Remembering the Illegal War in Kosovo

The Kosovo war did tremendous damage to the international system and helped pave the way for other destructive breaches of international law in the decades that followed

This week marks the 25th anniversary of the start of the illegal U.S.-NATO war in Kosovo. The war was a significant departure for NATO in two respects: it represented the first time that the alliance went to war, and the war that they chose to wage was an aggressive one without any international mandate. The war exemplified the arrogance of the U.S. at the height of the so-called unipolar moment, as the U.S. presumed to dictate to a much smaller, less powerful state what it could do inside its own borders and then began bombing when the target refused to comply. The war resulted in the de facto partition of a sovereign state.

The Western governments that waged the air war in 1999 had no right to use force against Yugoslavia, and they chose to escalate and internationalize what had been a low-level internal conflict. Western governments insisted for years that Kosovo was a unique case and wasn’t a precedent for anything else, but that was never credible. The damage was done as soon as the U.S. and its allies trampled on the U.N. Charter and fought a war that had absolutely nothing to do with self-defense.