The alliance was established initially as a defensive mechanism, and that remains its culture. Getting the alliance to take pre-emptive actions or even make a decision to posture forces before a major event is, I think, very unlikely. Last week, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright issued a thinly veiled warning to Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic about the safety of Montenegro, his independence-minded junior partner in the Yugoslav rump state. Albright denied reports that she offered specific security guarantees to Djukanovic in a meeting last week, although the Clinton administration has provided financial assistance to Montenegro in the past.
Nothing is off the table.
NATO will follow through on a naval exercise with Croatia off the Montenegro coast later this month involving about 300 U.S. Marines, which officials said had been in the planning stages before the election was called in Yugoslavia. But military planners have been careful not to rely too heavily on previous campaigns in the Balkans to prepare for hypothetical actions in Montenegro. There are other differences as well. In the war on Yugoslavia, NATO struggled to reach a consensus on how to prosecute the battle. Ultimately, the allies ruled out ground forces and could agree only on a phased air campaign of escalation that officials hoped would break Milosevic's will to hang onto Kosovo.