The Clinton administration also aggravated Russian insecurities with its global military interventions. In Russians’ eyes, no case epitomized this brazen geopolitical engineering more strongly than Kosovo.
In Yugoslavia, Kosovo was an autonomous province within Serbia. The idea behind the autonomy was to acknowledge the rights of a minority, Albanians, who shared the region with Serbs. Together with the rest of the mini-empire of Yugoslavia, in the 1980s Kosovo descended into ethnic strife. By 1998, clashes had grown into war between Albanians’ Kosovo Liberation Army and Kosovo Serbs’ paramilitary units. The president of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milošević, sent in federal troops—not for peacekeeping, but to crush the Albanian rebels in the most brutal way. Milošević rejected all the United Nations resolutions of protest, explaining that Kosovo was an integral part of Serbia and that he would not consider Albanian rebels anything but terrorists.[23]
NATO countries, led by the United States, wanted to use military strikes against Serbia to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe. Russia expressed outrage. In the words of Strobe Talbott, Clinton’s Russia adviser (and an avid supporter of a NATO military campaign against Serbia), Kosovo became the “substantiation of all the Russians’ reasons for fearing NATO and opposing its expansion.”[24]
Another great power with several potential Kosovos on its territory, China, also vehemently objected to any military campaign. Russia’s and China’s objections meant that the U.N. Security Council could not pass a resolution authorizing “humanitarian” intervention in Serbia. So NATO went in unilaterally. To use Madeleine Albright’s language, that was a new, post–Cold War “common endeavor.”
By doing so, the alliance was taking on an entirely new function, that of a policeman on a foreign territory not even bordering any NATO country. As the British author Geoffrey Wheatcroft wrote: “Whether or not a military response in the former Yugoslavia was desirable, it’s hard to see what it had to do with NATO. Under the crucial Article 5 of the 1949 treaty [that created the alliance], the members agreed that ‘an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all,’ and whatever else Milošević and [Bosnian Serb army chief Ratko] Mladić might be accused of, they had not attacked any NATO member.”[25]
Still furious, but willing to cooperate with NATO in order to play at least a limited role in the Balkans, Russia agreed to send peacekeeping troops to Kosovo. The uneasy partnership led to a brief all-out war scare. One day, Russian peacekeepers were found in a place they were not supposed to be, and the commander of NATO forces in Kosovo, General Wesley Clark of the United States, ordered his British subordinate General Mike Jackson to attack and “overpower” them. Jackson famously told Clark off: “Sir, I am not going to start World War III for you.”[26]
If for the NATO powers the intervention in Kosovo was a straightforward matter of rescuing the Kosovar people from a murderous Serbian regime—and for the United States in particular, an effort to prevent in Kosovo the genocide it had conspicuously failed to prevent a few years earlier in Rwanda—for other nations the matter was more complicated. When Kosovo proclaimed its independence from Serbia in 2008, many U.N. members objected. As of 2016, Kosovo had been recognized by 108 states, but among those that still ignored its existence were the powerhouses of the developing world—Russia, Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Iran, Mexico, and Singapore—as well as several U.S. allies, including Greece, Israel, Romania, Slovakia, and Spain. All of these states contained minorities striving for nationhood that might be inspired by Kosovo’s example to try to cleave off chunks of territory and declare independence. One of the nations objecting to Kosovo’s recognition was Ukraine. If American diplomacy remained blissfully unaware that by crafting an independent Kosovo it had opened a Pandora’s box, politicians in Kiev knew very well that they had their own potential Kosovo in Crimea.
As edited by Western advisers, the declaration of Kosovo independence emphasized that Kosovo was a special case, not a precedent to be exploited by secessionists worldwide. Yet as Timothy Garton Ash pointed out, all sixty-eight other members of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization, “from Abkhazia to Zanzibar,” were “special cases too.” The “Kosovo precedent” became a rallying cry in every separatist hotbed: Nagorno-Karabakh and Trans-Dniester in the former Soviet Union; the Basque Country and Catalonia in Europe; Northern Cyprus; Quebec.[27]
The enthusiastic American support of the breakaway republic had prompted Russians to take the attitude, “if they can do it, so should we.” After a brief war with Georgia in 2008, Russia sponsored “sovereignty and independence” for the Georgian provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.[28]
On George W. Bush’s watch, NATO membership was extended to Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, and three post-Soviet countries—Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. U.S.-Russia relations plummeted. But bigger challenges were to come: the candidacies of both Ukraine and Georgia for admission to NATO.
By Russians’ lights, this crossed the line. As a British author put it, Washington would have felt the same had Leonid Brezhnev “invited Mexico and Cuba to join the Warsaw Pact.”[29]
Regime Change in a Foreign Country
Since the end of the Cold War, supposedly won by the United States, the winner has scored remarkably few foreign policy victories. No doubt many factors had contributed to the debacles in Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere, but one major miscalculation seems to have been the striking readiness to launch political engineering and sometimes endorse regime change in countries that are neither willing nor ready to ally with the West.
The moral permissibility of such interference aside, typically neither the U.S.-sponsored opposition nor the U.S. representatives engineering the transition of power have a positive program in mind. The “down with” bit is the easiest part of any uprising, but if there is no clear answer to the “what next” question, in all likelihood all the sacrifice would be in vain.
In 2004, in the viciously contested presidential elections in Ukraine, the United States supported the “pro-Western” candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, as Moscow rallied behind the “pro-Russian” Viktor Yanukovych. The campaign was nothing short of operatic. A dig in Yanukovych’s dirty linen revealed felony: as a young man, he had been found guilty of violent street crime. Now he professed to be “reformed,” a claim that many did not find entirely convincing. His opponent, Viktor Yushchenko, a very handsome man, had suddenly developed a brutal rash on his face. He claimed poisoning, and blood tests run by a European clinic confirmed the presence of herbicide, dioxin. Blaming the Russian secret services for his Shrek looks, Yushchenko bravely went on campaigning.
The “pro-Russian” Yanukovych claimed electoral victory, but the many reports of fraud coming from polling stations around the country caused popular anger, and that led to riots. Yushchenko refused to concede; as his campaign had been using the color orange for banners, t-shirts, and other paraphernalia, the resistance was dubbed the “Orange Revolution.” The movement got the support of the U.S. government, but the Kremlin, mistaking American cheerleading for a disciplined cabal, exaggerated the level of U.S. involvement. Much was made of the fact that Yushchenko’s wife was an American citizen and a former U.S. State Department official.[30]
23
Misha Glenny,
30
Mark R. Beissinger, “Promoting Democracy: Is Exporting Revolution a Constructive Strategy?”