Richard Holbrooke

Europe and the United States were reluctant to get involved in the Balkans even while rumors of war reached them. Europe did not believe that the break-up of Yugoslavia was a real threat to stability in the region, while the United States was reluctant to get involved in what it viewed as a messy civil war. In addition, the United States was less interested in helping communist Yugoslavia once the Cold War—and the threat of Soviet-style communism—had ended.

Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for European and Canadian affairs from 1994 to 1996 and the chief architect for the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords, argued as early as 1992 that the United States should get more involved in the conflict in Bosnia. In the following excerpt from his book To End a War, Holbrooke describes the chaos he...