The Third Way was their love child – a concept at once so perfectly inclusive

The Third Way was their love child – a concept at once so perfectly inclusive, economically neutral and innocently vacuous that to oppose it seemed to be an act of bloody-mindedness. My complaint against the Third Way is that it fudged the inevitability of making stark choices War is the starkest choice of all Mr Blair realises that Mr Clinton does not. As a result, we have a disquieting loss of resolve at the heart of Nato. The special relationship between Britain and America will not survive a shabby end to the intervention in Kosovo. Neither, in its present form, will Nato.In tragic circumstances, Mr Blair has been confronted by the shortcomings of his political blood brother. New Labour has long had a blind spot about Clinton’s moral vacuum.

They considered Monica Lewinsky and the rest to be the minor lapses of a President who was otherwise in great ethical shape. In truth, they betokened a deeper weakness – his talent for vacillation and relativism, which has returned to haunt us all in the conflict with Serbia.Unlike Mr Blair, Clinton cannot see a line without fudging it. He wanted a war without risk, intervention without setting American foot in the war zone, compassion without cost. The more fervent Clinton’s verbal commitment to help, the less American resolve has held. When Hillary told the refugees that she felt their pain, I knew we really were in trouble.America aimed to win the war by fluke. When this hope foundered as Milosevic defied the bombs, Clinton ditched his original goal and began to seek an exit from war, using the Russians as brokers. You may remember the scene near the end of Schindler’s List when the Germans have fled the camp and the refugees, still too numb from their ordeal to feel the joy of liberation, are lying in a field Along comes a uniformed figure on horseback.

“You have been liberated by the Red Army,” says the Soviet officer. Such is the narrative power of Spielberg’s film and his cinematography that the terrible bathos of this moment goes largely unremarked by audiences.Liberation by the Russians has always been a mixed blessing, as those who experienced it in eastern Germany and Poland at the end of the Second World War still recall. The Kosovars will not return to a part of their territory under Russian protection. That means partitioning, or, as the Russians now put it, with nostalgia for their post-1945 role in Germany, “sectorisation”. There is even talk of a force without a US component, a triumph for Milosevic.The closing lines of Robert Southey’s poem, “The Battle of Blenheim”, spring to mind, In them, a small boy quizzes his grandfather over the fate of the doomed 600 cavalrymen: “What good came of it at last?” quoth little Peterkin, “Ah, that I cannot tell,” said he, “But t’was a famous victory.”In Kosovo, we are watching the Alliance being destroyed by its creators, the Americans. Some will welcome this as freedom from Washington’s hegemony in world affairs. Others see it as the great opportunity for Europe to develop a common military strategy Perhaps we have no other choice.

But let us not deceive ourselves that this is going to happen easily, quickly or reliably. The continent that cannot agree on how to reform a Common Agricultural Policy lacks the common will and shared resolve, let alone the experience, to uphold a peaceful order through thick and thin. At the new millennium, we are in a far more exposed and volatile position in Europe than we have yet begun to comprehend.Victory will be announced in the Balkans, whatever the outcome The Democrats have an election to fight in 18 months’ time. The American people will be told that they did their best to help some beleaguered people far away But there is no such thing as a victimless military failure Mr Blair feels this keenly, as any good European must. Unless Washington can be persuaded that the shame of a bad compromise will return to haunt it, “ethnic cleansing” will again have been rewarded, and evil gone unpunished That would be a famous victory, all right No good can come of it..

ISRAEL’S SHIFT of power from the Likud to Labour’s successor, One Israel, happened because of a protest vote against Benjamin Netanyahu, mainly due to his personality and style, rather than because of love of Ehud Barak. Barak’s 12 per cent advantage over Netanyahu is impressive and significant, but a mere 6 per cent of voters upset the even balance of 1996 between Netanyahu and Shimon Peres. The 6 per cent consisted of disappointed Likud voters, whose party Netanyahu shredded to bits, new immigrants who hold Netanyahu responsible for the difficult economic situation and new voters avenging the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. There was a great deal of spontaneity and symbolism in the convergence of tens of thousands of people on the square where Rabin was assassinated, when the results were announced, followed by Barak’s victory address, facing the statue in commemoration of the late Prime Minister.