The Foreign Service Journal, April 2017

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | APRIL 2017 37 nonetheless, was the wrong one. The postwar settlement, which included NATO, was predicated on the lessons of two World Wars and a lost peace during the 1930s. NATO provides the United States with an important multiplier for defense and strategic influ- ence. But don’t be too hard on poor Richard—he at least waited until the Cold War was over to make the pronouncement. I remember well a high-level meet- ing in the Secretary of State’s conference room in 1975, where not one of the very senior participants could tell us why the United States still had troops in divided Berlin. U.S.-European Security Is Indivisible Yet the reason is rather obvious. Better to unify and remain vigilant than to be forced to come in to clean up after a crisis has broken out. And better to remain closely integrated with the rest of the world’s great democracies than to believe that deals with authoritarian states can better serve Ameri- can interests. I participated in one such clean-up in the Balkans in the 1990s. During a visit to Belgrade in June 1990, Secretary of State James Baker replied to a question about possible war in the Balkans with a classic piece of Texas wisdom. “We ain’t got no dog in this fight,” the Secretary said. Serbian President Milosevic later told me that those words had electrified him. “That was my go-ahead to start a war.” One could argue that President Obama’s silence on Syria had the same disastrous effect. In other words, we and Europe cannot escape each other. Bosnia and Syria and the fight against terrorism have demon- The “normality” of Europe was to be deeply divided and strategically paralyzed. This remains the case today.