The Foreign Service Journal, April 2019

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | APRIL 2019 37 Yet in significant respects, the Afghanistan experience has proved a testing one for both. The need to engage in serious com- bat operations—mercifully avoided during the period of the Cold War—has proved a notable practical challenge for NATO, exposing problems of political will and operational coordination. Afghani- stan has also brought into sharp focus the questions of what kind of leadership from the United States will be politically acceptable in the context of a “Global War on Terror” that means different things to American and European observers and publics. —WilliamMaley, director of The Australian National University's Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy, July-August 2008 FSJ . NATO's Future: Taking a Fresh Approach–2008 NATO seems always to have enjoyed the status of a self-evident good thing—like old buildings among architectural historians or free trade among liberal economists. As a result, the ques- tion generally asked about NATO is how can we preserve it, as opposed to what is it good for. Since the Soviet demise, does NATO really serve the national interest of the United States? Asking that question pulls us away from the prevailing preservationist approach to a less sentimen- tal, geopolitical stance. What are America’s fundamental interests in Europe, and how can they best be protected? Does today’s NATO serve those interests? Is it the right structure for organizing our participation in post-Soviet Europe? The issue is not only whether preserving NATO in its pres- ent form suits the geopolitical interests of the United States, but also whether it suits the geopolitical interests of the Europeans. For countries like Poland, whose foreign policy horizon seems dominated by past conflict with Moscow, the answer seems self- evident: Defeated Russia should be hemmed in militarily. But for the major Western European countries, and from the perspec- tive of the European Union as a whole, it is difficult to imagine a happy future for Europe without a stable and friendly relation- ship with Moscow. n — David P. Calleo, director of European studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, December 2008 FSJ