Importantly, the book’s dust jacket contains strong endorsements from Talbott, Ahtisaari and Holbrooke. Although no similar endorsement from Chernomyrdin or other key Russian diplomats is to be found, perhaps that is expecting too much from a diplomatic team who suffered much internally for essentially conceding to the West’s terms. The book’s detailed and chronological nature is valuable in developing the agonizing twists and turns that accompanied the Kosovo diplomacy, including often nearly simultaneous developments, and admirably describes the range of options, possible outcomes and unknowns at each step in the conflict. It notes, for example, the political and human challenges faced by U.S. and Russian leaders that distracted them from their diplomat ic efforts. In the case of Russian President Boris Yeltsin, it was a weak economy and rapidly failing personal health. In the case of U.S. President Bill Clinton, it was the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal and impeachment proceedings. Likewise, diplomatic complications resulted from an early Clinton announcement that he had no intention of committing ground troops to the conflict. Also included in the book are the varying and conflicting interests of different European Union member countries. Similarly, the book draws into sharp relief the policy divisions between members of the Clinton administration, mainly between Clinton hawks like U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and NATO Supreme Allied Commander and U.S. Gen. Wesley Clark, who favored use of a ground war to remove Milosevic, and those who favored more restrained action and opposed the use of ground troops, including many in the Pentagon, such as U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen. Norris’s analysis of the many diplomatic facts and developments he musters is, however, at times rudimentary and insufficiently supported, particularly with respect to the critical issue of what lessons are to be learned from the conflict. Talbott’s five-page forward provides a general’s level analysis of the key events and lessons learned that one hoped would have been more fully developed in the book itself. Among such principles noted by Talbott are that the Kosovo war represents a continuing evolution of the principle applied in the U.S. led-invasion of Haiti in 1994—that the sovereignty of individual states is not absolute and that a national government that abuses the rights of its own citizens loses the right to govern and is, in the words of Talbott, “subject either to being put out of business altogether or having its authority suspended in that area of the country where it is running amok.” The concept of regime change was, of course, taken even further by the Bush administration’s removal of the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001 and Saddam Hussein in 2003. Talbott notes that the Bush administration, however, did not cite Bosnia or Kosovo as a model for the war on terror, perhaps because Bush had earlier disparaged those efforts as nation-building. Among the more provocative conclusions that Norris does advance are the conflict’s implications for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who took power in 2000. Norris claims that Putin’s foreign policy may have been deeply shaped by the Kosovo experience. Constant wrangling within NATO about how to deal with Milosevic may have made it clear to Putin that NATO was not an expansionist threat. An aborted attempt by Russian generals to seize Kosovo territory may have also led Putin to conclude that reactionary Russian military forces were capable of doing great harm if left unchecked, and perhaps most fundamentally, Putin may have concluded that selective foreign policy engagement might be most practical for Russia given its challenging domestic situation. Norris says that Putin may have realized that Russia’s aggressive rhetoric in the Kosovo confrontation and its delay in diplomatic efforts did not affect the outcome to its advantage and led Southeastern European (and former Soviet Bloc) states to fear Russia. Because Russia could not be a major player in every foreign policy event, Putin may have concluded that it must pick its fights carefully, Norris argues. Also missing from the book is a scholar’s analysis of the conflict’s historical context. In a section dedicated to the origins of the war, a single paragraph is all that recounts the ancient tension between the Serbs and Albanians through the late 20th century. “Disputes between Serbs and Albanians over control of the territory stretch back centuries” is the level of specificity of this analysis. Perhaps most surprising is the delay in releasing the book. Given its spot-reporting nature, a delay of more than five years from the close of the conflict to the book’s publication is difficult to understand. Although the dust jacket gamely attempts to relate the book’s contents to the Iraq war, little within the book updates the core material with such analysis or appears to justify such a lengthy release delay. Still, at the heart of Norris’s book, and of diplomacy in general, is the question of how to best address conflicts such as Kosovo and the agonizing policy choices and dilemmas presented by them. “Collision Course” provides a valuable examination of such issues and record of the diplomacy that addressed them. David Tobenkin is a freelance writer in Chevy Chase, Md.