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

Fromkin, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0684869535 ISBN 13: 9780684869537

Publisher: Free Press, 2002

Synopsis

In Kosovo Crossing, bestselling historian David Fromkin examines the clash between American ideals and Balkan realities on the battlefields of Kosovo. Leading NATO into the first war of its fifty-year existence, America sought to carve out a new role both for the alliance and for itself by establishing a world order. Yet like the other crises of the late twentieth century -- in Iraq, Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti, and Rwanda -- this war, in a land long plagued by deadly conflict, revealed the limits of America's power to reshape the world. Brilliantly weaving military, political, and historical analysis, Fromkin forges a new understanding of the paths that American leaders must explore to advance American values abroad.

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Review

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

About the Author

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Free Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0684869535
• ISBN 13: 9780684869537
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224