War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals was published by Scribner in September 2001, just days before the September 11 attacks rendered its subject — the problem of American military intervention in a world without a great-power adversary — suddenly and devastatingly relevant. The book covers the period from 1989 to 2000, focusing on how two administrations struggled with the question of when and whether to use military force in a post-Cold War world.
Halberstam’s central argument is that the end of the Cold War did not produce peace but a series of smaller crises — Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, Kosovo — that the American political system was poorly equipped to handle. The Cold War had provided a framework for understanding threats and justifying interventions; without it, each crisis had to be debated from scratch, and the debates revealed a fundamental disconnection between American military power and American political will.
The portraits of the key decision makers — George H.W. Bush’s cautious realism, Bill Clinton’s reluctant interventionism, Colin Powell’s doctrine of overwhelming force or no force at all, Madeleine Albright’s impatience with military caution, Richard Holbrooke’s relentless diplomacy — are vintage Halberstam: detailed, psychologically acute, and structured to reveal how individual temperament shapes institutional decisions.
Collecting War in a Time of Peace
First edition (Scribner, New York, 2001): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$40
- Very good/very good: $5–$15
- Signed: $40–$100