Kosovo traumas: How NATO got out of its depth in crisis management operations

NATO’s crisis management engagement came of age in the Kosovo crisis of 1999, as the alliance committed fully to this role in its 1999 Strategic Concept and consequently inscribed the engagement in the Euro-Atlantic security architecture it sought to refine in subsequent years. The war in Afghanistan brought change as NATO at first sought to implement its crisis management principles and then, when it ran into policy failure, accepted the Americanization of its strategy and ultimately sought to reformulate its principles in more modest terms. Where Kosovo lessons were initially seen in European security management terms, their subsequent limitations on the wider global stage impacted NATO’s broader transformation for twenty-first-century security and defense operations. NATO is today still coming to terms with the experience.