The only irreversible losers, of course, are the ethnic Albanian victims in Kosovo, whose numbers are liable to rise into tens of thousands as allied peacekeepers make grisly discoveries. Probably equally irreversible, too, is the downfall of Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav leader. As the extent of Serbia's devastation and international isolation sinks in, the defeat seems bound to fuel revolt against the only current head of state who is an indicted war criminal. Mr. Milosevic, for all his proven ruthlessness against ethnic Albanians, has no latitude for repression against Serbs of the sort that has allowed Saddam Hussein to survive defeat in Iraq.
Tests lie ahead for Western leaders' budgets and, even more, their political imagination.
In other words, Europe may now be free of any major military threat for at least two decades. Russia, too, has managed to occupy a place that keeps it as least a titular partner of the West largely because of diplomatic engineering by the United States and Germany, where the new coalition government was having its first war and its first turn at the presidency of the European Union. The orphan of defeat is Mr. Milosevic after a combat in which his own miscalculations ultimately played to the overwhelming strength of Western political unity and military skills. This reflex contained some important lessons. Trans-Atlantic splits were fatal.