This book examines how and why the United States, Britain, France, and Germany failed to cope with the collapse of Yugoslavia and its descent into a savage civil war. This failure also shattered long-cherished notions about how the UN, NATO, and the European Community would deal with such a crisis and prompted a drastic reassessment of their roles. Gow demonstrates that the lack of timing, bad judgment, poor cohesion, and absence of political will over the use of force were the fundamental reasons for this failure.