Exactly a week after the 10th anniversary of the start of the Kosovo air campaign and on the eve of NATO’s own 60th birthday, there could be few more appropriate moments to reflect on the past, present and the future of the Atlantic Alliance.

This week 10 years ago [in 1999], the NATO nations took the momentous step of attacking a sovereign nation state without a UN Security Council resolution. The Alliance of 19 nations, born in the Cold War and originally designed to stop Stalin’s westward push, was faced with an appalling tragedy unfolding in the heart of Europe. Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was determined to drive out – using mass murder, rape, terror and crude, vicious violence – the Albanian majority from the province of Kosovo.

The outraged world demanded action and, when diplomacy failed to stop the horrors, only NATO could prevent a huge humanitarian disaster. Those of us in power at that time had no doubts about what had to be done. All of us had doubts as to whether it would work.

But it did. We expressed our objectives in such simple terms it has earned me a place in the Oxford Book of Political Quotations : “Serbs out, NATO in, refugees home.” It took 78 days of air bombing and intensive diplomatic pressure but the brutal ethnic cleansing was stopped and then reversed.

NATO after the Cold War

And so, after its involvement in Bosnia in 1995, NATO again used its firepower to achieve an end to hideous violence and establish a political settlement in the Balkans. These were defining moments not just for us politicians of the time – the generation of Vietnam protesters – but for a defense alliance which had seemed out of time when the Berlin Wall was torn down and the old adversary, the mighty Soviet Union, packed its bags and stole away.

NATO had proved its new usefulness and now, today, its organization and its troops are engaged far beyond the old boundaries wherever there is a threat to its members’ interests.

I will always remember my visit, on the first anniversary of Operation Allied Force, to the village of Poklec in Kosovo. In that small village a year before, Serb troops and paramilitaries had rounded up a crowd of villagers, including children, into one house, had thrown in grenades, fired machine-guns and then set it alight. They devastated Poklec and the neighboring village.

OUTLINE

• NATO after the Cold War
• The Alliance still plays an essential role
• A transformed Alliance

Lord Robertson of Port Ellen has been the United Kingdom’s Secretary of State for Defence (1997-1999) and Secretary General of NATO (1999-2003). He is President of the Atlantic Council of the UK. The following text is a speech given at the 60th anniversary celebration of the Treaty of Washington, in London on 31st March 2009.