Stephen Sestanovich
If, as he promises, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump can settle Russia’s war against Ukraine, he will surely boast that he accomplished something no one else has been able to do in over 100 years—end a major war on the European continent by negotiation. And he’ll be right—well, almost right. The U.S. diplomats who settled the Balkan wars of the 1990s will be his only rivals. Even so, Trump needs to understand their success, for it was achieved by overcoming instincts and preferences very much like his own. He ought to know that policymakers in President Bill Clinton’s administration were tempted to be Trump—and succeeded only because they weren’t.
If Trump can get an eager assistant to sketch the Balkan wars for him in a few quick strokes, he will instantly see the parallels to today’s war in Ukraine. The fighting in the 1990s erupted after the slow collapse of Yugoslav communism, which had long suppressed desires for independence among the many ethnic groups it ruled. The dictator who led the largest state after the breakup—Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia—had made resentful nationalism the basis of his rule, and adjacent states like Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, both with large Serb minorities, felt the pressure immediately. Though the resulting bloodshed took on genocidal proportions, Western governments for years proved unable to stop it. When the warring parties finally agreed to attend a peace conference in Dayton, Ohio, in late 1995, many senior U.S. officials—even Richard Holbrooke, who led the U.S. team—expected the effort to fail.
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