contribute to a common security mission, irrespective of whether their own national
interests are seriously at risk. But for a peacekeeping mission to succeed there has to be
a peace to keep. Alas, there was no such peace in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. In
1999, NATO intervened with air power alone to coerce Serbia into halting its oppression
of the Albanian majority in Kosovo. Notwithstanding its ultimate success, that lengthy
bombardment demonstrated yet again the problems distinctive to multinational military
operations.
The United States generally was unwilling to act unilaterally to enforce order in the
1990s. It followed that disorder in its many bloody forms either proceeded according
to its own dynamics, unhampered by foreign intervention, or was policed ineffectually
by multinational military missions, typically under the UN flag. The excellent book (and
subsequent movie) Black Hawk Down, by Mark Bowden, reveals the costs of multi-
nationalism to military, and hence strategic, effectiveness, in Somalia in 1993 (Bowden,
1999). No less penetrating, if not as dramatic, is Rupert Smith’s memoir of command
of UNPROFOR in Bosnia in 1995 and again from 1998 until 2001, The Utility of Force
(Smith, 2005). UN forces generally were bystanders to the complex of wars under way
in the former Yugoslavia. They lacked clear political purpose, they had no strategy and
their principal concern swiftly became self-protection. The story told by General Smith
does not make agreeable reading, and it is particularly discouraging for those who
were hopeful that the new activism of the United Nations in peacekeeping – strongly
advocated by the ambitious Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali – marked a major
change in the organization’s significance as an active contributor to international order
and security. That activism was, of course, enabled by the end of the Cold War and the
consequent unfreezing of a Security Council no longer paralysed from endorsing
possibly controversial military interventions by the veto power of one or more of its five
permanent members (the USA, Russia, the UK, France and China).
To complete a trilogy of cases which illustrate the strong tendency of multinational
military efforts to deny strategic logic and decline to a lowest common denominator of
commitment, one can cite the sad example of General Wesley Clark of the US Army,
NATO’s SACEUR (Supreme Allied Commander, Europe). In 1999, General Clark had
the unenviable task of coordinating and securing the prompt coercion of Slobodan
Milosevic, the President of Serbia, who was in the process of ejecting and otherwise
oppressing the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. The NATO air campaign, which had been
anticipated to be very brief, in practice was compelled to persist for an embarrassing
seventy-eight days. Although Milosevic eventually did concede, it is uncertain whether
the principal reason for his defeat was NATO’s air campaign, or, eventually, the credible
threat of a ground-force invasion by NATO to be launched from Macedonia, or his
belated realization that no Russian support was forthcoming. The Americans took from
this strategic – but in practice almost anti-strategic – experience of multinational (NATO)
campaigning the clear lesson that strategic effectiveness requires a simple, single,
national and strictly American chain of command. Allies are beneficial for political
comfort, but as active, or more usually semi-active, military partners they are likely to
be more trouble than they are worth. The American preference for unilateral action which
post-dated Kosovo was not so much a reflection of imperial hubris or cultural preference
but pre-eminently a recognition that divided counsels and conflicting interests produce
poor strategy. General Clark’s tale of woe as the NATO commander for Kosovo, which
226 War, peace and international relations