For over four years, Washington responded to the war in Bosnia by handing the problem to the Europeans to resolve and substituting high-minded rhetoric for concerted action. Then, in the summer of 1995, the Clinton administration shifted course, deciding to assert the leadership that would prove necessary to end the war in Bosnia. This book - based on numerous interviews with key participants in the decision-making process and written by a former National Security Council aide - examines how the policy to end the war took shape. The case study seeks to demonstrate how determined individuals can exploit their positions to change US government policy issues on crucial issues. In so doing, Daalder not only explains how Washington launched the diplomacy that culminated at Dayton, but also why the subsequent peace proved to be difficult to establish.
Ivo H. Daalder is a senior fellow in Foreign Policy Studies and the Sydney Stein Jr. Chair in International Security at the Brookings Institution. He is the coauthor, with James M. Lindsay, of America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy (Brookings, 2003) and the coauthor of Winning Ugly: NATO's War to Save Kosovo (Brookings, 2001), written with Michael E. O'Hanlon.
"Ivo Daalder has illuminated a crucial part of the history of this decade --how after three years of timidity, confusion, and discord over Bosnia, the Clinton administration finally broke away from its perceived domestic political constraints in the summer of 1995 and began the determined diplomatic and military effort that ultimately led to the Dayton Accords. He has recreated the evolution of policy thinking and the bureaucratic to-ings and fro-ings with insight, clarity, and directness. His book is an important contribution to an understanding of recent American foreign policy." --Morton Abramowitz, Former president, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
"Ivo Daalder has illuminated a crucial part of the history of this decade -how after three years of timidity, confusion, and discord over Bosnia, the Clinton administration finally broke away from its perceived domestic political constraints in the summer of 1995 and began the determined diplomatic and military effort that ultimately led to the Dayton Accords. He has recreated the evolution of policy thinking and the bureaucratic to-ings and fro-ings with insight, clarity, and directness. His book is an important contribution to an understanding of recent American foreign policy." -Morton Abramowitz, Former president, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
