Post by eurofed on Sept 26, 2020 20:45:57 GMT
This is a story about how the 2nd Korean War, an escalation of the Yugoslav Wars, and Russia's bid to restore the USSR in a new guise created a Second Cold War between the West and Russia-China. Since I do not want the West to be troubled and distracted by the post-Gulf War mess in the Middle East, I am going to pick an earlier PoD that averts the conflict and the entire event sequence it generated.
ITTL the British protectorate on Kuwait that ultimately led to its consolidation as an independent state never happened. The dynastic and diplomatic intrigue that IOTL led to the Anglo-Kuwaiti Agreement of 1899 instead caused the Ottoman annexation of Kuwait. As a result, Kuwait became an integral part of Iraq when the Ottoman Empire collapsed after WWI. This caused a significant alt-historical divergence to happen since the 1980s.
In the early 1980s, Iraq's leader Saddam Hussein decided to exploit the post-revolutionary weakness of Islamist Iran, which was busy tearing itself apart with a violent power struggle between the dominant Islamists and their Communist, social-democratic, and Islamic socialist opponents, as well as a purge of the old monarchist elites that wrecked the Iranian army. Iraq invaded Iran with the aim of seizing ethnically-Arab and oil-rich Khuzestan. The initial Iraqi offensive was a decisive success that overrun Khuzestan thanks to the additional oil revenues of the Kuwait province allowing a greater military build-up and a sensible strategy that concentrated Iraqi mechanized land forces and air power. Iran's troubles were magnified by the poor strategic choices of Iran's supreme guide Khomeini. He distrusted, neglected, and purged the conventional army, which had been built up to a considerable degree under the Shah's regime, and instead relied on poorly armed and trained if full of zeal Islamist militias for a counterattack that failed disastrously.
The Iranian forces exhausted and bled themselves white with a series of human-wave offensives that accomplished very few gains for a considerable blood price, despite the regime's determination to win a decisive victory against Iraq and export its revolution at all costs. Out of growing frustration and desperation, the Iranians tried to spread instability across the Middle East to their advantage and open a second front by sponsoring pro-Iranian Islamist, Shiite, and Palestinian militias and terrorist groups to wage a series of attacks against Iraq, Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. They also encouraged their Arab allies, Syria and Libya, to support the same groups and apply military pressure on those states by border clashes. This significantly worsened the chaotic situation of the Lebanese Civil War and increased tensions and instability across the Middle East. However, it eventually backfired badly for the pro-Iranian front. The enraged Egyptians, noticing Libya ignored the previous lesson it had got during the 1977 Libyan-Egyptian border war and relapsed into provocations, reacted by staging an all-out counteroffensive that crushed the Libyan army, overrun Libya, and ousted Qaddafi's regime. Egypt annexed Libya.
Much the same way, the situation led to an unspoken alliance of convenience between Iraq and Israel with the support of Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The two states unleashed a joint attack against Syria that expanded into a combined intervention in Lebanon against the PLO, which took Syria's side, and pro-Syria/Iran militias. Christian and Druze militias switched to support Israel and Iraq. Israel's military superiority allowed the Israeli-Iraqi coalition to win a decisive success despite Iraq being involved in a two-front war. They crushed the Syrian army and its allies, overrunning Syria and Lebanon. This led to the ultimate collapse, disintegration, and partition of the Syrian and Lebanese states alongside sectarian lines.
Iraq annexed most of Syria, including the Sunni and Kurd northern and eastern areas, as well as the Aleppo and Damascus regions. The Alawite community on the Syrian coast established its independence with Soviet support, and became a haven for the remnants of Assad's regime. The Druze areas in southeastern Syria joined and established a land connection with the Druze community in southeastern Lebanon to form an independent state. It got Israel's support since it mostly worked as a buffer state for its annexation of the Golan Heights. Iraq also annexed the Shiite and Sunni areas in northern and eastern Lebanon. The Christians in western-central Lebanon established their own state with the support of Israel that used it as another buffer entity. The Israeli gave it control of the Shiite areas in southern Lebanon they had occupied. The PLO forces and the pro-Syria/Iran militias in Lebanon were crushed. The Palestinians got split between a pro-Iraqi faction that was kept on a tight leash by Saddam, and an anti-Iraqi faction that was expelled from Lebanon and fled to Algeria.
