Not long before the Dayton Peace Conference negotiations started in November 1995, the Contact Group met in Moscow to discuss how it all should go. The European members of the Contact Group decided to have an informal consultation before we met the Americans and then had the full Group meeting with the Russians.

Thus it was that the British Embassy hosted first a European breakfast, then the Europeans’ encounter with the Americans. Pauline Neville-Jones led for the UK. Wolfgang Ischinger (like me and Jay Pollard a former denizen of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy) for Germany. I sat in as the Embassy’s Bosnian expert.

The Europeans quickly agreed that the whole Dayton process was being done just too fast. This was to be a once and for all effort to end the Bosnian mayhem, and the documents emerging from it – including a new constitution for a single Bosnia and Herzegovina – would have far-reaching significance. All this could not be pulled together sensibly in the time now available. They agreed to press the US side hard to delay the start of the Conference by a couple of weeks or more, to give a better chance for the vital expert work to be done properly.

Then the Americans showed up at the Embassy, led by Dick Holbrooke and NATO commander (and future Presidential candidate) General Wes Clark. We all clustered in to the small Embassy ‘safe room’.

The amazing thing was that the Americans looked twice as big as the Europeans! The US military team of course were bulked up by camouflage jackets, but they looked pretty damn big to start with. Plus Holbrooke is a larger than life character in all senses. So when everyone sat down in the tiny room I had a feeling that already the Americans had an advantage of some hard to define but real sort.

Soon the European side of the table started to make its elegant, firm and reasoned case for starting Dayton rather later.

Dick Holbrooke looked across the table in a friendly way and said something to the effect of, "Well, I’ve talked to the President. Our dates are in his diary. If you are there for the start, that will be fine. And if you’re not, that will be fine too."

That salvo effectively ended the battle, the ‘European’ position flicked off the table like a wearying crumb.

The rest is history. Or will be one day.