Spinning Toward a Diplomatic End

The Kosovo crisis is heading inexorably toward a negotiated compromise. Well-informed spectators will want a score card to follow the action.

The Clinton administration’s feint in the direction of “reviewing” plans for a ground war is unlikely to produce any ground war. Meanwhile, the diplomatic track that the administration has been assiduously encouraging is already speeding up. The evidence for this is NATO’s eagerness for Russian mediation--reflected in the G-8 accord Wednesday--and the gradual whittling down of NATO’s negotiating demands.

First, what have been the U.S. objectives? The U.S. military has covered its bureaucratic rear by ensuring that its mission was defined narrowly: to “degrade the Yugoslav army.” The rest of us, however, can be forgiven if we thought the crisis had something to do with saving the people of Kosovo from ethnic cleansing. This is, without any doubt, the political objective in the name of which all this is happening--thus NATO’s original demands for a reversal of ethnic cleansing, withdrawal of the Yugoslav army and police from the province, and a NATO military protectorate to speed the return of refugees. This is a key benchmark by which to judge any negotiated outcome.

The other key benchmark is Slobodan Milosevic’s objectives. He wanted Kosovo. He now has it. In an important news story that has received insufficient attention, Serbian officials told the New York Times that Milosevic was willing to permit about 600,000 Albanians to remain in Kosovo. This was because the reduction from the original total of 1.8 million Albanians sufficiently reversed the demographic balance, and because a substantial remaining Albanian population was insurance against a NATO ground attack.

Accordingly, it is likely that Milosevic can afford to make a generous-sounding diplomatic offer: withdrawing most of his army and police (since the KLA has been smashed); accepting a weaker international monitoring presence (not a NATO military force) and inviting many of the refugees to remain or return (since he knows most of them will not do so in these conditions)--all with the confidence that he has already achieved his objective of transforming Kosovo’s demography. He will insist on retaining Serbian sovereignty over the province and on an immediate halt to NATO bombing.

Meanwhile, NATO has been gradually modifying its negotiating demands. Where once NATO insisted upon Milosevic’s acceptance of Rambouillet, the G-8 accord now speaks more loosely of “taking full account of” Rambouillet. Where once NATO insisted on a protecting force of NATO troops, the G-8 now speaks more vaguely of “international civil and security presences” under U.N. Security Council auspices. Serbian sovereignty over Kosovo is conceded, and the KLA is to be disarmed. The bombing can stop when Milosevic has “unequivocally accepted” a settlement and “demonstrably begun” implementing it.

How a bombing halt is treated in the negotiation, in fact, will be a good indicator of how serious NATO is about any of its objectives. President Clinton has begun flirting with the idea of a “bombing pause.” NATO allies Greece and Italy wanted a bombing halt after the first day of the air campaign, to “give negotiation a chance.” This is a naive absurdity long discredited by the Johnson administration’s miserable experience of “bombing pauses” in Vietnam. Demonstrations of American good will were not then nor are they now the missing ingredient in the conflict. Nor was or is the conflict a misunderstanding of some kind that a bombing halt is meant to give time to clear up. The North Vietnamese laughed all the way down the Ho Chi Minh Trail during bombing pauses as they accelerated their supplies and their aggression; they were in it to win.

If NATO agrees to a bombing halt in the early phases of a negotiation or of implementation, whatever leverage it has will instantly evaporate. It will never be able to mobilize the political will to resume it if Milosevic nibbles away at the edges of an agreement, in the manner of Saddam Hussein.

The American eagerness for a Russian mediating rule is puzzling. Boris Yeltsin and Yevgeny M. Primakov are not known for their devotion to helping NATO preserve its vitality and credibility. NATO’s eagerness for Russian involvement has all the earmarks of an eagerness to get out of the crisis on compromise terms.

As time passes, it will become clearer that Milosevic has Kosovo and we are not succeeding in getting it away from him. Political pressures within the alliance to cut a deal will mount. Milosevic’s diplomatic offers will soon start to look appealing. The G-8 accord will be the starting point of a Russian negotiation with Milosevic; a haggle will begin over how to split the differences; the pressures to stop the bombing will grow. The outcome is likely to be a diplomatic compromise superficially confusing enough to allow some in the West to claim success. Those for whom mastery of spin substitutes for mastery of strategy may even believe it themselves.

Given our unwillingness to win, there may be something to be said for cutting a deal and cutting our losses. But there should be no illusions that it is a “success.”