After the March 2004 riots, Western leaders reassessed their strategy in Kosovo. Analysts and diplomats in the United States saw the riots as a wake-up call to push for final status. Europeans were more inclined to claim that violence should not be rewarded. Most importantly, Westerners knew that they could not credibly threaten to put off the status question indefinitely. To do so might bring on “another March 2004.”

Another change in the intervener game: standards with status

The interveners had come to accept that they needed to take Albanian threats into account and they had resigned themselves to the fact that Serbs were likely to defect for the foreseeable future. In terms of the 2×2 game, the broad contours of intervention strategy remained the same as with Standards before Status. The task was first to move the Albanian side to unilateral cooperation (T, S) and then eventually to get the Serbs on board to move the equilibrium to mutual reward (R, R). Although the broad strategy was similar, the tactics had changed. With the new policy, Standards with Status, the West did not threaten to withhold status, but rather promised to grant an independent status. Instead of being sequenced, the issues would be dealt with simultaneously.