DAYTON, Ohio—US President Donald Trump could learn a lot about how to best end Russia’s murderous war on Ukraine, now into its fourth year, from the US experience here thirty years ago in negotiating what became known as the Dayton Peace Accords.
If Trump wants to stop Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war, and he has made that an administration priority, then he should reflect on what it took to finally stop Serbian President Slobodan Milošević in 1995—after nearly four years of killing and more than 100,000 dead, including the massacre at Srebrenica, Europe’s worst genocide since the Holocaust.
A deal required relentless US diplomatic engagement backed by a demonstrated military threat and carried out alongside unified European allies. It also took twenty-one days of intensive negotiations in Dayton—not involving then US President Bill Clinton until the end—while all parties were cloistered from media and outside influences at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
Marking the Dayton anniversary, Ohio Congressman Mike Turner brought the NATO Parliamentary Assembly here last week, gathering delegates from the thirty-two allies as well as from partner countries. They joined leaders from the Western Balkans, assorted experts, and even the Sarajevo Philharmonic, which performed for participants in a giant hangar stocked with presidential aircraft in the National Museum of the US Air Force.
Though I came to commemorate history, I left having interrogated its architects. My aim was to gain clues that might help the Trump administration in its still-fruitless quest for an end to Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Voice of Ukraine 