Smoke-filled rooms are no longer the places where modern diplomacy is fashioned: bright lights and Belgrade's top luxury hotel were yesterday's setting for the United States envoy and self-publicist, Richard Holbrooke, to announce his Kosovo breakthrough.
The bullish American, standing tall before cameras in the Hyatt's Crystal Ballroom, even found time to plug his book, To End A War, chronicling his success in bringing peace to Bosnia three years ago, joking: "Copies of my book are on sale in the lobby."
But amid the dazzle of those bright TV lights it was easy to forget that, for all his bluster, the deal clinched with the Yugoslav President, Slobodan Milosevic, isn't much of a deal at all.
In essence, Milosevic has agreed to pull troops out of Kosovo, allowing refugees, aid workers and war crimes investigators to come in. He has agreed to a force of 2,000 monitors to watch the process, and to hold elections for some form of local government in the province. But the withdrawal was planned anyway - his troops had completed the smashing of the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army in a three-month summer offensive, and a massive aid effort to pick up the pieces was already planned a month ago.
The monitoring force is not law - there are already more than 100 observers in Kosovo, sent in June when the previous ceasefire was announced.
What is new is the agreement to allow elections for a Kosovo parliament which will be dominated by the 90 per cent of the province's electorate who are ethnic Albanians. But these elections are unlikely to solve the basic issue: after so much bloodshed and repression, Albanians are committed to forming a breakaway Kosovo state, and the Serbs are committed to stopping them.
Holbrooke's agreement will skirt around this problem. It envisages having a three-year cooling off period of autonomy before independence is again discussed. Albanians say that as long as that is honoured, then fine. Milosevic says he will not discuss independence, now or later.
"The proof is in compliance," boomed Holbrooke, back to his fulsome self after several days of scurrying between marathon talks sessions as NATO threatened to bomb. "We're not talking about words, we're talking about compliance in Kosovo."
And that's the problem. Three months ago Milosevic signed a deal with the Russians, agreeing to a ceasefire, troop withdrawls, and inviting more than 100 monitors to watch over Kosovo. They arrived just in time to chronicle, but not stop, the summer offensive that has killed more than 300, smashed homes in more than 200 villages and laid waste much of Kosovo's countryside.
This time there will be more monitors, which may have some deterrent effect. But that is what they said about the last force, and in the end only the threat of NATO bombs made any difference. But whether NATO intends to keep its threat hanging over Milosevic indefinitely has yet to be decided.
"We don't trust him, we think it's important to keep the bullet in the gun," said one US official, as NATO announced it would keep its planes on high alert for the rest of the week.
But it has not said whether the bullet will stay in the gun in the weeks and months ahead. And for NATO this need not matter. The Holbrooke deal will in fact be between Milosevic and the OSCE, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, an organisation which has been searching desperately for a role in the world. If the deal sours, it will be OSCE's responsibility, not that of NATO.
Holbrooke insisted on playing word games to make the observers seem more important than they are: "Not monitors, not observers, but verifiers," he said, as if that would somehow give them more force. The truth is, they will have none, because Milosevic has refused to allow peacekeepers to be deployed, and NATO has shied away from forcing the issue.
One diplomat watching the Holbrooke show advanced the unnerving idea that the observers, simply by being potential targets, would deter both sides from going back to war. "Clearly they will be unarmed, there are limitations to what they can do. They will be 2,000 monitors spread around the villages and cantons; anyone who starts fighting will have to take the risk that they will drag in the international community."
In fact the ones who benefit most from the deal are the two armies. The Yugoslavs are spending money they cannot afford keeping troops in the field. They need time to rest and refit. Similarly, the KLA got a drubbing this summer. It lost few men but a lot of territory and its command system and training proved to be a shambles. Winter will make operations in the mountains impossible, and will deny the KLA the cover of summer foliage. This deal means that the rebels - and their families - will be fed, clothed and sheltered by the United Nations through the winter, while they can concentrate on smuggling in fresh arms and reorganising.
Officially much store is being put on the elections, which it is hoped will somehow draw off Albanian ambitions for a separate state: "These elections are absolutely key, they will be the foundation of democracy that we are trying to construct in Kosovo," said Chris Hill, Holbrooke's diminutive side-kick. Hill's team has been working through the summer to construct a deal for autonomy in the province. Kosovan Albanians already vote in their own elections, and this year all the major parties who won seats were committed to outright independence. What happens if they use these local elections to elect separatist parties is something the envoys chose not to think about yesterday.
Of course, with goodwill things could yet work out. Kosovo's Albanians are terrified of Serb firepower and Kosovo's Serbs are worried by the Albanians nine-toone superiority. Both are likely to welcome this breathing space. But even the monitors already on the ground in Kosovo think that once spring arrives all bets will be off and the guerrillas will launch another offensive aimed a wresting the province from the Serbs.
And Holbrooke has the satisfaction of knowing that a halt, even temporary, to Kosovo's fighting will save lives, giving relief agencies the time to rescue ethnic Albanian refugees still trapped on freezing mountains.
"We have 50,000 people who are living in exposed circumstances," said a UN spokeswoman, Ms Lyndall Sachs. "We have convoys to move out as soon as possible. It won't be easy. They will not be living in palatial circumstances," she said.
Milosevic has gained a victory, exploiting the uncertainty of NATO about the wisdom of bombing without approval of the United Nations, supposedly the world's referee in such matters. He refused to let NATO put in ground troops which could forcefully hold him to his promises. He also refused to agree to a peace deal - and will have plenty of chances in the coming months to ensure that talks about it with the Albanians get nowhere.
His main concession has been to avoid crowing about his success - instead, he appeared po-faced and sombre in a short TV broadcast yesterday, telling his people: "The agreements we reached end the possibility of military intervention. All questions can be addressed by political means."
Milosevic will have little time to savour his victory, however. His economy, worn down by years of wars, sanctions and corruption, is almost out of money.
His main patron - Russia - has troubles of her own, and he must somehow find the money to pay millions of pensions, state wages and heating bills through the coming winter.
And he has a second problem, a timebomb whose ticking was easy to miss amid the fanfare and hubris of yesterday's speeches. Part of the Holbrooke deal allows access to Kosovo for investigators from the United Nations war crimes tribunal.
The tribunal has learnt much from Bosnia, where evidence of torture and killings has led to indictments. Among those indicted are the former Bosnian Serb president, Radovan Karadzic, charged in his absence with genocide for ordering the bombardment of Sarajevo.
Already evidence is plentiful on the bombardments, torture and killings inflicted on ethnic Albanian civilians this year by Yugoslav forces under the command of Slobodan Milosevic.
As investigators begin their work in Kosovo, he may now feel the way former US President Richard Nixon did when he is reputed to have said, on hearing that the Watergate burglars had been caught: "I think someone has lit the end of a very long fuse."