The Iranians also attempted to stir up Kurd and Shiite opposition to the Baathist regime within Iraq, but with limited results due to the strength of the Iraqi security apparatus and their deteriorating military situation and loss of prestige. By the mid-late 1980s, Iran came to face revolutionary collapse because of its disastrous military and economic situation. The land war was locked in an unfavourable strategic stalemate that secured control of Khuzestan and defence of its pre-war territory for Iraq, while Iranian human-wave offensives accomplished little but racking a severe blood bill. The economy was collapsing due to the loss of oil revenues. The Iraqi kept air superiority and waged an effective bombing offensive against Iranian cities and economic infrastructure. Iraq was able to keep its war machine well-supplied thanks to its oil revenues, financial backing from the Persian Gulf states, and weapons purchases from the Western countries and the Soviets (although relations with the USSR cooled after the fall of Libya and Syria). The Iranian war effort steadily deteriorated due to Iran's international isolation (worsened after the fall of Syria and Libya) and its economic inability to purchase arms (Iran's lack of money prevented anything like the Iran-Contra affair from happening). Iran's last-ditch gambit of attacking tankers in the Persian Gulf backfired once the Western powers started to escort the tankers and fight off Iranian attacks.
Popular malcontent fuelled resurgent opposition to the Islamist regime. The Second Iranian Revolution overthrew the mullah and killed Khomeini. Iran was forced to sign an armistice that conceded Khuzestan to Iraq. After a power struggle between the various revolutionary factions, a coalition between the social democratics, the Islamic socialists, and the resurgent monarchists defeated and purged the Islamists and the Communists. Iran remained plagued by Islamist terrorism for a few years, but eventually suppressed it. To rebuild its economy after the loss of most of its oil revenues, Iran turned to exploitation of its gas and mineral resources. Because of their hostility to Islamism, when the Taliban threatened to take over Afghanistan, the Iranians intervened to support the Northern Alliance and helped it take over the country. Saddam spent the next few years after the end of the Iran-Iraq war consolidating his gains and enacting a ruthless purge of various opposers, including Shiite and Kurd militant groups, Syrian nationalists, Alawites, and pro-Iranian Khuzestani separatists.
In the early 1990s, a crisis developed in the Far East because of American opposition to the North Korean nuclear program. Jimmy Carter's untimely death in an accident prevented him from acting as a last-moment mediator and defusing the crisis. As a result tensions continued to grow and the US President eventually ordered a bombing of the Yongbyon reactor and other known or suspected sites of the NK nuclear program. The paranoid North Korean leaders took this as a sign a US invasion was imminent and reacted with an all-out attack on South Korea, Japan, and US bases in the region, as well as by sponsoring various terrorist attacks on Western targets across the world. Although the Western countries suffered some serious damage (especially from NK artillery bombing of Seul, use of chemical weapons on civilians, and state-sponsored terrorist attacks), the Western forces were able to contain the NK land invasion a few miles from the border, enact a massive bombing of NK military targets that crippled the invaders' war machine, and eventually staged a strategic counterattack that overrun North Korea and occupied it up to the Yalu border.
The USA was able to defuse the possible threat of a Chinese intervention by negotiating a deal that bargained Chinese acceptance of South Korean-led reunification of Korea and its continued alignment with the Western world in exchange for the guarantee no US forces would be stationed North of the 'neck' of the Korean Peninsula. Other reasons for Chinese acquiescence included China still feeling insecure of its domestic stability after the Tienanmen event and fearing Western military superiority and massive damage to its economy, the Chinese leaders being reluctant to suffer serious damage to their country because of the recklessness of the Kim Dynasty, and their awareness NK was beyond salvation after its all-out attack and war crimes. A few NK leaders were able to escape to China or bribe Russian officials to travel through Russia to anti-Western rogue states, others were captured, put on trial in an international tribunal, and received harsh sentences for their extensive list of war crimes. Russia under President Yeltsin mostly took a pro-Western neutrality stance during the crisis. The Northern portion of reunified Korea got an extensive, lenghty, and expensive reconstruction, rehabilitation, and reeducation program subsidized by a pool of several Western countries that gradually integrated it in the Western world and brought it up to speed with developed-world standards.
Serbian dictator Milosevic learnt the wrong lesson from the Korean conflict and deemed the Americans were too busy in the Far East and the Europeans too pacifist and divided to intervene. Therefore, he assumed he had a free hand in the Yugoslav Wars to redraw the political and ethnic map of post-Yugoslavia to its liking. For a good while it seemed he was right, and as a result, the Yugoslav army and Serb nationalist militias went on a brutal rampage. They attacked Croatia and invaded Bosnia, seizing the areas they claimed for Greater Serbia and expelling the Croat and Bosnian population from them. They also staged a brutal repression of the Hungarian minorities in Vojvodina and the Albanian population in Kosovo, enacting an ethnic cleasing of them and suppressing the autonomy of these regions. This ethnic cleansing took place with plenty of atrocities and caused a vast refugee wave. These successes and the apparent passivity of the Western world gave Milosevic and the Serb nationalists one heck of a victory disease and they enlarged their bloody expansionist drive. The Serb army and militias invaded North Macedonia and applied the same ethnic cleansing playbook, with the usual consequences. The Balkan mess greatly troubled the European leaders, but they were aware of their military weakness without the support of a distracted America. They tried to remedy the situation by engaging in rearmament and taking a few serious steps to add a military and foreign policy integration dimension (or 'pillar' in EU lingo) to the European integration process. The EU core countries (France, Germany, Italy, Benelux, Spain, Portugal) joined the new initiative. Britain, Ireland, Austria, and the Nordic countries (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland) opted out, but chose not to oppose the process. The international situation drove the Norwegian electorate to approve EU membership in a referendum.
By the late 1990s, America had recovered enough from its Korean War effort and Europe deemed its mlitary reforms and integration initiative advanced enough to justify taking a sterner stance towards Serbia. However, Milosevic remained gripped by victory disease and oblivious to that. He topped his expansionist rampage by picking a fight with and attacking Albania about border incidents with Kosovo Albanian insurgents. To his surprise this time the Western countries quickly reacted by sending him an ultimatum and when it went unheeded, NATO approved a mandate to restore peace and security and suppress gross human rights violations in the Balkans by any means necessary. Despite support by the Muslim world, a drive to get approval for intervention by the UN Security Council failed b/c of Russian and Chinese opposition. However, the Western countries claimed their intervention was legitimate b/c of the NATO mandate, humanitarian protection concerns about Serb atrocities, and Serb aggressions against other Balkan states. As a matter of fact, such arguments turned out convincing enough in the Western world that the intervention got solid popular support and the US Congress, UK Parliament, European Parliament, and the legislatures of the EU countries approved it w/o much difficulty.
NATO started a massive air bombing campaign that caused severe damage to the Serb military and dual-use infrastructure and industry. However, Milosevic and the other nationalist leaders bunkered down, out of stubborness, unwillingness to lose their territorial gains and grip on power, and awareness that a cell awaited them if they surrendered. The UN had established an international tribunal for human rights crimes in former Yugoslavia that had indicted them. Moreover, they expected the Western countries would eventually lose the will to fight faster than Serbia, Vietnam-style. The apparent stalemate eventually drove the NATO countries to escalate to land invasion. A massive build-up on Serbia's borders enabled a multi-front invasion and the quick defeat and collapse of the Serb army and militias. The latter proved much more efficient at brutalizing civilians than at fighting a superior conventional army. The regular army made a decent performance but it was clearly out of its league and suffered the same fate of the North Korean military. An extremist minority fought to the bitter end out of nationalist fanatism, but the vast majority of the population accepted the inevitable surrender when the situation turned hopeless.
