Second paragraph of third essay (“First War of the Global Era: Kosovo and U.S. Grand Strategy” by James Kurth)

As we will see, all of these claims about the Kosovo War are true, but they are also incomplete. They could therefore be misleading both about the causes of the war and about its implications for future conflicts. To understand these causes and consequences, we will need to examine the war in the context of the grand, or national, strategy of the United States. For the Kosovo War was, inter alia, an outgrowth of a new grand strategy that the United States has developed in the aftermath of the Cold War. Among the Kosovo War’s distinctions, it was the first American war of the global era.

A collection of essays about the Kosova war, published in January 2002. Most of the essays are critical of the way in which the war was conducted from a military doctrine or strategic thinking viewpoint. Most of them also try to look ahead to see what the implications are for future conflicts where the USA may not need to have a strong ground component, though very few of the observations turn out to have been helpful to understand the Afghanistan war, started just before the book was published, or the Iraq war, which started just after.

Less surprisingly perhaps, none of them foresaw a future where the USA first threatened annexation to its allies and then attacked Iran and lost. One feels for analysts trying to make sense of the world we are in and then discovering that the future has arrived and it’s not as expected. But none of these essays made me feel that the US policy community had any much better idea of what is going on in the world than the rest of us. In particular, none of the writers has much knowledge of Kosova itself, which is what I am most interested in.

You can get War over Kosovo here. This was the shortest book acquired in 2022 which was still on my unread shelf. Next on that pile is The Light That Failed, by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes.