Breakthrough International Negotiation: How Great Negotiators Transformed the World's Toughest Post-Cold War Conflicts. By Michael Watkins and Susan Rosegrant. Foreword by Shimon Peres. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001. 346 pages. $40.00. Reviewed by Colonel James S. McCallum, USA Ret., Professor of Peace Operations, US Army Peacekeeping Institute, Center for Strategic Leadership, US Army War College.

Breakthrough International Negotiation contains four case studies of complex international negotiations or interventions in the last decade: the North Korea nuclear crisis (1994); the Oslo negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians (1992-93); building and maintaining the coalition for the Persian Gulf war (1990-91); and the negotiations leading to the Dayton peace talks on ending the war in Bosnia (1995). Three of the four cases are US-centric while the fourth emphasizes the interaction-at the Oslo negotiations of Israel, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and Norway. The cases are well researched, with significant reliance on interviews with key participants in the negotiations from the US perspective and from all perspectives in the Oslo case.

The authors consider these to be significant international negotiations with high stakes in cases that proved resistant to earlier attempts at resolution. They call them breakthrough negotiations because the negotiators succeeded in overcoming...