26 Years Ago Today, NATO Set the Precedent for Russia's Special Military Operation (SMO)
No matter how you feel about the Special Military Operation (SMO), if you think it was provoked by the Collective West especially NATO, or if you believe it was an unjustified, barbarous invasion of a peaceful neighbor--the precedent for it was set on the night of March 24, 1999. When NATO began Operation Noble Anvil later redubbed Allied Force, without any cross-border provocation whatsoever from Serbia aka the rump Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). While launched officially for humanitarian reasons, to stop a Serb campaign of ethnic cleansing--which in fact, turned into a surge of Kosovar Albanian refugees into Albania after the bombing was underway--it would be more accurate to say the second term Clinton Administration waged an unconstitutional war for the same reason Bill Clinton admitted he had oral sex with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. Simply because Clinton could get away with it.
We were in high school at the time, and we remember telling an older sibling, who was headed for a US military career, that the USA would one day come to regret the precedent being set by the NATO operation, once China would become a superpower. We didn't have the foresight to predict Russia's recovery into a near-superpower 25 years later, but the whole thing just felt off from what the then-dominant legacy media was telling us. We'd feel that same gut feeling that everything was wrong when the Maidan "Revolution of Dignity" false flag sniper killings of the "Heavenly Hundred" happened in Kiev years later, as well as the P(l)andemic. That something terrible was happening, and we couldn't do a damn thing about it but helplessly watch and warn our closest ones.
The Clinton White House said that this police action, not even war, would be a series of slick, precision strikes, and above all would not require US "boots on the ground". The stock market was up and Baby Boomers were feeling flush in the US, so who really cared about some faraway country most Americans couldn't find on a map? This was before the smartphone, when fax machines still existed and the Internet was still screeching modem dial up via AOL, before mass formation psychosis and NPCs supported the Current Thing.
Congressional opposition was weak, represented by a few skeptics of humanitarian intervention and antiwar stalwarts such as then Texas Congressman Ron Paul. But thanks to Dr. Paul, we did discover Antiwar.com and the very early idea of multipolarity. Most critically, Serbia's old fraternal Orthodox Christian ally Russia, still recovering economically, societally and militarily from the collapse of the Soviet Union, was too weak to help the Serbs fight back. In an alternate timeline, if Serbia had then been led by a more ruthless leader than Slobodan Milosevic, one who had dared NATO soldiers to come and die in the rubble of downtown Belgrade, the course of future events might have changed. The US-led invasion of Iraq, certainly, would've been a much harder sell by the George W. Bush Administration. The delusion of Collective Western omnipotence, and victories on the cheap, that had developed after Desert Storm, which the Black Hawk Down Battle of Mogadishu had only temporarily dented, would've been broken.
The helplessness many Russians felt watching the bombs fall on Belgrade was captured in this song recorded by the then 14 year old future t.A.T.u singer Lena Katina, Yugoslavia, posted above (with English lyrics). And inducing helplessness, as many psychologists know, instead of imposing dominance often backfires instead, fueling rage by the disempowered males. Just ask the inhabitants of the Donbass who faced Ukrainian soldiers who'd watched their country give up the Crimea without a shot being fired about being on the receiving end of such fury. The lesson Vladimir Putin and his future cadres took from this sorry episode was the Thucydidean one from the Melian Dialogue recorded by the ancient Greek historian: "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must".
It's an ancient maxim the Ukrainians are (re)learning the hard way, when it turns out "the world's strongest military alliance" NATO was willing to hand them weapons and intelligence, but was never going to fight and die alongside them by the tens of thousands. Because fundamentally, the Collective West is cowardly, and many of its veterans and "defense" oriented communities rely not so much on borrowed Ukrainian valor and weasels like ex-Illinois Congressman Adam Kinzinger boasting about Russian casualties, as a synthetic CDO of valor. That is, waging war against Russia, while insisting they're not a direct party to the conflict and hiding behind the Ukrainians' backs. There was a similar smugness about NATO's successes in 1999, despite the unpopularity of the war in Russia, Greece, and with the "accidentally" Belgrade Embassy-bombed Chinese. Part of this arrogance was due to the Serbs being unable to strike back beyond their borders, which a few Russian Iskander ballistic missiles would've enabled them to do. But ultimately, the 1999 war affirmed the very Thucydidean might makes right principal do-gooders on both sides of the Atlantic are deploring Trump for allegedly imposing on the world.
