As we prepared our cover story proposing a broader European-American partnership to stabilize the greater Middle East, the existing European-American partnership became embroiled, in Europe itself, in the battle against genocide in Kosovo.
From the perspective of hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanian refugees forced to flee their villages--and also from the perspective of NATO pilots on round-the-clock bombing raids of what remains of Yugoslavia--the notion of retooling the Atlantic alliance to advance mutual interests in the Middle East must sound like a lofty foreign policy notion indeed.
And yet the experience in Kosovo--where roughly 800 of NATO's 1,000 warplanes have come from the United States, diverting U.S. resources from trouble spots in Iraq and the western Pacific--corroborates a core argument put forth by David Gompert, Jerry Green, and Steve Larrabee in their essay on the Middle East.
That argument holds that the European-American partnership can no longer depend on a lopsided military relationship. In the Middle East, a balanced partnership has enormous potential to improve matters. In Europe, Kosovo has brought the issue home. The American-dominated military effort has been hampered by its de- pendence on American forces and equipment from overseas. This lopsided relationship can hardly endure, now that a wealthy Western Europe is no longer crippled by a world war nor threatened by a cold war.
Kosovo may signal the end of that brief historical interlude commonly referred to as the "post-cold war era," that transitional decade of the 1990s in which the lone remaining superpower has held disproportionate sway over--and disproportionate responsibility for-- world affairs. If the allies succeed in Kosovo and determine that diplomatic cohesion must henceforth be backed by balanced military commitments, perhaps the "post-cold war era" will cede its awkward moment in history to a more coherent, deliberate, and mutually reinforcing "European-American era."
Again, such a lofty notion won't do much for those fighting for survival today in Kosovo, let alone for those who have died in the long series of Balkan wars spanning this decade. But maybe the phoenix that rises from the ashes of Kosovo will be a resilient, integrated, committed community of responsible democracies that will champion human rights, ethnic and religious tolerance, and decent behavior by legitimate governments throughout Europe--and beyond. Perhaps only then will the horror of the Balkans not have been in vain.
--John Godges