NATO’s Empty Victory: A Postmortem on the Balkan War

The United States and other NATO members loudly proclaim that the alliance achieved a great victory in the war against Yugoslavia. According to the conventional wisdom, NATO waged a successful campaign to prevent genocide; enhanced its credibility as an effective institution for preserving peace, stability, and justice in post-Cold War Europe; and intimidated would-be aggressors around the world. Such claims already ring hollow. NATO’s Empty Victory is a searing indictment of the policies pursued by the United States and its allies. It also warns of the likely consequences — including prospects for more Kosovo-style interventions — if those policies are not repudiated.

Ted Galen Carpenter is senior fellow for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. Dr. Carpenter served as Cato’s director of foreign policy studies from 1986 to 1995 and as vice president for defense and foreign policy studies from 1995 to 2011. He is the author of eight and the editor of 10 books on international affairs, including America’s Coming War with China: A Collision Course over Taiwan. Barbara Conry, former associate policy analyst at the Cato Institute, was a public relations consultant at Hensley Segal Rentschler and an expert on security issues in the Middle East, Western Europe, and Central Asia.