Abstract
During the years of illusions, the United States had downplayed the seriousness of any challenge to its prestige as the dominant power. Even the cautious Colin Powell was won over by this optimism: “I would be very surprised if another Iraq occurred. I’m running out of demons. I’m down to Castro and Kim Il Sung.”1 But the unfolding decade proved Powell wrong, as the United States wandered from crisis to crisis, each instance further reducing its prestige. Recognizing this problem, the Clinton administration sought to address it with a renewed resoluteness, as in Bosnia.
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Notes
Stephen Budianski, “Missions Implausible,” US News & World Report 111 (October 14, 1991), pp. 24–31.
Kosovo represents a stronger case for unilateralism than for multilateralism because, while the United States acted with others, it restricted at the same time the universe of cooperation by giving up on securing the approval of non-NATO partners represented in the Security Council (Russia and China). This was a serious threshold to cross, because, later on in the case of the invasion of Iraq, the United States could and in fact did shrink even further the number of states it cooperated with when deciding to use force. It is true that in a recent endeavor Sarah Kreps describes Kosovo as a multilateral operation because of the level of involvement by other parties and because of the approval by a regional organization (NATO). But this assessment is possible only because Sarah Kreps does not take into consideration the evolution over time of a state policy in the direction of either unilateralism or multilateralism. Thus, she does not discuss the previous instance of the United States doing away with Security Council approval in the bombing of Iraq in December 1998. Sarah Kreps, Coalitions of Convenience: United States Military Interventions after the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 20–1; also see
Marc Weller, “The US, Iraq, and the Use of Force in a Unipolar World,” Survival 41 (Winter 1999): 81–100.
Ivo Daalder and Michael O’Hanlon, Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo (Washington: Brookings Institution, 2000), p. 117.
For a similar interpretation, see Jeffrey Taliaferro, “Neoclassical Realism: The Psychology of Great Power Intervention,” in Making Sense of International Relations Theory, ed. Jennifer Sterling-Folker (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2006), pp. 38–54. However, Taliaferro considers prestige as the equivalent of reputation. Also see
Sean Kay, “After Kosovo: NATO’s Credibility Dilemma,” Security Dialogue 31, no. 1 (2000): 71–84.
Barry Posen, “The War for Kosovo,” International Security 24 (Spring 2000): 39–84, fn. 24;
International Strategic Studies Institute, The Military Balance, 1999–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Daalder and O’Hanlon, Winning Ugly, pp. 103, 140.
Quoted in John Norris, Collision Course: Russia, NATO, and Kosovo (Westport: Praeger, 2005), p. 32;
Wesley Clark, Waging Modern War: Bosnia, Kosovo, and the Future of Combat (New York: Public Affairs, 2002), pp. 376–400.
Daalder interview with PBS Frontline, “War in Europe,” February 22, 2000, www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/Kosovo/interviews. Gelbard branded the KLA as a terrorist group in a press conference on February 23. Steven Burg, “Coercive Diplomacy in the Balkans,” in The United States and Coercive Diplomacy, ed. Robert Art and Patrick Cronin (Washington: United States Institute of Peace, 2005), pp. 75–6.
Madeline Albright, Madam Secretary (New York: Miramax Books, 2003), p. 383; Sciolino and Bronner, “How a President.” Berger went on to accuse the State Department personnel who had come up with the “irresponsible” proposal of acting like “lunatics.” As Halberstam writes: “To know what Clinton felt, you only needed to know what Berger felt, and if Berger was not ready to take a position on a complicated and pressing issue like Kosovo, it meant that the President wasn’t either.”
David Halberstam, War in Time ofPeace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals (New York: Touchstone, 2002), pp. 404–9.
Tim Judah, Kosovo: War and Revenge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Sciolino and Bronner, “How a President.”
Richard Holbrooke, To End a War (New York: Random House, 1998), pp. 305–9.
Roger Cohen, “Who Really Brought Down Milosevic?” New York Times Magazine, November 26, 2000; Michael Dobbs, “US Advice Guided Milosevic Opposition,” Washington Post, December 11, 2001; Adam LeBor, Milosevic: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 298–308;
Louis Sell, Slobodan Milosevic and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 340–2. Dobbs places the total US aid to Serb opposition at $41 million, while LeBor argues for a $70 million figure and Sell for a $77 million figure.
Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier, America between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11 (New York: Public Affairs, 2008), pp. 179–204.
Newshour with Jim Lehrer, transcript Online Focus, Assessing the Situation, April 2, 1999, accessible at www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/europe/jan-june99/assessment_4–2.htm1; Henry Kissinger, Does America Need A Foreign Policy? Toward a Diplomacy for the Twenty First Century (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), p. 263.
