Kosovo’s the First ‘Third Way’ War

President Bill Clinton calls his legacy the “third way.” He believes it’s sweeping the world. The war in Kosovo is very much a part of that legacy: It’s the first third-way war.

The third way is a new progressive politics, practiced by a new generation of world leaders identified with the moderate left. As British Prime Minister Tony Blair explained at a third-way conference in April, “It’s distinguishable both from the old left politics of heavy-handed intervention and the new right politics of laissez faire.”

“The reason people have been going for a third way is that both of those tracks have been discovered to be misorientations,” German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder asserted. “They are misguided ways.” Hmmm . . . something equidistant from the old left and the new right. Sounds like . . . aha! Triangulation!

Clinton, the old triangulator himself, claims to be the third way’s founding father. Under his administration, the third way passed its first test. As Clinton put it, “If you look at the third-way challenge in America, for the Democratic Party, it meant we had to prove we could manage the economy in an intelligent way.”

The third way has to prove it can succeed where the old left failed. The old left failed in the 1970s, in both the U.S. and Europe, for two reasons. It couldn’t manage the economy. And it couldn’t manage national security. For example, under Jimmy Carter, the last Democratic president, Americans felt the country lost power and influence in the world.

Clinton claims Kosovo has solved that problem. “We have achieved a victory for a safer world, for our democratic values and for a stronger America,” he told the nation on June 10. Senior White House aide Sidney D. Blumenthal makes a grander claim: “We have reconciled ourselves with the great traditions of American foreign policy and with the older generation that fought World War II.”

Exactly what is it that makes Kosovo a third-way war?

The leaders, for one thing. Blumenthal said, “This is the first time the alliance has been led by leaders who share a common political and programmatic outlook.”

But it’s also the policy. Conservatives believe in toughness. Clinton’s Kosovo policy was tough. But conservatives insist the United States should take action only when its vital interests are at stake. Kosovo did not pass that test. U.S. forces “shouldn’t be put in harm’s way for something that isn’t in the national interest,” Sen. Robert C. Smith (R-N.H.) said. “Everybody understood that the U.S. had vital interests in the Persian Gulf,” military analyst Joseph J. Collins observed. “Kosovo was important, it was humanitarian, but it was not a vital interest.”

The right repudiated Kosovo, calling it, contemptuously, “Clinton’s war.” For the first time, the House of Representatives refused to endorse a U.S. military mission that was underway.

The old left believes foreign policy should be driven by moral values. Clinton’s Kosovo policy fit that model. But the left rejects militarism. Clinton didn’t. So the old left joined the new right in repudiating Kosovo. “If you want to understand what the left position has been on this war,” Laura Flanders of Pacifica Radio said in April, “you just need to look at the line that has been consistent since the Vietnam War: that militarism is not the solution to conflict.”

What do you call a policy that steals from right and left but is attacked by both? The third way.

The three third-way leaders--Clinton, Blair and Schroeder--come out of the anti-Vietnam War generation. That colored their Kosovo policy. “Particularly for Clinton,” Collins said, “the whole notion of large-scale casualties became something almost unthinkable.” Conservatives argued that the refusal to risk casualties made the policy unworkable. “I don’t think you can bomb a country into submitting to a peace agreement,” Sen. Don Nickles (R-Okla.) said in March. Liberals claimed it made the policy immoral. “A war that began for humanitarian intentions is now causing humanitarian damage,” Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of the Nation, said in May.

Military analysts called the allied strategy in Kosovo “stupid” and “amateurish.” So what do they make of the fact that it seems to have worked? Not much. “It is not good for the United States or the international community to come away from this horrible experience with the assumption that you can have bloodless wars on our side and do it all from the air,” said former Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Bernard E. Trainor. In the view of former Adm. Leighton W. Smith, “This is going to be an example in all the war colleges throughout the world of how not to employ the military in pursuit of strategic objectives.”

They sound like the expert in Alfred Hitchcock’s film “The Lady Vanishes,” who, when presented with evidence refuting his theory, responds indignantly, “Nonsense. My theory is perfectly correct. It is the facts that are misleading.”

But did the strategy really work? A peace agreement on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s terms looks pretty convincing. So does the withdrawal of Yugoslav troops from Kosovo.

Critics, however, point out that in terms of Clinton’s objective of “deterring a bloody offensive against innocent civilians in Kosovo,” the NATO campaign may have made the situation worse. Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic used the initial weeks of bombing to complete the ruthless ethnic cleansing.

Moreover, Milosevic is still in power. Many Americans soured on the Gulf War because, eight years later, Saddam Hussein remains in power. They may apply that lesson to Kosovo. Which is why Clinton said to the people of Yugoslavia on June 10, “As long as your nation is ruled by an indicted war criminal, we will provide no support for the reconstruction of Serbia.”

So far, the U.S. public’s response to Kosovo has been tepid. Clinton’s job rating is 60%, where it has been for most of the last two months. There has been no huge peace dividend for Clinton, nothing like the acclaim President George Bush enjoyed after the Gulf War.

To the American public, Kosovo looks more like a lucky break than a brilliant strategy. Most Americans do not think the Clinton administration has a clear, well-thought-out policy in Kosovo, according to the Gallup Poll. Too many blunders, like bombing the Chinese Embassy and conflicts with Russia. In fact, most Americans don’t even call the outcome in Kosovo a U.S. victory. Not with a million Kosovars displaced and thousands killed.

Kosovo is likely to remain a political battleground, even if the peace deal holds. For one thing, U.S. engagement in Kosovo has become intensely partisan. Nearly 60% of Republicans say it was a mistake for the U.S. to get involved. Almost two-thirds of Democrats say the U.S. did the right thing. Republicans nationwide seem to echo the view of the GOP Congress that this was “Clinton’s war.”

The war seemed to shatter a lot of conventional wisdom. Like, no war has ever been won by air power alone. It looks like NATO did just that. But critics point to the fact that, in the end, the threat of allied ground troops was becoming real.

The war also put human rights above a nation’s sovereignty. “Finally, thank God,” supporters say. “It’s what should have been done in the 1930s.” Critics say it means the U.S. has become policeman to the world.

How’s this for an amazing outcome: Russia saved NATO. Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin decided his country’s future lay with the West, not with Serbia, though opinion in Russia is overwhelmingly anti-NATO. Yeltsin abandoned Milosevic at a key moment, when a NATO decision on ground troops was impending. Yeltsin wanted a payoff, and he got one: a major role for Russian troops in Kosovo, independent of NATO.

Imagine the political liability for Vice President Al Gore if U.S. troops had been fighting on the ground during next year’s presidential campaign. Or if the standoff continued and Americans were seeing pictures of freezing refugees next winter. The Serbs broke, under Russian pressure, just as Clinton was about to face that difficult choice. Clinton owes Yeltsin, big time. And that, like everything else associated with this war, is going to be the subject of continuing debate.

If Kosovo was a third-way war, does it become a model for future U.S. engagements? As one foreign-policy expert put it, “For Clinton, Kosovo was like Monica. He got away with it. But he doesn’t ever want to have to go through it again.”

The U.S. public feels pretty much the same way. Americans don’t feel triumphant about Kosovo. They feel relieved.*