NATO’s ‘Third-Way’ Leadership Faces Foreign Policy Test in Kosovo

When war in the former Yugoslav federation first erupted in 1991, most of the core NATO powers were led by conservatives such as U.S. President George Bush, British Prime Minister John Major and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

But when NATO leaders gathered in Washington over the weekend to celebrate the organization’s 50th anniversary--and assess the unsteady state of its war in Kosovo--almost all of them represented left-of-center governments. Apart from conservative French President Jacques Chirac, all the other seats at the head table are now held by baby boomers who consider themselves progressives: President Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.

Kosovo has rightly been called a test of NATO’s future. But it is equally a test of what Blair has rather grandly christened this “new generation of leaders . . . who hail from the progressive side of politics.”

At home, most members of this generation have committed themselves to defining a new progressive agenda on domestic issues--a “third way” that threads a path through traditional conservative and liberal approaches. Now, in the crucible of Kosovo, they are trying to do the same in foreign policy.

Despite all the frustrations of the past month, in some ways they are succeeding. By intervening in Kosovo at all, they are leading the left away from the reflexive resistance to the use of force that infused their parties from the 1960s through the 1990s--a hostility evident even in their own younger anti-war activities.

Their decision to fight Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic departs just as clearly from the realpolitik calculation of vital national interests that led Bush and his contemporaries to reject intervention when Yugoslavia first began disintegrating eight years ago. Marrying a commitment to human rights with a tolerance for martial force, the Clinton-Blair generation is constructing a doctrine that might be called armed Samaritanism.

But the third-way leaders have not yet demonstrated that they can use force effectively enough to meet their objectives--and efficiently enough to hold public support. In short, they have shown the left can once again start a war if need be; they have yet to prove it can do what it takes to win one.

“The good news is that we are seeing the emergence of a third-way approach to foreign policy that accepts responsibility for maintaining order and for redefining NATO’s mission,” says Will Marshall, executive director of the centrist Progressive Policy Institute. “The execution of this interventionism is another question. We are feeling our way toward a new definition of where it is legitimate to apply force, and it has not been pretty.”

The questions raised by the failure of the military campaign to prevent Milosevic’s forced depopulation in Kosovo rise beyond issues of operational competence. They amount to a measure of character and conviction.

In domestic policy, the great (though exaggerated) knock against third-way politicians is that they triangulate to the squishy center of public opinion, sacrificing leadership to minimize risk. In Kosovo, critics on the right are already leveling the same indictment. Tart as ever, conservative New York Times columnist William Safire crystallized this critique when he derided NATO’s course of airstrikes-only warfare as a strategy “neither to stop nor to ignore the aggressor, but to punish evildoing in a low-risk manner.”

That judgment is in one obvious respect unfair: The third-way leaders have already risked more--in both political and military terms--to prevent atrocity in the Balkans than their conservative predecessors did.

It’s true that just before he left office, Bush threatened Milosevic with military force if he cracked down in Kosovo. But given Bush’s unwavering refusal to intervene in the bloody wars that erupted in Croatia and Bosnia--and the equally staunch resistance from Major, Kohl and then-French President Francois Mitterrand, the most prominent left figure in NATO at the time--it is difficult to imagine that the threat would have translated into a war of the magnitude now underway.

Bush’s aversion to intervention against Milosevic was rooted in his conviction that the great lesson of Vietnam was that the U.S. should not initiate any use of force unless it was willing to escalate all the way to a full-scale ground war, if necessary, to meet its goals. Inside the Bush administration, the consensus was that the chaos in Yugoslavia did not justify such a potentially vast commitment. That essentially ruled out force at all, since Europe would not fight without the U.S.

With an eye on the 1995 NATO bombing campaign that helped push Milosevic to the bargaining table in Bosnia-Herzegovina, today’s crop of NATO leaders rejected the imprisoning assumption that their only choices in Kosovo were all or nothing; in that sense, Clinton’s generation arguably has been less bound by the Vietnam precedent than Bush’s.

“This is the post post-Vietnam generation,” insists one senior Clinton administration official. “There is a very strong conviction in and around the administration that we could not allow ourselves to be paralyzed by the belief that you can’t do anything unless you do everything.”

Yet the past month has shown that the third-way leaders have not exorcised all their ghosts. From the start, they have given enormous, even inordinate, priority to minimizing allied casualties and their attendant political risks. In that sense, Vietnam still seems to haunt their thinking, providing the shade of truth in Safire’s damning group portrait.

With Blair leading the way, NATO now is inching its way out of that box with preliminary planning for a possible ground assault. That’s overdue (and still too leisurely). No one should complain when a president or prime minister exhausts every alternative before sending young men and women into a ground war. But no one should cheer when leaders stubbornly ignore mounting evidence that their course isn’t working. The guiding principle of the third way was to reexamine old assumptions in light of new realities. As the NATO leaders leave Washington still searching for a winning strategy, it may be time to apply that rigorous prism to the contention that air power alone can liberate Kosovo.

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See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site athttps://www.latimes.com/brownstein.