For over four years, Washington responded to 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 suddenly 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 decisionmaking process and written by a former National Security Council aide—examines how the policy to end the war took shape. Getting to Dayton is a powerful case study of how determined individuals can exploit their positions to change U.S. government policy 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 at the Brookings Institution. From 1995 to 1996 he served on the National Security Council staff as Director for European Affairs, where he was responsible for coordinating U.S. policy for Bosnia. His most recent publications include The United States and Europe in the Global Arena (1998) and Bosnia After SFOR: Options for Continued U.S. Engagement (1997). He is co-author of Winning Ugly: NATO's War to Save Kosovo, which will be published in 2000.

This book is the first to provide a comprehensive and systematic analysis of the foreign policy of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a post-conflict country with an active agency in international affairs. Bridging academic and policy debates, the book summarizes and further examines the first twenty-five years of BiH’s foreign policy following the country’s independence from Yugoslavia in 1992. Topics covered include conflict and post-conflict periods, Euro-Atlantic integration, political affairs on both local and regional levels, integration with a variety of international organizations and actors, neighboring states, bilateral relations with relevant other states including the United States, Russia, selected EU countries, and Turkey, as well as BiH’s diaspora. The book highlights that despite their apparent weakness, post-conflict states have agency to carry out foreign policy goals and engage with the international sphere, including in geopolitics, and thus provides a novel insight into weak states and their role in international politics.

This book examines the historical, cultural and political dimensions of the crisis in Bosnia and the international efforts to resolve it. It provides a detailed analysis of international proposals to end the fighting, from the Vance-Owen plan to the Dayton Accord, with special attention to the national and international politics that shaped them. It analyzes the motivations and actions of the warring parties, neighbouring states and international actors including the United States, the United Nations, the European powers, and others involved in the war and the diplomacy surrounding it. With guides to sources and documentation, abundant tabular data and over 30 maps, this should be a definitive volume on the most vexing conflict of the post-Soviet period.

The intricate diplomacy that led to the peace agreement in Bosnia, known as the Dayton Accords, is here revealed in unprecedented detail. Based on thousands of still-classified government documents and dozens of interviews with key participants, this is a comprehensive story of high-level diplomacy, told from the inside.