So when a relative or friend especially one in Canada or Western Europe tells you Trump and Putin are jointly bringing back the world back to 1939, ask them where were they when the liberal Boomer President Bill Clinton and the "defensive alliance" NATO shattered the "rules-based" post-WW2 order against territorial aggression, by bombing Belgrade.
The fact is, a generation ago European leaders including the Danes who are outraged about Trump's designs on their Arctic colony of Greenland were happy to assist in the dismemberment of a small country in Europe, including via post war violation of a UN resolution that had upheld the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia and partial European recognition of Kosovo independence. But obviously in the minds of a liberal pro-NATO Dane, it was totally different back then, NATO was coming to liberate a country rather than annex its territory, regardless of the Americans plunking a giant military base called Camp Bondsteel right in the middle of Kosovo, which is a soft form of annexation (just ask the Germans and Japanese eighty years later if the American bases in their country are going anywhere). Kosovar Albanians had a right to self-determination, which the Crimean and Donetsk/Lugansk natives, because they're pro-Russian, do not have. Plus there's intersectionality too: the Kosovar Albanians were victims even if the KLA was attacking Serb civilians and soldiers, and likewise Ukrainians are all victims today because their military is weaker than Russia's. Well then, what about Palestine? Or NATO member Turkey's occupation and installation of a puppet government in Syria?
Epilogue: After the 1999 bombing, Russian director Alexei Balabanov filmed his action/revenge movie Brother 2 in Chicago, in part as an "F you" to America for what NATO had done to the Serbs. In the film's climax, the crafty young Russian spetsnaz veteran hero Danil (played by Sergey Bodrov Jr) memorably scales a fire escape to confront a weaselly white collar American criminal Mennis (then coldly guns down his security guards) at his Chicago high-rise office.
At gunpoint, Danil asks Mennis rhetorically to answer him what is power? Does it come from money, as Danil's Russian hitman older brother and many Americans think? Or does it come from truth? Mennis begins crying like a baby and hands over the money he extorted from Danil's Russian NHL player friend. The film closes with Danil and a Russian woman who had been reduced to prostituting herself on the streets of an American ghetto (a symbol of the country's state at the time) Dasha boarding an Aeroflot flight out of Chicago's O'Hare for the Motherland. Cue credits with the song "The Last Letter (Goodbye America)" by the hugely popular during the 1990s band Nautilus Pompilius (which would later be shown on Russian TV as a soundtrack to the 2020 Summer of Floyd riots). Regardless of how you feel about it, the movie remains vastly influential in Russian pop culture and psychology, because it captured a zeitgeist and still gets shown on Russian TV every year, especially around New Year's. But if you want to read a Russian liberal's pro-Ukrainian "intersectional" take on the film.
When the Russian Army rolled into northern Ukraine at the start of the SMO, many Russian armored vehicles and soldiers wore the letter V for the slogan Наша сила — в правде (our strength is in truth), which originates with the canonized Russian warrior Saint Prince Alexander Nevsky. A splendid little war, waged on the relative cheap by the Collective West at the height of its post-Cold War power, because it could get away with it, had sewn the seeds for a much bigger war, that approached the brink of World War III a generation later. In retrospect, then Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov famously turning around his US-bound plane over the mid-Atlantic, the shoot down of the USA's "invisible" stealth jet by the Serbs 1960s vintage Soviet-built SAMs, and Russian peacekeepers in Bosnia's race to the Pristina Airport ahead of NATO occupation forces, were all hints of the NATO-Russian confrontation to come.
– Belisarius
March 24, 2024