The Dayton Peace Agreement stopped the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) 30 years ago, a war in which more than 100.000 people were killed, more than a million displaced, and in which the first genocide in Europe after the Second World War was committed.
The Dayton Agreement was signed by the actors who were also fighting in BiH, but the key signature was that of Bill Clinton, the then-President of the United States (U.S.).
Without the engagement of the Clinton administration, which, by moving away from the isolationist approach of the previous U.S. president George H.W. Bush, reached a solution to the war in BiH, the question is how this bloody conflict would have ended.
The U.S. forced the Bosnian Serbs to the negotiating table with bombs
The role of the U.S. was crucial because behind its words stood the arsenal of the world’s greatest power, which had just emerged from a decades-long Cold War as the winner.
Already in February 1994, U.S. aviation, with air support to United Nations (UN) troops in BiH, actively entered this conflict, and the culmination came in the following months, when precise strikes on the forces of the Bosnian Serbs accomplished more than the European Community, which had been primarily entrusted with resolving the wars in the former Yugoslavia, had done in the previous two years.
It was precisely these actions, which also included the bombing of the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) forces on the hills above Sarajevo, that forced the then leadership of RS, most of whom today are serving sentences for war crimes, to sit at the negotiating table, culminating in the Dayton negotiations.
Dayton is the only U.S. foreign policy project that fulfilled and outlived expectations
However, one thing that is often overlooked in the wider engagement of the U.S. in the war in BiH is that the Dayton Peace Agreement is its greatest foreign policy success since the end of the Second World War.
When assessing the success and implementation of the Dayton Peace Agreement, a wrong assessment is often made, highlighting that BiH is not a fully functional state.
While that assessment is correct, and BiH does have problems with blockades within the political system established by the Dayton Peace Agreement, that was not the point of this document.
The Dayton Agreement was supposed to end the conflict, and in that it succeeded, because since 1995, there has been no war in BiH. Even 30 years later, there is still no conflict in BiH, at least not armed conflict, which the Dayton Agreement halted.
When we place that in the context of other U.S. projects since 1945, it is difficult to find another part of the world in which the U.S. achieved such success.
Although the current president of the U.S., Donald Trump, often points out all the wars he has “stopped,” the truth is that the U.S. has rarely played such an active role as it did in 1995 in stopping the war in BiH, and that this has been maintained even after three decades.
Their foreign policy projects, such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, and others, ended in failure. Whether these were military or “peaceful” defeats, U.S. foreign policy projects usually collapsed at the outset or did not withstand the test of time.
In BiH, on the other hand, they managed to gather the warring sides at one table, force them to sign a peace, and to maintain it for the next 30 years, and likely more.
Of course, some peace agreements, such as those between Armenia and Azerbaijan, India and Pakistan, and Thailand and Cambodia, still have time to show the same level of success as Dayton, but time will answer that.
For now, in 2025, on the 30th anniversary of the Dayton Peace Agreement, it must be said that this document has withstood the test of time, fulfilled what was expected of it, and even outlived some of the expectations, Klix.ba writes.
