Print

8 Waging War to Make Peace the conversation among these ways of thinking and shows how that dynamic affected the ultimate choices decision makers made in 1999 and 2003. In the contemporary context, these worldviews emphasize different aspects of the international order: national sovereignty, inter- national law, and moral imperative. As this analysis demonstrates, decisions about the use of force are influenced by the tensions and confluences among the three ways of thinking. The building blocks of the debates—context and concepts—are set forth in chapter 3. These include, among other contemporary issues, the relationship between NATO and the UN, debates about the nature of sovereignty, the evolu- tion of human rights, and the militarization of humanitarianism. The Kosovo decision is the focus of the study and is examined in some depth in chapters 4 through 6. That campaign is generally seen as the culmination of the humanitarian wars of the 1990s, the “most strik- ing example” of humanitarian intervention of our time,9 and a turning point in international politics. The Iraq case, examined in chapter 7, tests the model presented in the Kosovo case and reveals the mixed motives present in both cases, whether or not nations agreed on the use of force. The conclusions in chapter 8 offer implications and policy recom- mendations for decision makers as they grapple with how to address strategic threats, such as those from Iran and North Korea, as humani- tarian and human rights emergencies in the decades ahead.