Focusing on NATO's continued crisis of identity, Joyce P. Kaufman argues that the conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo have proven to be critical to an alliance that has not been able to define its roles and missions in the post-Cold War world. While, on the one hand, NATO was enlarging by inviting former adversaries in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to join, on the other hand it has been woefully unprepared to deal with the ethnic conflicts that erupted on its borders and that could undermine the peace and stability of Europe. The author contends that the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia have potentially threatened the essence of NATO by forcing the alliance to take on the new role of peacekeeper without adequately allowing the members to examine the role the alliance wants to or should play in a largely postcommunist world. Despite ongoing discussion in NATO ministerial summits, the alliance has made little progress to date and public questions about the role and even the viability of NATO after the Cold War continue to grow. The inability to address these issues leaves NATO facing a number of pressing questions that this book tries to answer: What role can and should the alliance play in the future? And why have the ongoing conflicts in the Balkans proven to be a challenge that the alliance has been unwilling or unable to resolve?

Following the passage of the fifteenth and twentieth anniversaries of the entry of many former communist states into both NATO and the EU in 2019, this book takes a comprehensive look at the changed security conditions of these new member states. How has NATO and EU membership improved their overall defence protection, and what elements are still missing for them on an individual state basis? Utilising alliance politics theory, convergence/divergence theory and defence policy theory, the book provides an invaluable assessment of defence policies, from the stable East Central European states to the most jeopardised Baltic states in the north of Europe. With chapters on the Cold War defence conditions during the last two decades of Soviet domination, post 1989–91 transformations in the direction of democracy and the impact of the 2014 Ukraine–Russia–Crimea crisis, this book is essential reading for those seeking to understand the changed landscape of European politics in the twenty-first century.

A discussion of the political illusion created by the humanitarian bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 that tests popular beliefs

The hypocrisy and lies behind the alleged humanitarian war waged by the United States and NATO are exposed in this anthology of carefully documented critiques of the Balkan conflict. Evidence is presented to conclude that divide-and-conquer tactics were used to stimulate war in Yugoslavia; critical essays examine the Hague Tribunal, the occupation of Kosovo, media deception, war crimes, and blatant NATO aggression. Contributors include Ramsey Clark, Slobodan Milosevic, and Michael Parenti.

After eleven weeks of bombing in the spring of 1999, the United States and NATO ultimately won the war in Kosovo. Serbian troops were forced to withdraw, enabling an international military and political presence to take charge in the region. But was this war inevitable or was it the product of failed western diplomacy prior to the conflict? And once it became necessary to use force, did NATO adopt a sound strategy to achieve its aims of stabilizing Kosovo? In this first in-depth study of the Kosovo crisis, Ivo Daalder and Michael O'Hanlon answer these and other questions about the causes, conduct, and consequences of the war. Based on interviews with many of the key participants, they conclude that notwithstanding important diplomatic mistakes before the conflict, it would have been difficult to avoid the Kosovo war. That being the case, U.S. and NATO conduct of the war left much to be desired. For more than four weeks, the Serbs succeeded where NATO failed, forcefully changing Kosovo's ethnic balance by forcing 1.5 million Albanians from their home and more than 800,000 from the country. Had they chosen to massacre more of their victims, NATO would have been powerless to stop them. In the end, NATO won the war by increasing the scope and intensity of bombing, making serious plans for a ground invasion, and moving diplomacy into full gear in order to convince Belgrade that this was a war Serbia would never win. The Kosovo crisis is a cautionary tale for those who believe force can be used easily and in limited increments to stop genocide, mass killing, and the forceful expulsion of entire populations. Daalder and O'Hanlon conclude that the crisis holds important diplomatic and military lessons that must be learned so that others in the future might avoid the mistakes that were made in this case.

Drawing on a wide range of unpublished material and observations gathered from his visit to Yugoslavia in 1999, Michael Parenti challenges mainstream media coverage of the war, uncovering hidden agendas behind the Western talk of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and democracy.