"America Between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11" by Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier

I read several chapters of the book America Between the Wars, a history of United States foreign policy from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 2001. The premise of the book is that 9/11 didn't really "change everything", but rather that the attacks that day finally focused American attention--not just the public, but the governing elite--on new realities which had been developing since the fall of Communism.

It is an interesting and worthwhile thesis, one which places the Balkan wars of the 1990s into a larger context. In the authors' opinion (which I share), the battle between internationalist/interventionists on one side and neo-isolationist/non-interventionists on the other defined this era, and the current debates over American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan must be viewed in the context of continuing the struggle from the immediate post-Cold War period.

The authors essentially view events strictly in that framework, so the Dayton agreement is considered a "success" since the war was ended through American leadership, and improved the Clinton administration's standing globally and domestically. Little to nothing is said about Bosnia itself. Kosova gets rather more attention, since the war was, after all, Clinton's from the get-go, and the authors spend more time examining some of the ambiguities of the entire operation.

Time being in short supply for me lately, I did not finish the book, but I was pleased to see that, at the very least, the authors connected the dots between American involvement in the Balkans in the 1990s and current debates over humanitarian intervention, multilateral versus unilateral international actions, the limits of state sovereignty, and so forth.