25 April, 1999
NATO, Kosovo and Russia
By Eqbal Ahmad
NATO heads of state are gathered in Washington D.C. to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the alliance which was founded on April 4, 1949. What was billed as a "gala" celebration of western success and solidarity, has turned out to be a sombre conference on the crisis over Kosovo, a crisis NATO's leaders created for themselves from an excess of ambition and insouciance.
The discomfiture is especially Washington's, the site of the conference. Moscow and Belgrade must be watching with satisfaction.
NATO's alternatives in the Balkans are stark. To fight or lose, that is the question before it, and NATO is not wanting to do either. "This is an American-led organization", the New York Times of April 22 quotes a senior European official. But America is caught in a paralyzing contradiction. It has long nourished a conviction of 'manifest destiny' but its ruling establishment and also the ordinary citizens are haunted by the experience of Vietnam where the United States sustained a great defeat, both moral and physical. This contradiction explains the peculiarity of contemporary American posture in the world: the US is determined to play the role of the world's paramount power but it does not wish to bear the costs. Its instinct is to 'show the flag' where necessary, but it is not willing to put uniformed American boys and girls in harm's way.
The outcome is a reliance on remote warfare - air raids, missile strikes, naval blockades and off-shore bombings. Here, a primary lesson from Vietnam is forgotten. The Vietnamese had successfully asserted the superiority of men over machines; they defeated the cumulative presumption of modern technology. When George Bush declared at the end of Desert Storm that the "Vietnam syndrome is over," he may not have realized that technology had triumphed over Saddam Hussain but in America the inhibition against ground war remained. The Gulf War may have stimulated another illusion: the Sheikhs of Arabia paid the dollar bill of Desert Storm. Europeans shall be less generous. George Bush's only legacy to Bill Clinton are Saddam Hussain and America's inhuman embargo on Iraq. Desert Storm did not sweep away the Vietnam syndrome.Another answer to the 'syndrome' was the Nixon Doctrine, rehearsed in Indo-China as the 'Vietnamization programme'. Ambassador Elsworth Bunker's blunt description of it was that it entailed 'changing the colour of the corpses'. It compelled the construction in the 1970s and 1980s of pro-American constellations of power, and yielded the neo-fascist dictators of that period, including a bloated Iranian Shah, murderous Latin tyrants, Mohammed Ziaul Haq, and Suharto of Indonesia. As a 'strategic ally' in the Middle East, Israel alone achieved a useless and pricy permanence. Others proved vulnerable to popular discontent. But none rendered service greater and more cost-free than Mohammed Ziaul Haq, a self-styled soldier of Islam who brought ruination to Afghanistan, and inflicted deep wounds upon Pakistan when he dragged it into the role of the "front-line" state in the cold war.
The premises of Nixon Doctrine cannot work with NATO. Europeans demand equality not subservience, participation not supervision in their relations with the US. From its beginning Europeans have insisted on the principle of American military leadership of the alliance; they insist that to be primus inter pares, the US must put into the alliance more men and material than the other members. Therein lies a principal aspect of NATO's current problem. The US sponsored a war which it did not plan to fight on the ground. As could have been anticipated (See Dawn, April 4, 1999), the air war is a miserable failure and a human disaster. It cannot be reversed without a ground campaign and NATO casualties. Europe will not pick up the slack. Clinton is on the spot.
The stakes are high and going higher by the day. "If we do not achieve our goals in Kosovo, NATO is finished as an alliance", Senator Joseph R. Biden warned in a speech to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. "Kosovo has brought NATO into the never, never land," says David Gompert, formerly a White House national security staffer and now Vice-President of the Rand Corporation. Senator John S. McCain, a presidential hopeful from the Republican party, has been lambasting Clinton for starting the air war without contingency plans for ground action. Britain and France are reported to be adding to pressure for introducing ground forces in Kosovo.
All are looking to Moscow, hoping it will pressure Milosevic to agree to a settlement and save NATO the hard choice. Yet, there is no evidence so far that the United States, Britain and other NATO countries are willing, in return, to admit to their ill will with regard to Russia and reverse their unilateral initiatives toward permanently diminishing its future as a power. The expansion of NATO is but one, albeit most significant, example.
NATO was created as a "purely defensive" military alliance during the cold war. This rhetoric never changed even though the alliance was used as the mechanism for speeding up the arms race which put unbearable burdens on the USSR under which it finally collapsed in 1989-1990. Russia dismantled its empire, the Warsaw Pact disbanded, and the cold war ended. The West deemed itself victorious. It had no viable enemy, and no need of NATO. Yet, the United States embarked on a plan to expand NATO to former Warsaw Pact countries, the strategic underbelly through which had entered the invaders one more devastating than the other - Napoleon, Hitler - into the Russian heartland. As if to add insult to injury, the United States also embarked on a systematic effort to limit Russia's access to the energy resources of Central Asia.
The intent was hegemonic rather than adversarial. The language of "crisis management" and "partnership" was employed to hide a harsh reality which was that a former superpower was being encircled in order that its influence shall not extend again beyond its borders, so that it may be decisively "contained" becoming a malleable subsidiary of the sole superpower. At the time when NATO's expansion was being contemplated I had discussed in some detail its long-term consequence (Dawn, February 23, 1997). The essay concluded that Moscow's corrupt and ineffectual leaders will not be able to deter America's determined effort to expand NATO into Eastern Europe. It read in part:
"The United States and its NATO allies are playing, nevertheless, a risky game. Their cold war strategy of containment has metamorphosed into a policy of encircling Russia and reducing it to a dependency, preferably a prosperous one. But Russia is not Japan or Korea. It is too large and resource-filled a country to remain a toothless giant, even in a golden cage. ... So if Moscow's demoralized and divided leaders do acquiesce, their acquiescence may prove historically more dangerous than did the German surrender to the Treaty of Versailles. Germany, after all, was punished for starting and waging a war. Russia is being penalized for ending one."
NATO's present quandary over Kosovo is the first such penalty Moscow has inflicted upon it. Russia's Great Slavs exercise an overriding influence on Serbia's Little Slavs. Yet, they did little to convince Slobodan Milosevic to accept the Euro-American proposal, or a version thereof, for defusing the Kosovo crisis. They have not actively discouraged Milosevic's ethnic cleansing campaign, a human disaster that may have a lasting adverse impact on the future of the Balkans. And with generous logistical supplies, they are reducing the pain on Belgrade of the allied bombing campaign. So if a non-military resolution to the crisis over Kosovo - the one outcome Washington desperately wants - is at all possible, Russia holds the key to it.
In order to win Moscow's active cooperation in achieving a settlement, the United States and NATO may have to reverse at least some of their most aggressive diplomatic and strategic incursions into Eastern Europe and Central Asia. For a hegemonic power, this is a hard call. But the alternative may well be a ground war in the Balkans which Clinton is keen to avoid.