Serbia was overrun and the occupied areas liberated. Most nationalist leaders were killed in battle, took their life, or were captured, dragged to the international tribunal, and given harsh sentences for their crimes. A few managed to escape and took refuge in Russia or other anti-Western countries. Serbia got a harsh peace deal as retribution for its misdeeds. Hungary annexed Vojvodina. Albania got Kosovo. Croatia and Bosnia were restored in their pre-war borders and formed a confederation. Bulgaria and Albania partitioned North Macedonia with the support of Greece. A series of referendums approved these changes. Croat, Bosnian, Hungarian, Albanian, and Macedonian (mostly shifting identity to Bulgarian) refugees returned and repopulated these areas together with settlers from the annexing countries. On the other hand, the vast majority of the Serbs fled or were expelled, depending on whom you asked. In any case, they were not allowed to return and resettled into Serbia proper, now shrunk to Central Serbia. Despite the inevitable accusations of hypocrisy and double standards from Russia, anti-Western states, and far-leftists, the Western governments and public opinion quietly accepted this outcome as a way to tone down ethnic conflicts in the Balkans and a justifiable retribution for the crimes of Serbia.
The Western Balkan countries that benefited from NATO intervention developed a markedly pro-Western attitude, making an eager queue in the following years for NATO and EU membership. Serbia remained under military occupation for a while, until the Western powers decided its domestic situation had stabilized enough. A division manifested in the Serb people between a faction that repudiated nationalism and embraced the ideal of integration in the EU and the Western world and another (spearheaded by the refugees) that nurtured nationalist resentment and looked to Russia as a model and protector. As a result Serbia remained burdened by serious political instability and subject to severe swings of its foreign policy depending on which faction got on top. To a lesser degree, Montenegro too manifested the same kind of division, although its pro-Western faction was more consistently dominant.
The Korean and Yugoslav wars, and later the resurgence of the Russian threat, had a number of important political consequences. They vindicated humanitarian military interventionism as a tool to contain and suppress rogue states engaged into serious human rights abuses and regional destabilization. In the face of UN paralysis and impotence, NATO appeared as the perfect tool to enforce international stability, at least from a Western perspective. This paved the way to its enlargement and transformation into a global security organization and integrated military alliance of pro-Western countries. Much the same way, these events gave a mighty boost to the European integration process, driving the expansion of the EU into Eastern Europe and the Balkans and its evolution into a quasi-federal entity. On the other hand, it also drove the leaders of the great powers and anti-Western countries, especially Russia and China, to embrace nationalist paranoia, an increasingly hostile and confrontational attitude towards the Western world, and a ruthless determination to enforce their strategic interests and sphere of influence claims by any means necessary. The seeds of the Second Cold War were sown.
ITTL the British protectorate on Kuwait that ultimately led to its consolidation as an independent state never happened. The dynastic and diplomatic intrigue that IOTL led to the Anglo-Kuwaiti Agreement of 1899 instead caused the Ottoman annexation of Kuwait. As a result, Kuwait became an integral part of Iraq when the Ottoman Empire collapsed after WWI. This caused a significant alt-historical divergence to happen since the 1980s.
In the early 1980s, Iraq's leader Saddam Hussein decided to exploit the post-revolutionary weakness of Islamist Iran, which was busy tearing itself apart with a violent power struggle between the dominant Islamists and their Communist, social-democratic, and Islamic socialist opponents, as well as a purge of the old monarchist elites that wrecked the Iranian army. Iraq invaded Iran with the aim of seizing ethnically-Arab and oil-rich Khuzestan. The initial Iraqi offensive was a decisive success that overrun Khuzestan thanks to the additional oil revenues of the Kuwait province allowing a greater military build-up and a sensible strategy that concentrated Iraqi mechanized land forces and air power. Iran's troubles were magnified by the poor strategic choices of Iran's supreme guide Khomeini. He distrusted, neglected, and purged the conventional army, which had been built up to a considerable degree under the Shah's regime, and instead relied on poorly armed and trained if full of zeal Islamist militias for a counterattack that failed disastrously.
The Iranian forces exhausted and bled themselves white with a series of human-wave offensives that accomplished very few gains for a considerable blood price, despite the regime's determination to win a decisive victory against Iraq and export its revolution at all costs. Out of growing frustration and desperation, the Iranians tried to spread instability across the Middle East to their advantage and open a second front by sponsoring pro-Iranian Islamist, Shiite, and Palestinian militias and terrorist groups to wage a series of attacks against Iraq, Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. They also encouraged their Arab allies, Syria and Libya, to support the same groups and apply military pressure on those states by border clashes. This significantly worsened the chaotic situation of the Lebanese Civil War and increased tensions and instability across the Middle East. However, it eventually backfired badly for the pro-Iranian front. The enraged Egyptians, noticing Libya ignored the previous lesson it had got during the 1977 Libyan-Egyptian border war and relapsed into provocations, reacted by staging an all-out counteroffensive that crushed the Libyan army, overrun Libya, and ousted Qaddafi's regime. Egypt annexed Libya.
