It also had the effect of strengthening Milosevic's claim to be the protector of Serbian national interests, in Kosovo and elsewhere, and helped his election as president of Serbia by popular referendum in December 1989. So at the same time as US policy still formally favoured the continuing integrity of Yugoslavia, Washington's actions served to hasten the end of the country. When it first got involved in the Yugoslav crisis back in 1989 the West became involved in a process whose final outcome was highly uncertain, since intervention always tends to have unintended consequences. The one thing that was entirely predictable, however, was that Western involvement would make things worse rather than better. Yugoslavia is the example par excellence of the destructive impact of foreign interference, and the way in which outside intervention creates a self-perpetuating dynamic towards more of the same.
Intervention generates greater instability and conflict, which in turn invites more intervention.
In Yugoslavia a symbiotic relationship between external intervention and internal conflict has been the pattern of the past 10 years. The image of the Western powers as firefighters, dousing fires started by local Serbian arsonists, is misleading. In Yugoslavia, the supposed firefighters are in fact the arsonists. The collapse of communism across the former Soviet bloc had led to the demise of centralised control and competing claims for self-determination from the republics within the shaky federation. Once the old system was called into question the process of fragmentation acquired a momentum of its own.