So before the air war against Serbia began, Javier Solana, the bubbly Spaniard whom Mr Robertson will replace, was authorised to turn the key for bombing.
While the book also touches on the crises in Haiti and Somalia, and crams the air war against Serbia over Kosovo into three of its 44 chapters, it is essentially about American policy towards Bosnia.
After the talks broke down and NATO launched its air campaign against Serbia that resulted in Kosovo becoming a UN protectorate, Mr Rugova reasserted his authority within the province and officially became president in 2002.
In Kosovo, where Americans and Europeans co-operated closely and successfully, both diplomatically and militarily, the Europeans were plain embarrassed at how little they could contribute to the air campaign against Serbia and just how few troops they could muster quickly enough to police the cease-fire.
ECONOMIST: More useful work for Europeans. But will they do it right?
And business would presumably mean air attacks on targets throughout Serbia and its ally Montenegro, aimed initially at suppressing air-defences and then at paralysing the communications and logistics of Yugoslavia's forces.
Instead, the Clintonites are hoping that air power will break Serbia's defiance, and they are prepared to bomb for weeks in order to be proved right.
Three months after the air strikes began, Serbia surrendered.
The hope must be that, after a mind-concentrating battery from the air, discontented members of Serbia's armed forces will speedily remove Mr Milosevic and replace him with someone more conciliatory.
Slobodan Milosevic's rejection of an internationally-brokered deal to end the crisis, and the persecution of Kosovar Albanians, led to Nato air strikes against targets in Kosovo and Serbia in March 1999.
The bombing campaign against Serbia is still recalled with a shudder by American air-force commanders.
NATO's doves have been persuaded to renew their support for the air campaign, that must in part reflect their cautious hope that Serbia can be persuaded, with Russian help, to sue for peace on acceptable terms in the next few weeks.
But does this mean that America's next air war will be constrained by British political influence, as the war against Serbia was restrained by France?
For the most part, those targets were still parts of Yugoslavia's integrated air defense system and command-and-control headquarters, and headquarters of Serbia special police units, who are responsible for much of the horror taking place in Kosovo.
NATO's air war, most Turkish newspapers and their readers rallied enthusiastically to the battle against Serbia, seeing it as a fresh blow for the interests of Balkan Muslims stranded by the demise of the Ottoman empire.
Pavkovic commanded the Yugoslav army in southern Serbia, including the mainly ethnic Albanian province of Kosovo, during the 1999 NATO air strikes which eventually forced Yugoslav forces to withdraw from the region.
NATO's demands for the use of its air corridors, given that the opposition, and a slight majority of citizens, are against bombing Serbia.
NATO's opening position is that it must lead and dominate a post-war occupation force in Kosovo, while Serbia (and its Russian friends) insist, for a start, that those who ran the air war would be the least suitable keepers of Kosovo's peace.
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