Much the same way, the situation led to an unspoken alliance of convenience between Iraq and Israel with the support of Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The two states unleashed a joint attack against Syria that expanded into a combined intervention in Lebanon against the PLO, which took Syria's side, and pro-Syria/Iran militias. Christian and Druze militias switched to support Israel and Iraq. Israel's military superiority allowed the Israeli-Iraqi coalition to win a decisive success despite Iraq being involved in a two-front war. They crushed the Syrian army and its allies, overrunning Syria and Lebanon. This led to the ultimate collapse, disintegration, and partition of the Syrian and Lebanese states alongside sectarian lines.
Iraq annexed most of Syria, including the Sunni and Kurd northern and eastern areas, as well as the Aleppo and Damascus regions. The Alawite community on the Syrian coast established its independence with Soviet support, and became a haven for the remnants of Assad's regime. The Druze areas in southeastern Syria joined and established a land connection with the Druze community in southeastern Lebanon to form an independent state. It got Israel's support since it mostly worked as a buffer state for its annexation of the Golan Heights. Iraq also annexed the Shiite and Sunni areas in northern and eastern Lebanon. The Christians in western-central Lebanon established their own state with the support of Israel that used it as another buffer entity. The Israeli gave it control of the Shiite areas in southern Lebanon they had occupied. The PLO forces and the pro-Syria/Iran militias in Lebanon were crushed. The Palestinians got split between a pro-Iraqi faction that was kept on a tight leash by Saddam, and an anti-Iraqi faction that was expelled from Lebanon and fled to Algeria.
The Iranians also attempted to stir up Kurd and Shiite opposition to the Baathist regime within Iraq, but with limited results due to the strength of the Iraqi security apparatus and their deteriorating military situation and loss of prestige. By the mid-late 1980s, Iran came to face revolutionary collapse because of its disastrous military and economic situation. The land war was locked in an unfavourable strategic stalemate that secured control of Khuzestan and defence of its pre-war territory for Iraq, while Iranian human-wave offensives accomplished little but racking a severe blood bill. The economy was collapsing due to the loss of oil revenues. The Iraqi kept air superiority and waged an effective bombing offensive against Iranian cities and economic infrastructure. Iraq was able to keep its war machine well-supplied thanks to its oil revenues, financial backing from the Persian Gulf states, and weapons purchases from the Western countries and the Soviets (although relations with the USSR cooled after the fall of Libya and Syria). The Iranian war effort steadily deteriorated due to Iran's international isolation (worsened after the fall of Syria and Libya) and its economic inability to purchase arms (Iran's lack of money prevented anything like the Iran-Contra affair from happening). Iran's last-ditch gambit of attacking tankers in the Persian Gulf backfired once the Western powers started to escort the tankers and fight off Iranian attacks.
Popular malcontent fuelled resurgent opposition to the Islamist regime. The Second Iranian Revolution overthrew the mullah and killed Khomeini. Iran was forced to sign an armistice that conceded Khuzestan to Iraq. After a power struggle between the various revolutionary factions, a coalition between the social democratics, the Islamic socialists, and the resurgent monarchists defeated and purged the Islamists and the Communists. Iran remained plagued by Islamist terrorism for a few years, but eventually suppressed it. To rebuild its economy after the loss of most of its oil revenues, Iran turned to exploitation of its gas and mineral resources. Because of their hostility to Islamism, when the Taliban threatened to take over Afghanistan, the Iranians intervened to support the Northern Alliance and helped it take over the country. Saddam spent the next few years after the end of the Iran-Iraq war consolidating his gains and enacting a ruthless purge of various opposers, including Shiite and Kurd militant groups, Syrian nationalists, Alawites, and pro-Iranian Khuzestani separatists.
