The Sit Room: In the Theater of War and Peace

Scheffer (All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals), professor of law at Northwestern University and former American ambassador-at-large for war crimes, offers an insider’s detailed account of the “three-year conversation” that took place in the White House situation room as policy makers tried to grapple with the early-1990s Balkans War. For Scheffer, deliberations in the “sit room” were characterized both by courageous, innovative thinking—in particular that of Scheffer’s boss at the time, Madeleine Albright, U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations—and by “procrastination, fear of the unknown, and a futile search for alternatives to bold action.” Participants in these discussions found themselves negotiating ever-changing daily developments and a dizzying array of stakeholders, ultimately “muddling through” to secure what Scheffer calls a “fragile peace.” This account will doubtless be useful to scholars of U.S. foreign policy and the policy-making process, but may prove less than engaging for the general reader, as it often reads like a sequence of notes—meeting after meeting, document after document—rather than a unified narrative with an identifiable arc. As such, policy scholars will be rewarded by the level of detail and the sharp character sketches of key figures, but other readers may find themselves losing the forest for the trees. [em](Dec.) [/em]