The New York Times

Tuesday, June 15, 1999

FOREIGN AFFAIRS / By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

NATO or BATO?

BRUSSELS -- For many years the standard quip about NATO was that NATO existed to "keep the Germans down, the Americans in [Europe] and the Russians out." In light of NATO's U.S.-led victory in Kosovo, though, that old clich is going to have to be adapted. NATO's new mission is "to keep the Balkans quiet, the Americans in and the Russians sweet."

No one planned it this way, but managing the bloody turmoil in the Balkans, not the Eastern Front, and managing the zany, unpredictable weakness of Russia, not its strength, have now emerged as NATO's primary missions. Ever since the cold war ended, NATO planners have been groping for a new mission, a senior NATO official remarked to me at NATO's Brussels headquarters, and the Balkans is turning out to be it.

This shift from NATO to BATO -- the Balkan-Atlantic Treaty Organization -- has been driven both by humanitarian demands and institutional imperatives. "In order to survive, an international organization can't just have a conceptual mission," the official said. "Organizations seek out action. They need to do things. That's why NATO needs the Balkans as much as the Balkans need NATO.

"The Balkans is one security issue that NATO can actually do something about," he added. "We talked about dealing with drugs, terrorism, proliferation and the mafia, but the truth is there is not much we can really do about them. The thing about the Balkans is that what NATO has to offer is exactly what they need. We have a product that they want -- peacekeeping and providing security."

And there are a lot of customers. Once NATO forces are fully in place in Kosovo, NATO's Balkan deployment will involve nearly 100,000 troops -- 30,000 in Bosnia, 57,000 in Kosovo, 7,000 in Albania, 2,000 in Macedonia and 1,000 in Croatia. Many of those troops are committed indefinitely. Indeed, the poor Albanians have quietly told NATO they hope its troops never leave.

The NATO official added that over the past six years he had attended virtually all the high-level meetings of the NATO Council in Brussels. "I would say that 85 percent of those meetings dealt with the Balkans one way or another," he said. "Maybe once a year we had a session on weapons of mass destruction or terrorism. Those issues are the dessert, but the daily diet is the Balkans. We are Balkan specialists now."

How should Americans feel about this? Well, they should feel very good that NATO, using air power alone, and without a single battle casualty, accomplished its basic humanitarian mission in the Balkans -- halting the ethnic cleansing by the Serbs, containing Slobodan Milosevic (and setting in motion what will be his downfall) and bringing about the return of most Kosovar refugees.

But U.S. national security has never rested on the fate of the Balkans. Does NATO's Balkan tilt have any wider strategic value? Well, if NATO's presence in the Balkans ends up closing Europe's last major open sore, and thereby promotes greater European integration and stability, there's strategic value in that. It's even worth contributing some U.S. troops already in Europe to solidify.

But we must be aware that this is going to be very costly, particularly for the Europeans, at a time when their defense budgets are already shrinking and they are spending virtually nothing on military research. (Of the 2,000 NATO targets in Serbia, 1,999 were chosen through U.S. intelligence satellites and sources, and exactly 1 by the Europeans.)

Which is why the strategic sustainability of NATO's Balkan operation will ultimately depend on how well Russia manages itself and how well NATO manages relations with Russia. We should want the Russians in Kosovo -- because peacemaking is not just about deterrence, it's about reassurance. Give the Russians some dignity, bring them onto the team, let them run a patch of Kosovo -- and thereby give the Kosovo Serbs some reassurance to stay so that NATO's Kosovo victory doesn't end in reverse ethnic cleansing.

If Russia, NATO's historic enemy, can be integrated into Europe, if its nuclear arsenal can be reduced through arms control, then NATO can afford to run the Balkans for the next 50 years. But if Russia collapses into turmoil, or returns to aggressive nationalism, we will have to rethink BATO and get back to NATO.