In the early 1990s, a crisis developed in the Far East because of American opposition to the North Korean nuclear program. Jimmy Carter's untimely death in an accident prevented him from acting as a last-moment mediator and defusing the crisis. As a result tensions continued to grow and the US President eventually ordered a bombing of the Yongbyon reactor and other known or suspected sites of the NK nuclear program. The paranoid North Korean leaders took this as a sign a US invasion was imminent and reacted with an all-out attack on South Korea, Japan, and US bases in the region, as well as by sponsoring various terrorist attacks on Western targets across the world. Although the Western countries suffered some serious damage (especially from NK artillery bombing of Seul, use of chemical weapons on civilians, and state-sponsored terrorist attacks), the Western forces were able to contain the NK land invasion a few miles from the border, enact a massive bombing of NK military targets that crippled the invaders' war machine, and eventually staged a strategic counterattack that overrun North Korea and occupied it up to the Yalu border.
The USA was able to defuse the possible threat of a Chinese intervention by negotiating a deal that bargained Chinese acceptance of South Korean-led reunification of Korea and its continued alignment with the Western world in exchange for the guarantee no US forces would be stationed North of the 'neck' of the Korean Peninsula. Other reasons for Chinese acquiescence included China still feeling insecure of its domestic stability after the Tienanmen event and fearing Western military superiority and massive damage to its economy, the Chinese leaders being reluctant to suffer serious damage to their country because of the recklessness of the Kim Dynasty, and their awareness NK was beyond salvation after its all-out attack and war crimes. A few NK leaders were able to escape to China or bribe Russian officials to travel through Russia to anti-Western rogue states, others were captured, put on trial in an international tribunal, and received harsh sentences for their extensive list of war crimes. Russia under President Yeltsin mostly took a pro-Western neutrality stance during the crisis. The Northern portion of reunified Korea got an extensive, lenghty, and expensive reconstruction, rehabilitation, and reeducation program subsidized by a pool of several Western countries that gradually integrated it in the Western world and brought it up to speed with developed-world standards.
Serbian dictator Milosevic learnt the wrong lesson from the Korean conflict and deemed the Americans were too busy in the Far East and the Europeans too pacifist and divided to intervene. Therefore, he assumed he had a free hand in the Yugoslav Wars to redraw the political and ethnic map of post-Yugoslavia to its liking. For a good while it seemed he was right, and as a result, the Yugoslav army and Serb nationalist militias went on a brutal rampage. They attacked Croatia and invaded Bosnia, seizing the areas they claimed for Greater Serbia and expelling the Croat and Bosnian population from them. They also staged a brutal repression of the Hungarian minorities in Vojvodina and the Albanian population in Kosovo, enacting an ethnic cleasing of them and suppressing the autonomy of these regions. This ethnic cleansing took place with plenty of atrocities and caused a vast refugee wave. These successes and the apparent passivity of the Western world gave Milosevic and the Serb nationalists one heck of a victory disease and they enlarged their bloody expansionist drive. The Serb army and militias invaded North Macedonia and applied the same ethnic cleansing playbook, with the usual consequences. The Balkan mess greatly troubled the European leaders, but they were aware of their military weakness without the support of a distracted America. They tried to remedy the situation by engaging in rearmament and taking a few serious steps to add a military and foreign policy integration dimension (or 'pillar' in EU lingo) to the European integration process. The EU core countries (France, Germany, Italy, Benelux, Spain, Portugal) joined the new initiative. Britain, Ireland, Austria, and the Nordic countries (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland) opted out, but chose not to oppose the process. The international situation drove the Norwegian electorate to approve EU membership in a referendum.
By the late 1990s, America had recovered enough from its Korean War effort and Europe deemed its mlitary reforms and integration initiative advanced enough to justify taking a sterner stance towards Serbia. However, Milosevic remained gripped by victory disease and oblivious to that. He topped his expansionist rampage by picking a fight with and attacking Albania about border incidents with Kosovo Albanian insurgents. To his surprise this time the Western countries quickly reacted by sending him an ultimatum and when it went unheeded, NATO approved a mandate to restore peace and security and suppress gross human rights violations in the Balkans by any means necessary. Despite support by the Muslim world, a drive to get approval for intervention by the UN Security Council failed b/c of Russian and Chinese opposition. However, the Western countries claimed their intervention was legitimate b/c of the NATO mandate, humanitarian protection concerns about Serb atrocities, and Serb aggressions against other Balkan states. As a matter of fact, such arguments turned out convincing enough in the Western world that the intervention got solid popular support and the US Congress, UK Parliament, European Parliament, and the legislatures of the EU countries approved it w/o much difficulty.
