og noe fra Gabriel Kolko, amerikansk historiker,
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http://www.tbwt.com/views/feat/feat1064.asp
Europe at the Crossroads
04-12-99
By Gabriel Kolko
The consequences of the war that the United States and NATO has unleashed
in Yugoslavia will profoundly alter Europe's political and military
environment for years to come. It will also affect Italy more deeply than
any other NATO nation. The crisis, restricted so far only to the skies over
Yugoslavia, has two crucial dimensions. The first is the immediate problem
of Kosovo, but its long-term political consequences will destabilize the
bitterly contested boundaries imposed on the entire region before World War
One. And this will create a much greater likelihood of rival nationalist
claims producing more local wars in the future.
There is no formula for the conflicting Serb and Albanian claims that will
satisfy both sides. Each is the result of the atavistic nationalist
psychology that has embittered the region's history for centuries. The
West's overriding objective must be to prevent the conflict from
undermining peace in the region, above all along Macedonia's borders--which
could involve Bulgaria, Albania, Greece, or Turkey in wars that would
exceed Bosnia in their scale of violence. Whatever its faults, the
preservation of the status quo in Yugoslavia is the least dangerous
solution for the rest of Europe. It was for this reason that the U.S.
initially opposed the KLA's demand for a fully independent Kosovo, for it
realized that its claims would lead to more conflicts over borders. But
given NATO's military role on behalf of the Albanians, the secessionists'
political objectives may yet be attained.
This would make future NATO interventions into the unstable Balkan quagmire
much more likely. Italy's present role as the war's staging base would then
become even more crucial. The second major outcome of NATO's intervention
has been to transform it from a defensive to offensive alliance, greatly
increasing America's influence in Europe and altering the continent's
balance-of-power and Russia's position profoundly. The U.S.' role, once it
embarked on an air war, is deeply motivated by ambitions to lead an
expanded NATO but especially the "credibility" of its military power. Its
obsession with credibility can only entangle Europe in protracted wars that
are not to its interest. Both in Korea and Vietnam, America increasingly
escalated its military action because of its deep belief that its real or
potential enemies cannot regard its huge military force as ineffective,
much less capable of being defeated.
This has repeatedly caused it to underestimate the limits of its arms and
the uncontrollable political effects of protracted wars--including such
wars' impact on politics within the U.S. In the past, its increasing
reliance on airpower inevitably required it also to strike civilian targets
and populations. At no time has the U.S. entered a war aware of the time
and material and tragic human costs it had to pay or demand of others. Such
blindness has not been restricted to America. Both before World Wars One
and Two, Europe's nations also greatly underestimated the costs to their
economic power and men, and both those wars lasted far longer than planned.
By 1999 the lessons of the past have been forgotten in the belief that Serb
brutality justifies military intervention in Yugoslavia. But wars are not
isolated events with limited consequences that can be subjected to
simplistic arguments about justice.
They unleash human suffering on all sides, much more among guiltless than
the evil people, and their destructive political impact is always far
greater than expected. Since 1945, the U.S. has always employed the
rhetoric of internationalism to justify the pursuit of its national
objectives, but this is the first war in Europe since then. By abdicating
the definition of their interests and war aims to those in Washington who
are unable to recognize the contradiction between extravagant use of
military power and politically realistic goals, the NATO states have lost
control of their own destinies. This also means that international affairs
will take increasing priority over those domestic issues which brought the
ascendant social democratic parties to power. Such a loss of control over
basic objectives dangerously risks that electorates will defeat them in
future elections.
It is entirely possible that the war NATO has embarked upon will not only
destabilize peace in the region, which is very likely, but cost Europe's
nominally Left parties their ability to fulfill their mandates.
Washington's ambitions to exploit this crisis to consolidate its leadership
over the NATO states, imposing new goals that will involve it more
aggressively in future European disputes, has sabotaged President Yeltsin's
consistent effort to reorient basic Russian policies toward cooperation
rather than confrontation with the West. NATO's recent expansion of its
members to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech republic was tolerable to
Russia so long as NATO's goals were explicitly defensive. NATO's
willingness to undertake military actions has now created a de facto cordon
sanitaire on Russia's borders, revising European geopolitics fundamentally
and immediately uniting the fractious Russian parties in opposition to the
new alliance.
While Russia's economy is a disaster, it remains a military superpower, and
a number of influential American strategists have warned the Clinton
Administration that Russia might seek to form an alliance with China should
NATO pose a threat to it. That threat is now a reality, and China's
relations with the U.S. have soured. The potential consequences of such an
accord for Europe as well as the U.S. cannot be dismissed. ------- The
eventual price of the NATO campaign in Yugoslavia cannot be calculated
precisely. Its implications to peace in the region and the stability of
Europe are likely to be enduring and great. If the U.S. attains its goals,
its mastery over Europe's foreign policy will increase significantly; if it
fails it will be discredited--a fact that will cause it to protract and
intensify the conflict in the hope of winning. Russia's future relation to
Europe will remain an open and eventually destabilizing question; economic
factors may cause it to tolerate realities imposed upon it, but it will
never accept them as desirable.
No matter how this radically new European context evolves, Italy will play
a role in U.S. strategy far more significant than other NATO powers. For
airpower, Italy is the front line. It has much more to lose from the
violent conflict that is unfolding--and to gain from a pragmatic peace
settlement. And it alone has the ability to constrain America's folly by
denying the use of its bases for offensive purposes that were never
included in the original NATO charter and mandate.
Gabriel Kolko has written many books on US foreign policy and war. His
CENTURY OF WAR (1994) describes how leaders fail to predict their dangerous
consequences.
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