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# Exiting the Balkan Thicket 

December 2001 

By [Gary Dempsey](https://www.cato.org/people/gary-dempsey) 

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##### About the Book 

Since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, American policymakers have been forced to reassess their priorities and consider longer-term and more flexible strategies for meeting unexpected contingencies in the post-Cold War world. Currently, the United States is the only competent Western power at the most intense and technologically sophisticated end of military operations and the expected hand-holder of its European allies at the most basic peacekeeping end. *Exiting the Balkan Thicket* reviews the West’s experiences in Bosnia and Kosovo and provides recommendations on how the United States can move beyond the status quo and forge a better balanced and more forward-looking security relationship with its European allies.

Featuring chapters by Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute; David Chandler, research fellow with the Policy Research Institute at Leeds Metropolitan University; Robert M. Hayden, director of the Center for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pittsburgh; John C. Hulsman, senior European analyst at the Heritage Foundation; E. Wayne Merry, senior fellow at the Lester B. Pearson Canadian International Peacekeeping Training Center; Stephen Schwartz, author of Kosovo: Background to a War; and Raju G. C. Thomas, Allis Chalmers Professor of International Affairs at Marquette University.

##### About the Editor 

Gary T. Dempsey is a former foreign policy analyst at the Cato Institute, with an emphasis on Southeast European affairs and the limits of peacekeeping and nation building. He is also the author of *Fool’s Errands: America’s Recent Encounters with Nation Building*.