NATO started a massive air bombing campaign that caused severe damage to the Serb military and dual-use infrastructure and industry. However, Milosevic and the other nationalist leaders bunkered down, out of stubborness, unwillingness to lose their territorial gains and grip on power, and awareness that a cell awaited them if they surrendered. The UN had established an international tribunal for human rights crimes in former Yugoslavia that had indicted them. Moreover, they expected the Western countries would eventually lose the will to fight faster than Serbia, Vietnam-style. The apparent stalemate eventually drove the NATO countries to escalate to land invasion. A massive build-up on Serbia's borders enabled a multi-front invasion and the quick defeat and collapse of the Serb army and militias. The latter proved much more efficient at brutalizing civilians than at fighting a superior conventional army. The regular army made a decent performance but it was clearly out of its league and suffered the same fate of the North Korean military. An extremist minority fought to the bitter end out of nationalist fanatism, but the vast majority of the population accepted the inevitable surrender when the situation turned hopeless.
Serbia was overrun and the occupied areas liberated. Most nationalist leaders were killed in battle, took their life, or were captured, dragged to the international tribunal, and given harsh sentences for their crimes. A few managed to escape and took refuge in Russia or other anti-Western countries. Serbia got a harsh peace deal as retribution for its misdeeds. Hungary annexed Vojvodina. Albania got Kosovo. Croatia and Bosnia were restored in their pre-war borders and formed a confederation. Bulgaria and Albania partitioned North Macedonia with the support of Greece. A series of referendums approved these changes. Croat, Bosnian, Hungarian, Albanian, and Macedonian (mostly shifting identity to Bulgarian) refugees returned and repopulated these areas together with settlers from the annexing countries. On the other hand, the vast majority of the Serbs fled or were expelled, depending on whom you asked. In any case, they were not allowed to return and resettled into Serbia proper, now shrunk to Central Serbia. Despite the inevitable accusations of hypocrisy and double standards from Russia, anti-Western states, and far-leftists, the Western governments and public opinion quietly accepted this outcome as a way to tone down ethnic conflicts in the Balkans and a justifiable retribution for the crimes of Serbia.
The Western Balkan countries that benefited from NATO intervention developed a markedly pro-Western attitude, making an eager queue in the following years for NATO and EU membership. Serbia remained under military occupation for a while, until the Western powers decided its domestic situation had stabilized enough. A division manifested in the Serb people between a faction that repudiated nationalism and embraced the ideal of integration in the EU and the Western world and another (spearheaded by the refugees) that nurtured nationalist resentment and looked to Russia as a model and protector. As a result Serbia remained burdened by serious political instability and subject to severe swings of its foreign policy depending on which faction got on top. To a lesser degree, Montenegro too manifested the same kind of division, although its pro-Western faction was more consistently dominant.
The Korean and Yugoslav wars, and later the resurgence of the Russian threat, had a number of important political consequences. They vindicated humanitarian military interventionism as a tool to contain and suppress rogue states engaged into serious human rights abuses and regional destabilization. In the face of UN paralysis and impotence, NATO appeared as the perfect tool to enforce international stability, at least from a Western perspective. This paved the way to its enlargement and transformation into a global security organization and integrated military alliance of pro-Western countries. Much the same way, these events gave a mighty boost to the European integration process, driving the expansion of the EU into Eastern Europe and the Balkans and its evolution into a quasi-federal entity. On the other hand, it also drove the leaders of the great powers and anti-Western countries, especially Russia and China, to embrace nationalist paranoia, an increasingly hostile and confrontational attitude towards the Western world, and a ruthless determination to enforce their strategic interests and sphere of influence claims by any means necessary. The seeds of the Second Cold War were sown.
