Getting NATO's Success in Kosovo Right: The Theory and Logic of Counter-Coercion

The overwhelming consensus in the literature on Slobodan Milosevic's decision to pull Serb troops out of Kosovo in June, 1999, is very clear—his concession after 78 days of bombing was a direct product of both air strikes and NATO's preparations for a ground war. Most analysts believe it was the combination of these two pressures that established a sufficiently clear, resolute and capable threat to force Milosevic to comply. This paper directly challenges standard interpretations of `successful' coercion in Kosovo on empirical, theoretical and logical grounds, and offers a resounding disconfirmation of conventional wisdom: (1) the ground war threat failed to satisfy even the most basic prerequisites for effective coercion; (2) Milosevic had no reason to interpret the threat as credible, given the very clear signals from NATO confirming the `refusal' to mobilize and deploy ground troops; (3) the assertion that Milosevic viewed the threat as credible would require an assumption of procedural non-rationality derived from misperception theory (an assumption that lies outside the boundaries of rational coercion); (4) to the extent that Milosevic may have misperceived the evidence, he would rationally have preferred to fight the kind of ground war NATO appeared to be planning as a way of maximizing counter-coercion leverage (Milosevic's only hope for success); and (5) given the identical nature of the outcomes, it would have made more strategic sense for Milosevic to risk losing Kosovo after a ground war (in the hopes of significantly increasing NATO's costs) rather than be forced to hand over the territory to NATO after an essentially cost-free, `virtual' war. In direct contrast to accepted wisdom, the air strike and ground war threats were mutually exclusive and contradictory. To the extent that a ground war threat was credible, the impact on successful coercion would have been negative, not positive. Stated in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, the absence of a credible ground war threat (both in terms of the `threat' and the actual `deployment' of troops) was a necessary condition for NATO's success , and, in combination with an escalation in air strikes in the final two weeks of May, constituted sufficient conditions for NATO's victory. This interpretation of the Kosovo case constitutes a more balanced and complete explanation for Milosevic's decision that is empirically valid, logically consistent and theoretically sound—conventional wisdom fails on all three grounds.