Dick Lugar: “It is axiomatic, at least for many in foreign policy, that Europe counts for the United States. By that I mean simply…”

“It is axiomatic, at least for many in foreign policy, that Europe counts for the United States. By that I mean simply this: that although throughout our history many have argued that we could get along by ourselves on this continent and that entanglement in the affairs of Europe was often described as nefarious skullduggery statesmanship without scruple, that eventually we come back to the fact that in the small world in which we live now, what happens on that continent matters a great deal to our security and to our prosperity. It is for this reason that the United States stayed in Europe after World War II. To state it very simply, as German Foreign Minister Fischer stated when he visited with our Foreign Relations Committee this week: The United States presence, the decision to stay, made all the difference in the last half century. It made a difference in terms of peace on the Europe continent, which had not had such an era of peace in a whole millennium.”