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.
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.
Trump’s assistant will enjoy describing these talks, since the story seems to be a near-perfect confirmation of the president-elect’s own instincts about the Russia-Ukraine conflict. First was the role played by Milosevic himself, an obvious stand-in for Russian President Vladimir Putin. American negotiators had gotten to know him well and considered him the most decisive of the major figures at Dayton. Milosevic ceaselessly berated his hosts for, as he saw it, not understanding what the war was all about. (Bosnia, he believed, was—as Putin always says of Ukraine—not a real country.) Despite the abuse, however, Holbrooke and his colleagues found the Serb strongman oddly charming—the tough guy who, they hoped, might be able to call the conflict off.
Trump will also have no trouble finding similarities between other players at Dayton and the Ukrainian leaders he confronts today. He’ll be told that the Bosnian Muslim participants were stubborn but divided, unsure of their political future, and unable to articulate peace terms they could live with. What U.S. policymakers saw of the Bosnians 30 years ago—that they were exhausted by their country’s ordeal—will add to Trump’s confidence in dealing with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky now. In accepting the 1995 agreement, the leader of the Bosnian independence movement complained (just as Zelensky will) that it was “not a just peace.” But, he admitted, “My people need peace.”
The European negotiators at Dayton will round out what Trump learns of the talks. He’ll conclude that they were ineffectual handwringers, contributing little to the outcome but complaining every step of the way (including about the ghastly food and accommodations). Ignoring European governments—except perhaps when the time comes to round them up for a signing ceremony and to tell them the problem is now their responsibility—will seem just as appropriate today as it was in the 1990s.
All these elements will reinforce Trump’s convictions about how to settle what he calls the “ridiculous” war in Ukraine. But if he acts on this version of the story, he’ll be missing the ingredients that actually made peace possible at Dayton. And he’ll be setting himself up for failure.
The Milosevic-Putin comparison, in particular, shows how much Trump could benefit from a better understanding of how the Bosnian War ended. Serbia’s president was a savvy and sophisticated bully, but he agreed to the deal the United States hammered out at Dayton because he saw that endless fighting had become unsustainably expensive; he needed the sanctions relief that only peace could provide. For Milosevic, genocidal nationalism had proved to be a lousy strategy, a realization that led him—more than once—to rescue the negotiations by making significant concessions.
Even as he brags that Russian troops in eastern Ukraine have the “strategic initiative,” Putin probably hopes that the United States will help him end the war on favorable terms. Trump’s challenge is to puncture the strongman bravado. He has to convince Putin to adopt Milosevic’s realism about the future of the conflict—that there are no further wins for him in it. The Russian leader needs to fear that, after a year of making slow but steady territorial gains at high but (so far) manageable cost, he risks a reversal in the year ahead: steady territorial losses and steadily increasing costs. Putin has yet to publicly admit that he is fighting a “ridiculous” war. To be a successful peacemaker, Trump will have to show him that he is.
If he understands how peace really came to Bosnia in 1995, Trump will also have a better chance of maneuvering the Ukrainians toward an agreement in 2025. Like the Croatian and Bosnian Muslim leaders at Dayton, Zelensky does worry about the demoralization and exhaustion of his people. He has to worry about any agreement that looks like a discrediting defeat and makes it harder for Ukraine to hold together in the aftermath of war.
Trump should ask his assistant how such worries were overcome 30 years ago. The twofold answer will help him in dealing with Ukraine’s leaders today. First, U.S. negotiators got the Croatians and Bosnian Muslims to support a deal not just by exploiting their exhaustion but even more by helping them to improve their positions on the ground in the run-up to the Dayton talks. Second, Holbrooke and his team showed them that peace would be followed by greater security cooperation with the United States. At every stage of the war, Washington had been nervous about expanding its military role in the fighting, just as President Joe Biden’s administration has been for the past three years. But the introduction of NATO peacekeepers when the war was over demonstrated to all that U.S. interest in the Balkans would not subside.
Trump has reportedly discussed stationing a European peacekeeping force in Ukraine as part of a peace deal, so he may know how much the NATO deployment contributed to success at Dayton. But he ought to be told that European troops had been in Bosnia well before Dayton and had accomplished absolutely nothing on their own: They were passive and embarrassingly ineffectual bystanders to atrocities. Only NATO’s involvement—with a U.S. commander to show American commitment—convinced the warring parties that the Dayton deal would hold.
Everything we know of Trump’s foreign-policy priorities suggests that he will be extremely wary of being bogged down in the security arrangements that follow the war in Ukraine. Yet Bosnia actually teaches a different lesson, one that ought to reassure him. By involving itself enough to resolve a major conflict, the United States enhanced its power and international standing. What had lessened U.S. influence was standing aloof. After Dayton, friendly and less-friendly governments alike viewed Washington’s success as a symbol of its renewed effectiveness. European leaders who had, in the aftermath of the Cold War, worried about U.S. decline began calling it a “hyperpower.” (The term was not entirely a compliment) “America is back,” they marveled.
If the president-elect’s assistant can hold his attention a little longer, there are two more facts about the United States’ success in Bosnia that should be on Trump’s mind as he tries to end Russia’s war in Ukraine. The first is that while their diplomacy at Dayton dazzled the world, U.S. policymakers faced a rerun of the conflict just three years later. This time, Milosevic’s target was a different ethnic minority of the late Yugoslavia, the Kosovar Albanians. Otherwise, there was little change: similar atrocities, with fears of worse; similar imperial rhetoric; and the same need to convince Milosevic that he wouldn’t be able to win a second round. (To drive that point home, an even greater U.S. military role was needed.)
Nothing will tarnish Trump’s peacemaking in Ukraine more than having Putin, like Milosevic, do the same thing again three years from now. The lesson? Trump needs an even better, more solid deal than the one that reached at Dayton, one that is not a mere breather between conflicts. The president-elect has, of course, already ruled out one idea—bringing Ukraine into NATO—that could offer a credible security guarantee. But if he doesn’t want war to break out again on his watch, he will have to come up with other, comparably credible ways of protecting Ukraine or ensuring that it can protect itself.
A final Bosnia lesson touches on this same point: What kind of Ukraine will we see once the war is over? After Dayton, U.S. diplomats eventually came to regret the enfeebled state in which they had left Bosnia: a country too divided for its government to work, too poor to draw back those who had fled, too isolated from the rest of booming Europe. Holbrooke and his colleagues wondered if a better deal would have been possible if there had been less pressure for a quick agreement.
Similar worries will hang over any talks that Trump convenes when he takes office. All the interested parties—Ukrainians, Russians, Europeans, and Americans—will want to know whether Ukraine will sustain the unity that war has given it, whether it will draw back the millions of refugees needed for the reconstruction work that lies ahead, whether it will be left alone or find a place in Europe, and whether it will feel defeated or reborn. Trump should know that the success of his diplomacy will depend on whether he can answer these questions.
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