Warren Bass

Somehow the Americans went from claiming they did not have a dog in the Bosnia fight to redrawing the map of the Balkans over Scotch with the ruthless Slobodan Milosevi,c. But the Dayton Accord that ended Bosnia's war has been oversold. It is the product not of Wilsonian idealism but of a reluctant realpolitik. Had Washington intervened in 1993, as Bill Clinton promised to, 100,000 lives could have been saved. Dayton has strengthened the two nastiest dictators in the region, Serbia's Milosevi,c and Croatia's Franjo Tudjman, and edged toward accepting the de facto partition of Bosnia. The violence in Kosovo today is a reminder of the costs of appeasing aggressors.