After the embarrassment suffered by the United Nations in Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia, the belief in peace operations as a successful means of intervention in civil wars plunged to an all-time low in 1995. The Western powers, although carrying much of the blame for previous failures, decided they would never again allow their soldiers to become ‘eunuchs at the orgy,’ as UN peacekeepers had been characterized in Bosnia. They entrusted their major military operations in the Balkans to NATO, their own regional security organization. The regionalization of military peace operations was thus set in motion, and the Implementation Force (IFOR) in Bosnia became the archetype. The painful legacy of previous years combined with IFOR's overwhelming military success in the early days of the operation made it the pivotal mission in the history of modern peace operations. Compared to most other peace operations, its impact on the Western military establishment was disproportional as the mission under American leadership restored the military's thoroughly battered confidence in its ability to bring civil wars to an end. Although peacekeeping was often still considered ‘not a job for soldiers,’ the military became convinced they could succeed as long as they were allowed to do peacekeeping on their own terms, which meant going in with the capacity to enforce the peace and a clearly defined objective that was strictly limited to the military sphere. While crucial experiences from previous years were incorporated into the mission, particularly those related to the possible use of force, others were consciously ignored. IFOR turned out to be a giant leap forward in strictly military terms, but it was a big step backward in terms of civil-military cooperation. Moreover, the clock was turned back on military involvement in public security-related tasks.

The Dayton Accord

The Dayton Peace Accord, officially known as the General Framework Agreement for Peace (GFAP) in Bosnia and Herzegovina, was a triumph of American statecraft after many years of US aloofness and European dithering during the Balkans wars. The Accord, negotiated at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio in November 1995, brought Europe's most savage war since 1945 to an end, something that the members of the European Union had been unable to do in the previous three-and-a-half years.