The New York Times

Friday, July 2, 1999

FOREIGN AFFAIRS

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Was Kosovo World War III?

A thoughtful reader, Allan Hoving, sent me a note asking an intriguing question: Was Kosovo actually World War III? "O.K., so it was a short one, as world wars go, just 80 days," he wrote. "But think about it: There was genocide by indicted war criminals, and the threat of nuclear war. Nearly every major power was involved -- even China. And historic realignments have emerged.

All this without a single allied combat casualty -- not too shabby for a world war."

The truth is Kosovo was not comparable to World War I or II. Those wars were earthquakes. But while Kosovo was no earthquake, it was a bolt of lightning that certainly illuminated the new international system we are now in, the system of globalization.

To begin with, the NATO intervention in the Balkans was made possible by the fact that the two great wars in Europe in this century -- the great tribal war between Germany and France, which was at the heart of World Wars I and II, and the Cold War between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. -- had both subsided, erasing the most important and paralyzing divisions and walls in Europe. The German-French entente made NATO intervention to quash the Balkan civil wars possible, and the collapse of the Soviet Union made NATO's intervention deep into the former Soviet sphere of influence permissible.

The falling of walls, and globalization, played another role in this war as well. When the war in Kosovo erupted, several people asked whether it didn't make obsolete my Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention, which pointed out that "No two countries that both had a McDonald's had ever fought a war against each other since they each got their McDonald's." After all, Belgrade had McDonald's, as did every NATO country. My answer was, let's see how the war ends.

Look what happened. As the Pentagon will tell you, air power alone brought this war to a close in 78 days for one reason -- not because NATO made life impossible for the Serb troops in Kosovo (look how much armor they drove out of there), but because NATO made life miserable for the Serb civilians in Belgrade. Belgrade is a modern city integrated with Western Europe, with a population that wants to be part of today's main global trends, from the Internet to economic development, which the presence of McDonald's symbolizes.

Once NATO turned out the lights in Belgrade, and shut down the power grids and the economy, Belgrade's citizens demanded an end to the war. It's that simple. Not only did NATO soldiers not want to die for Kosovo -- neither did the Serbs of Belgrade. They wanted to be part of the world, more than they wanted Kosovo to be part of them. They wanted McDonald's re-opened, much more than they wanted Kosovo re-occupied. So, yes, there is now one exception to the Golden Arches Theory -- an exception that, in the end, only proves how powerful is the rule.

This war also illustrated just how much the world is now dominated by U.S. power. Russia and China, as much as they chafed at this war, were unable to do anything about it. I was in the lobby of NATO's Brussels headquarters last month when I saw a Russian woman journalist there, walking in circles next to the Coke machine, talking on her cell phone in Russian. She reminded me of Russia's troops in Kosovo, trying to assert their identity in a world of pax Americana. But that's why this war also highlighted the backlash brewing against America, which is now referred to as "the capital of global arrogance," not only by Iranians, but by Russians, Chinese and half our NATO allies.

But while there is much that was post-modern about this war, there was something pre-modern as well -- the barbaric mass-murdering and rapes that the Serb military engaged in in Kosovo. This was old-fashioned evil, although even it had a certain bizarre 21st century twist.

The Serbs quickly realized that U.S. satellites were now so good they could track every mass grave they dug, down to the shovels. "So in the end they were even more brutal," said David Scheffer, the U.S. Ambassador at Large for War Crimes Issues. "The Serbs tried to erase the evidence of their behavior by burning bodies, excavating graves, destroying documents and even abducting Kosovar witnesses and taking them away with them." But modernity may catch up with them, notes Mr. Scheffer, because forensic technology is now so sophisticated: at one mass grave site -- Izbica -- F.B.I. experts have been able to document what happened from scraps of evidence, even though all 155 bodies were removed.

So, no, Kosovo wasn't W.W.III. It didn't change the world, but it has illuminated how much the world has changed.