ABSTRACT
On 11 September 2001, NATO officials in Brussels were discussing how to continue their third Balkans intervention. Compared to earlier NATO campaigns in Bosnia and Kosovo, this Macedonia deployment was a low-key affair, with some 4,ooo British-led troops to supervise a disarmament process agreed to by Albanian rebels. But the previous wars in Kosovo, Bosnia and Croatia-demonstrating the bottomless possibilities of ethnic brutality - had cast a long shadow. The threat of war in Macedonia raised many familiar dilemmas; these involved the morality and wisdom of military intervention in other peoples' civil wars, the prospects and limits of nation-building in ethnically fractured societies, the appropriate balance of transatlantic roles and the operational coherence of an extended Western alliance.
