Kosovo Crossing: The Reality of American Intervention in the Balkans - Softcover

David Fromkin's instant analysis arrived in bookshelves less than two months after the completion of NATO's 11-week air campaign against the Serbian government led by Slobodan Milosevic. As such, it deals much more with the historical factors that led to Operation Allied Forces than with the military action itself. In addition to providing a very broad overview to about three millennia of Balkan history, Fromkin tracks the growth of the United States as a world power in the 20th century and its mixed record of interventionism, then shows how those two tracks collided in the aftermath of the First World War, and again shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite regimes in the late 1980s. "The positions taken by President Clinton in the 1990s," Fromkin argues, "are those staked out for the United States by President Wilson eighty years ago." He goes on to assert that those positions, which require the United States to support Eastern European "self-determination" in principle but oppose actual nationalist movements that it fears would undermine the region's political stability, have not--and likely never will--succeed in the long run. "Serbia's apparent surrender in June 1999 was a triumph for the United States. But it was the easy part," Fromkin concludes. But ending the war is not the same thing as bringing about peace. "It may be a long time, if ever, before we are justified in breaking open the champagne." --Ron Hogan

David Fromkin is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University and is the author of numerous books, including the bestselling history of the Middle East, A Peace to End All Peace; In the Time of the Americans; and The Way of the World. A frequent contributor to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, and other publications, he lives in New York City and Boston.