Nato’s military operations against Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999 represented a watershed in the post-World War II history of Europe. Even from the vantage point of U.S. policy, the decision to lead a NATO operation against a European state on account of a dispute concerning its own national territory was a remarkable one, notwithstanding the steady development of the crisis triggered by Serbia’s behavior that may have made the actual outbreak of war seem more like an incremental step to implement the threats previously made. But for many other countries, the U.S. and NATO decision was no less fateful,...

For Western public opinion, foremost American, the Kosovo crisis was a clea-cut case of savage suppression of an Albanian ethnic minority, which constituted an absolute majority of about 90 percent in Kosovo, by the authoritarian and nationalistic Serbian regime of Slobodan Milosevic. Even before the spread of violence in Kosovo after February 1998, this regime was held responsible for the bloody and devastating wars in the former Yugoslavia since 1991. Serbia conducted these wars against Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia in an attempt to keep by force its Balkan Empire, created by Joseph Tito after the Second World War. Hence, it...