Why the dysfunctional Balkan states that splintered out of the old Yugoslavia and their quarrels should be of any interest to NATO has never been explained. From Ted Galen Carpenter at theamericanconservative.com:
The United States and its European allies love to portray NATO’s military interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo during the 1990s as solid successes. In both cases, NATO partisans stress, the West’s efforts brought bloody conflicts and rampant human rights abuses to an end and put the countries on the road to stability and democracy.
This is a greatly oversimplified, if not grotesquely distorted, version of the real history. Both political entities are still dysfunctional international wards decades after the original military interventions. NATO troops continue to police two increasingly fragile political and security environments. Recent events in both Bosnia and Kosovo highlight the volatile settings.
Such thankless and ultimately pointless missions are a far cry from NATO’s original purpose—to shield a weak, war-ravaged democratic Europe from possible intimidation or even conquest by the Soviet Union. It is a debatable matter whether Washington’s push for the creation of a U.S.-dominated transatlantic alliance to confront Moscow was either necessary or wise. Nevertheless, NATO at least had a credible, substantive geostrategic purpose.
