Ted Galen Carpenter
Washington, DC perpetuated and deepened its Balkan blunder a few
years after the Bosnia intervention when it intervened in Kosovo.
Civil strife in Serbia’s restless, predominantly Albanian province,
simmered and then flared in the mid-and late-1990s. This time,
Washington didn’t even make a gesture of deferring to the leading
European states, but took the policy lead early on. Ultimately, the
United States led a seventy-eight-day air war against Serbia,
compelling Belgrade to relinquish control to a largely NATO
occupation force operating under a fig-leaf resolution that the UN
Security Council approved. Russia reluctantly acquiesced to that
peacekeeping resolution, despite Moscow’s ties to Belgrade and
Russian interests in the Balkans …read more
Source: Cato Institute