Don’t Doubt NATO. It Saved My People.

• ALBIN KURTI

Some in the United States have downplayed the importance of NATO. Many European partners worry that after the U.S. presidential election in November, the American commitment to the alliance will wane. But as NATO prepares for the start of its summit in Washington on Tuesday, marking 75 years since its birth, I would like to remind the world of how NATO is etched into the cultural and political identity of one country in Europe: my own, Kosovo.

In 1999, a ruthless Serbian campaign led by the Serb leader and Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic brought massacres, rapes and the expulsion of about half of Kosovo’s majority Albanian population. It was a humanitarian disaster. NATO’s sustained aerial bombardment of Serb forces and positions put a stop to the horror. The alliance sent in nearly 50,000 troops immediately after.

Who among my people could forget the sight of NATO soldiers being cheered as they arrived? Over the past 25 years, as NATO helped liberate Kosovo and maintained the peace, we in return built democracy to foster this peace from within. We declared our independence in 2008, an idea that will resonate with Americans who have just celebrated their Independence Day. Most of the world now recognizes the nation known as Kosovo, although I prefer the Albanian spelling, Kosova.

There was little doubt to us, given the fresh memories of genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia, that the situation in Kosovo would have deteriorated rapidly without NATO. As a Kosovar, it is painful even to imagine how much worse it could have become.

From the outset, NATO’s intervention was humanitarian. But a humanitarian intervention serves national interests, too, however much we’d like to think of them as distinct. Peace in Europe and stopping human suffering served the national interests of NATO’s members. Conflict in the Balkans increases the risk of spillover into Western Europe, not only through refugee crises but also by drawing foreign players into this historically significant geopolitical borderland, threatening Europe’s security.

NATO is not an abstract entity acting on its own. It requires political will. In Kosovo’s case, we had the political will of many great powers, including the United States, NATO’s biggest military power. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright knew the region and the terrors of European wars. Despite being strongly associated with the Clinton administration, the intervention was bipartisan. In Congress, Senator Bob Dole, a Republican, was a strong advocate.

Military intervention should always be a last resort, and in Kosovo it was. High-level meetings repeatedly failed, including talks at Rambouillet Castle in France between Serb and Albanian representatives and American, European and Russian officials. Diplomacy had been exhausted while people were being killed. The war in Kosovo was the fourth Milosevic had waged in the former Yugoslavia.

The extent of the cruelty required a strong response. After 78 days of aerial bombardment, the alliance’s largest military assault since its founding in 1949, the Serb armed forces retreated. NATO stayed in Kosovo, and the return of refugees followed under United Nations and European Union administration and protection.

NATO’s presence ensured peace and allowed us to rebuild. The troops protected our border but also helped us protect ourselves, including by building up our military, the Kosovo Security Force. The initial mission was split between France in the north, Italy in the west, Germany in the south and the United States in the east, with the United Kingdom in the central east. Over the years, as our stability grew, NATO drastically reduced its troops from the initial 50,000 to several thousand.

The West should take pride in this achievement. Kosovo is now recognized as the highest ranked democracy in the Western Balkans. This transformation wasn’t solely NATO’s doing; it required efforts from many parties and, most importantly, the resolve of the Kosovar people who engaged in the political process. But NATO made this reality possible, and it is not by chance that the war in Ukraine marks the first major European war in over 100 years that Western Balkan countries have not participated in. Peace is hard work, and dynamic — it must be constantly maintained.

Yet even though Kosovo’s democracy is on the rise, so are threats to its security. In September, heavily armed Serbian paramilitary troops whom we believe came from Serbia took up positions at the Orthodox Banjska Monastery in what the U.S. government called a highly organized effort that included sophisticated weapons. Serbian military forces mobilized near our border, a move criticized by the United States as “destabilizing.” Last year NATO increased its troops from 3,770 to about 4,500 amid the increasing threats to peace.

Political challenges remain, too. In 2017, Aleksandar Vucic, a former minister of propaganda under Milosevic, became Serbia’s president. His rise marked a return to Milosevic’s authoritarian, ethnonationalist politics, especially the expansionist kind. The authoritarian politics of Belgrade made life especially difficult for ethnic Serbs in Kosovo. They had to navigate their role as a minority in a new country with an approximate 93 percent ethnic Albanian population and 7 percent consisting of other minorities, including Roma and Turks. Serbia has impeded this integration. It took bravery for ethnic Serbs to join the institutions and become active participants in the country.

A new front in the Balkans would serve Russia as well as Serbia: Serbia could try to gain territory through aggression and Russia could gain a stronger hold on Serbia as a satellite, in addition to distracting the world from the war it is waging in Ukraine. Under Mr. Vucic, Serbia has invested heavily both in its military and in military cooperation with Russia. A 2019 report by the U.S. Defense Department concluded that “Serbia provides the most permissive environment for Russian influence in the Western Balkans.” Kosovo, by contrast, could not provide a less permissive environment. We have remained staunchly pro-Western.

A quarter-century after its intervention, NATO’s role in Kosovo proves the organization is more crucial than ever. Its strong track record in the country demonstrates that the democracy and institutional support it helped establish, along with the external threats it prevented, successfully maintained peace. Unfortunately, 25 years later, we are facing war and threats of war in Europe once again. Here, peace is sustained only by our ability to defend it when directly challenged, and the threat of such a challenge is more real than ever.