The NATO Alliance Is Trapped by Its Own Great Power

The opportunistic sociopath who started the war in Croatia and Bosnia and who has terrorized the population of Kosovo is now being allowed to determine the action of the most powerful military alliance the world has ever known.

Never mind that U.S. negotiator Richard Holbrooke has warned Slobodan Milosevic that he faces a “lose-lose” situation. The fact is, Milosevic will decide whether NATO expends its blood and treasure in futile airstrikes or in an even costlier military occupation of a country in civil war. Clearly it is NATO, more than Milosevic, that faces a lose-lose situation.

Milosevic is not alone in managing to manipulate the Western alliance. The Kosovo Liberation Army that is battling Serbian forces launched its separatist military campaign precisely to provoke a brutal Serb response that would require international intervention. Needless to say, it has achieved its purpose.

How is it that a rogue government like Serbia’s and a separatist group whose political goals are not supported by any Western government have been allowed to play NATO like a heavily-armored marionette?

The problem arises from the historically unprecedented concentration of military power in a single fairly cohesive alliance. This concentration of power has led to almost infinitely high expectations among citizens of NATO’s member states, particularly the United States, as well as among the alliance’s potential enemies and beneficiaries. NATO cannot be seen to fail.

At the same time, with no large-scale military threat in the world, NATO feels constantly obliged to demonstrate its continuing relevance. This means that NATO cannot afford to ignore any challenge to its authority, which today can mean any televised misery that affronts Western sensibilities.

Together, these features of the unipolar world guarantee that NATO will increasingly find its actions driven by any third-rate dictator or separatists who decide it may be politically expedient to compel the alliance’s intervention. The alliance is crippled by its very power: the paradox of hegemony.

An irony of this self-defeating set of circumstances is that those who have created it believe that they enjoy the best of all possible worlds. The Europeans, for all their talk of creating a more robust European military structure, are quite happy, when the going gets tough, to let the U.S. take the lead. And the U.S., addicted as it is to its role as global cop, continues to revel in carrying the world’s biggest stick.

In making a ponderous and massive response by the entire alliance, with the initiative emanating from Washington, NATO countries are in their “comfort zone,” that is, following force of habit. But like many habits, this one is self-destructive.

Because every major Western country belongs to NATO, with membership on the rise, every time CNN televises atrocities in any country with which Europeans or Americans feel the remotest connection, the prestige of the entire West and the legitimacy of the international order is at stake. As President Clinton said in explaining the U.S. national interest at stake in Kosovo, “Europe must be made safe for American children.”

With unity as the alliance’s overriding priority, in any crisis the West is left with but two military options, both of them slow and blunt: launching multinational airstrikes and deploying a multinational ground force. NATO can never defer to any other organization; act quickly on a unilateral basis; claim to be disinterested; or allow regional pressures to work on problems in a quieter, less explosive way.

To escape the paradox of hegemony, NATO must devolve its power, with Europe maintaining an independent military organization and individual members allowed to act alone with the alliance’s political blessing. With such a force prepared to deal effectively with small-scale European problems, American power could be held in reserve for more serious threats. Only by devolving power to smaller units can NATO states recapture the prerogative to consider graduated and alternative responses to various challenges or even to make no response at all.

If NATO does not undertake this devolution of power voluntarily and soon, it will find itself confronting an expanding world of lose-lose situations.