A former U.S. diplomat offers an insider account of his time on the National Security Council during the first presidential term of Bill Clinton, when officials were trying to determine what to do about the genocidal war within the former Yugoslavia. Those officials debated whether the U.S. should do nothing, intervene alone, or build a coalition with European countries. Scheffer, who also served as America's first Ambassador at Large for War Crimes Issues, sided
with Clinton's secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, who leaned toward immediate, decisive military intervention to halt the deaths of civilians and the genocidal aspects of the fighting involving the unstable, Balkanized nations of Serbia-Montenegro, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina ... Scheffer felt
compelled to recount the give-and-take of his time in the Sit Room as a result of the brutal genocide in Syria.
David Scheffer worked in the Deputies Committee of the National Security Council during the early 1990's when the Balkans War raged. He then became America's first Ambassador at Large for War Crimes Issues (1997-2001). A graduate of Harvard, Oxford, and Georgetown universities, he is the Mayer Brown/Robert A. Helman Professor of Law at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law and is widely published in international law and politics.
Ambassador Scheffer was one of Foreign Policy Magazine's "Top Global Thinkers of 2011," won the Berlin Prize in 2013, and received the Champion of Justice Award from the Center for Justice and Accountability in 2018.