheless, the bombing campaign proceeded. Laura Rozen, writing for Salon in 1999, reported the reactions of a Serbian translator who had assisted Western journalists covering the Kosovo crisis. Speaking from Belgrade on the second night of NATO airstrikes, the translator expressed raw hatred of the United States and NATO despite her personal ties to Americans and her own direct knowledge of the atrocities committed by Serbian security forces against ethnic Albanians. Rozen noted that for the first time since World War II, Serbs were experiencing war in their own territory — even as the Serbian government had supported conflicts in Bosnia and Croatia that had killed nearly 300,000 people combined.

Conclusion: Outcomes and the Road Ahead

While the Serbs in Kosovo had perpetually committed genocide slowly against several ethnic groups over the course of many years, it was not until the involvement of the United States and NATO in the crisis that Serbians were confronted with the consequences of the violence they had been inflicting on others. The NATO intervention simultaneously provided the motivation necessary to bring Serbian leaders to the negotiating table in pursuit of a peaceful resolution to the ongoing conflict. The Kosovo region has been the site of recurring conflict since 1389, with the same territory witnessing war after war.