As a result of Clinton's military exercises, America's global mission is now increasingly compromised by shortages in ordnance, equipment and personnel. (The Pentagon, for example, has already asked Congress for $51 million to convert its stock of existing cruise missiles with nuclear warheads to conventional ones, in order to make up the deficit the war has created.)

Suppose, however, that Clinton and his progressive NATO allies suddenly acquired the political resolve they now lack, and prosecuted the war with vigor -- as some conservatives have advocated. Suppose the White House were to go to Congress and ask for an actual declaration of war and the taxes necessary to support it. Suppose 200,000 troops were dispatched to the Balkans to conduct a land war against Serbian nationalism fighting for its very existence (that Vietnam parallel again). Suppose the 19 nations running the NATO war were ready to embrace this escalation. Suppose the American public, footing most of the bill, was prepared for the long invasion and campaign, and for the casualties necessary to defeat Serbia's forces, something 33 Axis divisions failed to accomplish during a five year campaign in World War II. Suppose we won. What then?

Do Clinton and his NATO allies plan to restore the Habsburg Monarchy and bring back the Austro-Hungarian empire to administer the peace? Or are the United States and NATO going to administer this European backwater themselves, tying down vital military and political resources for the next decade in the hopes that the warring parties can learn to do what they have not been able to do except under a common monarch or a communist dictator —- live in peace?

Nor should we forget that our "friends" in the Balkans, the Albanian Kosovars, are now dominated by the Kosovo Liberation Army which can only be strengthened in a ground war. The KLA is a military-terrorist force led by Muslim radicals and Marxist-Leninists, linked to the Albanian mafia and the international heroin trade, and inspired by political visions of a "Greater Albania" carved out of Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Greece. Is this the pot we want to stir?

The only practical way to avoid the nightmare of a Balkan land war and post-war occupation is to drop the Wilsonian pretense that we can be a savior of the Balkans, or even of the Kosovar Albanians. We need to redefine our objectives to conform to a clear, practical national interest. In these circumstances, such an interest would be to end the war as quickly as possible, and to seek a partition of Kosovo that can form the basis for a stable status quo and, with it, the possibility of a more permanent peace. Instead of reigning terror on the civilian populace of Belgrade in the hope of forcing their government to surrender, we can salve our humanitarian consciences (and save a lot of money) by using our resources to relocate the refugees and help the bordering states resettle them. There will be two objections to this perspective, one from the right and one from the left. Some conservatives claim that the credibility of America and NATO have been put on the line, and thus there is "no alternative" to military victory. "If you're in it, you have to win it," as Sen. McCain has said. On the other hand, the left claims that "human rights" is itself an American national interest, while accepting a partition of Kosovo that does not provide for the return of all the refugees would be to ratify the "ethnic cleansing" that has taken place.

As far as NATO's credibility is concerned, until its intrusion into the Balkans, NATO was a purely defensive alliance. From its inception until the fall of the Berlin Wall, the NATO alliance worked because its focus was to provide a defense for the sovereignty of its member states against a clearly defined military threat. Though the United States itself was not directly threatened with invasion, it had a vital interest in preserving the independence of Western Europe and denying its industrial wealth and resources to the Soviet adversary. This coherence of purpose and convergence of national interests is why the alliance made sense for us. We were defending our allies against attack in order to defend ourselves. No such rationale justifies the NATO action in the Balkans today. Without any national discussion and without an act of Congress, we have been led by the Clintonites into a new NATO, which is radically different from the old, and whose problems are far greater and far more disturbing. The very action that NATO has undertaken in the Balkans -- an aggression against a sovereign nation over its internal affairs -- constitutes a radical redefinition of NATO's purpose and undermines the very logic that made it work, however problematically, in the past. As Mark Helprin put it, "NATO has gone to war to compel a sovereign state to forfeit a portion of its territory. This is what NATO was formed to oppose."

This formal redefinition of NATO's role was announced in a new declaration of purpose signed by the 19 nations who now make up NATO, at its recent 50th anniversary summit in Washington. The unprecedented war in the Balkans, along with NATO's new self-understanding, are the work of a group of political leaders whose views are quite different from (even opposed to) the views of the men who led NATO in the years of its Cold War success. In fact, most of the principal leaders of the present NATO alliance – Clinton, Solana, Blair, Schroeder and D'Alema-- have long been members of the political left. During the Cold War, they were either supporters of the Soviet side (D'Alema was a communist), or active anti-war protesters or backers of the nuclear-freeze movement which opposed the efforts of the NATO leaders at the time and the Reagan administration to preserve nuclear parity (and thus military parity) with the Warsaw Pact. That they are the architects of a "progressive" war of aggression in the Balkans, and a newly conceived NATO is hardly reassuring.

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