The United States hoped to get Russia on board, but failure to do so no longer represented a veto to action against Belgrade. The United States already had acted unilaterally in the summer of 1998 in response to al Qaeda’s bombings in Africa, and had dispensed with Security Council authorization in the December 1998 Operation Desert Fox against Iraq. Norris, Collision Course; James Goldgeier and Michael McFaul, Power and Purpose: US Policy toward Russia after the Cold War (Washington: Brookings Institution, 2003), chap. 10.
James Rubin, “Press Briefing on the Kosovo Peace Talks, Rambouillet, France, 21 February 1999,” in The Crisis in Kosovo 1989–1999, ed. Marc Weller (Cambridge: Documents & Analysis Publishing, 2001), p. 451.
The letter to the Albanian delegation stated that it concerned the future of the province article in the agreement and that “we will regard this proposal or any other formulation, of that Article that may be agreed at Rambouillet, as confirming a right for the people of Kosovo to hold a referendum of the final status of Kosovo after three years.” Marc Weller, “The Rambouillet Conference on Kosovo,” International Affairs 75 (April 1999): 211–5, 232–4. Getting the Kosovars to sign was a hardfought victory for Albright—some calling Rambouillet the “most difficult moment of her secretaryship.” Judah, Kosovo, pp. 214–5.
James Kurth, “First War of the Global Era,” in War over Kosovo: Politics and Strategy in a New Age, ed. Andrew Bacevich and Eliot Cohen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), pp. 63–96, 77.
Samantha Power, A “Problem From Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002), pp. 288, 446; David Binder, “Bush Warns Serbs Not to Widen War,” New York Times, December 28, 1992; Stephen Engelberg, “Weighing Strikes in Bosnia, US Warns of Wider War,” New York Times, April 25, 1993.
Elisabeth Barker, “The Origins of the Macedonian Question,” in The New Macedonia Question, ed. James Pettifer (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 3–14; James Pettifer, “The New Macedonian Question,” in New Macedonia Question, Pettifer, ed., pp. 15–27; Evangelos Kofos, “Greek Policy Considerations over FYROM Independence and Recognition,” in New Macedonia Question, Pettifer, ed., pp. 226–62.
Elez Biberaj, Albania in Transition: The Rocky Road to Democracy (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998), p. 11.
Pettifer, New Macedonia Question, pp. 16–7; James Pettifer, “The Albanians in Western Macedonia after FYROM Independence,” in New Macedonia Question, Pettifer, ed., pp. 137–47; Biberaj, Albania in Transition, pp. 13–5. The figures of a census in 1994, which the Albanians contest, put the total number of Albanians in Macedonia at 442,000 or 23 percent of the population. At the time, it was suspected that the real number was somewhere between 30 and 40 percent. However, a new census in 2002 under international auspices confirmed that the percentage of Albanians in FYROM was 25.7 percent. See John Philips, Macedonia: Warlords and Rebels in the Balkans (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 80–1.
Albright, “Remarks.” The prospect of conflict in Macedonia was not just theoretical. This was proven by events in 2001, when a civil conflict that killed more than 200 people erupted between Slavs and Albanians in FYROM. James Pettifer and Miranda Vickers, The Albanian Question: Reshaping the Balkans (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009), pp. 243–53; Philips, Macedonia.
Christopher Layne and Benjamin Schwartz, “For the Record: Kosovo II,” National Interest 57 (Fall 1999): 9–15;
Michael McGwire, “Why Did We Bomb Belgrade?” International Affairs 76 (January 2000): 1–23.
If there was a dominant theme to US policy toward the region, this was finding a way to exit Bosnia, where the United States had stationed thousands of troops. Hal Brands, From Berlin to Baghdad: America’s Search for Purpose in the post-Cold War World (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008), pp. 204–7.
Ibid. pp. 11–2,194–6; Joseph S. Nye, “Redefining the National Interest,” Foreign Affairs 78 (July/August 1999): 22–44;
Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (Toronto: Viking, 2000); Tony Judt, “The Reason Why,” New York Review of Books, May 20, 1999.
For critical views, see Isaacson, “Madeleine’s War”; Kissinger, Does America Need a Foreign Policy, pp. 255–64; Michael Mandelbaum, “A Perfect Failure,” Foreign Affairs 78 (September/October 1999): 2–8.
On NATO’s tactics, see Daalder and O’Hanlon, Winning Ugly, pp. 122–3; on airpower, see Benjamin Lambeth, NATO’s War for Kosovo: A Strategic and Operational Assessment (Santa Monica: Rand, 2001).
Philip Shenon, “US Grapples with Issue of Finding Refugees Homes,” New York Times, April 3, 1999; Joanne Van Selm, ed., Kosovo Refugees in the EU (London: Pinter, 2000).
Andrew Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of US Diplomacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 182–97.
Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of America’s Empire (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), pp. 93–4.
Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracies at Home and Abroad (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004);
Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1999), p. 195.
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Onea, T.A. (2013). Prestige and Assertiveness in Kosovo. In: US Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137359353_4
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