President Clinton should take Belgrade’s recent interest in the cease-fire plan produced by the foreign ministers of the G-8 — the world’s economic powerhouses, plus Russia — as a sincere gesture toward peace. The president, with NATO’s support, could do that by setting measures for the first two points of the G-8 agreement.

Those two conditions are clear-cut: immediate end to the violence and repression in Kosovo, and withdrawal from Kosovo of military, police and paramilitary forces. Verifying these will take more than spy plane flyovers and more than information relayed by the Kosovo Liberation Army. Russia, which gave the agreement life when it signed on last month, could again prove useful in establishing a method to decide when the conditions had been met.

The role for Congress is equally important. Though President Slobodan Milosevic has so far made an exception to the agreement in the case of the United States participating as a peacekeeper, there is good reason to believe that U.S. troops could play that role. Congress can either reach some conclusion on this question or it can debate it again in a panic when such an occurrence is imminent.

Meeting the first two requirements doesn’t bring peace, of course, merely a standoff. No peace is possible without also establishing some level of self-government for Kosovo, even while respecting the sovereignty of Yugoslavia. But there is hope in this too. After 70 days of being bombed, President Milosevic could well see a formal agreement between his government and NATO as, first, international recognition of his authority to continue to lead and, second, a mandate to rebuild the republic under his own terms. For a leader who was increasingly unpopular with his own people before the bombs started to fall, this is not a bad deal.

Whether any of this comes to pass, however, depends on NATO finding an acceptable to way to measure its victory. G-8 has provided the ruler.