Is there life after victory? What NATO can and cannot do.

• Author: Joffe, Josef

History counsels that defeat and victory are the two deadliest moments in the life of alliances. Defeat is nature's way of telling an alliance that it does not work, that its reason for being has vanished. Surrender is the end, dissolving both bonds and obligations. And so no coalition has ever survived capitulation.

But alliances also die when they win. The European-wide league against Napoleon had unraveled by 1822, if not sooner. The Western compact against Imperial Germany was a dead letter by 1920. The Soviet-American partnership of World War II survived victory by only a few months. These were not mere accidents of history. For victory, too, robs coalitions of their raison d'etre. When the great threat disappears, so does the glue that binds nations in alliance. Worse, once partners no longer need to worry about their common enemy they begin to worry about one another: How will yesterday's comrade-in-arms use his unshackled power tomorrow? With nothing to absorb his might, will he not turn it against me? Rivalry resumes as the victors turn to face one another.

True, NATO still endures even in the year 6 A.C., (After the Cold War). No member has moved to dissolve it, none has even intimated a desire to abscond. Everything is still in place: the, Brussels headquarters and the secretary-general, the infrastructure and the training, the doctrine and the maneuvers. Nonetheless, the longest-lived alliance of free nations cannot escape the question that confronts all victorious coalitions: What is its reason for being if the threat that spawned and sustained it is gone?

This article proceeds in three parts. First, it will define the problem of an alliance that remains all dressed up but with no place to go. Second, it will look at two solutions to the quandary of victory that have not worked, and explain why. Third, it will conclude by suggesting a modest remedy that might yet carry this indispensable institution into ripe old age.

The Curse of Victory

The problem may best be described in the language of micro-economics. NATO finds itself in the position of a firm that, having been an exemplar of excellence for decades, suddenly faces a severe downward shift of the demand curve for its traditional wares. In NATO's case, the problem is the drastic decline of the strategic threat, and hence of the demand for its two best products: deterrence and defense. Faced with an ailing cash cow, what does such a company do?

There are four, and only four, basic choices:

1. The firms sells its remaining assets and closes its doors.

2. The company downsizes pari passu with the decline in demand, hoping to regain an equilibrium between costs and revenues to keep shareholders from defecting.

3. It develops new products for its classical market in order to replace yesterday's "cash cow" with new "shooting stars."

4. The ailing firm tries to conquer new markets for its old product.

The last two of these four are precisely the strategies NATO has pursued in the past three years, but the returns have ranged from meager to downright negative.

New Products, New Markets

"Out-of-area or out-of-business." Peacekeeping and peace enforcement in Europe, that is, in Bosnia, are the new products of strategy C, as reflected in this slogan. Hardly had the Cold War ended with Moscow's capitulation than a vast new security market opened up in southeast Europe. Demand for the new product emerged with Serbia's intervention against Croatia and Slovenia in 1991, leaping upward with the tripartite war that broke out in Bosnia in 1992. Yet no matter how high the demand, NATO could not deliver on the supply.

For a while, it looked as if a few newly designed goods would somehow satisfy the demands of the Bosnian security market. NATO bombed a bit, symbolically rather than tactically, let alone strategically, and the Bosnian Serbs retracted a bit.

But in the spring of 1995, a murderous gap opened between the meager security supply trickling off Nato's production fines and the burgeoning demand generated by the escalation o Serbian violence. Instead of intimidation, ATO reaped retaliation and provocation. An American warplane was shot down, UN forces were taken hostage, Tuzla was attacked in the most vicious manner, with seventy-one civilians killed in a single gruesome explosion. Nor did escalation end there. In July of this year, the ultimate (so far) provocation occurred when Serbian forces, taking UN soldiers prisoners on the way, broke into Srebrenica, a UN-designated safe haven for forty thousand starving inhabitants and refugees. Yet this time too, NATO did not act.

In short, what NATO had to offer in the way of defense and deterrence was woefully inadequate to the demand. The explanation for the failure comes in three parts, in rising order of importance and generality. First, by acting as "subcontractor" to the UN, NATO has imposed on itself an absurd chain of command: UNPROFOR must decide that it wants air support; that demand goes to Yasushi Akashi, the uN bureaucrat on the spot; thence it travels to Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the secretary-general of the United Nations, who win either do nothing or consult the Big Five; the Five, given China and Russia, will not agree; ergo, NATO cannot act.

Which leads to the second level of the explanation: Russia. After a brief period of retraction, even of subservience to the West, Russia began to act as tacit protector of the Serbs. The motive is not "pan-Slavism," the alleged bond of kinship with the Serbs. That familiar explanation does not wash. Where was that volkish tie from 1948, when Stalin had Yugoslavia expelled from the Comintern, to the break-up of the Titoist construction --...