CAMBRIDGE, England -- While you were on the beaches of Hawaii or Hainan or wherever else you spent the summer, the secretary general of NATO, or U.S.-led NATO as Beijing calls it, spelled out the new philosophy of that organization, as it was expressed in the Kosovo war. Referring to Kosovo in a speech at the Mansion House in the City of London, Lord Robertson said that "the international community has delivered a message: that where we can be decisive, massive violations of human rights will not go unopposed."
For "international community" and "we," read NATO. This statement was a neat encapsulation of "the new interventionism" that has been so upsetting to Chinese leaders and other non-NATO countries. It is worth a closer look, one it did not get at the time because so many people were away on holiday.
Lord Robertson spelled out two basic justifications for the intervention in Kosovo. The first was to stop what NATO saw as the "humanitarian disaster" being perpetrated by the Yugoslav Serbs on their fellow countrymen, the Kosovo Albanians. The second was to stem the tide of refugees from Kosovo to neighboring countries, because they would have "inevitably ended up traveling further, including to our own countries,"