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...to argue for American engagement in the world, and for a purposeful and serious American engagement, and this institution has stood for that for a very long time. We also need, obviously, to focus this year on America's evolving role with Europe and the changing agenda, in fact I would say the complete transformation of the United States (U.S.) and European agenda in recent years. And I would like to focus on two important but I think under appreciated perhaps by the press and other observers, developments in our relations with Europe.
First, the United States has acted with great determination, and I think with great efficiency and results, in reaffirming our partnership with Europe over the last several years. I was Ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 2002 and 2003 during that very difficult time when we had a major transatlantic difference over whether or not the U.S. should go into Iraq; a difference over the role of the U.S. and the European countries in fighting the war on terrorism on a global basis; maybe even a difference about the nature of what an alliance was and whether countries should act independently of that alliance or whether they should not. That was a very serious and profound disagreement. A lot of us participated in it. But we have made a major effort over the two years that have transpired since that time to reaffirm the NATO alliance, reaffirm our partnership with the European countries, and I think I can say with great confidence today, and I would think most European diplomats would say the same, alliance is now back together again.
France is our leading partner in dealing with the crisis in Lebanon, trying to defend the democratically elected government of Prime Minster Siniora in Lebanon. Germany, France, and the United Kingdom are our leading partners in trying to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear weapons state. Europe and America are the two parts of the world arguing that the Balkans now should finally be able to achieve the results that they missed in the early 1990s of peace and stability, of unity and of inclusion in a Europe that is whole, free, and at peace in the words of our 41st president, George Herbert Walker Bush. It is time for the people of Kosovo to know what their future is going to be. It is time for those in Bosnia and Herzegovina to be able to rise, to go beyond the Dayton Accords and to build a modern constitutional state, and Europe is our great partner in that. And so I think we have been successful Europeans and Americans alike in returning to the alliance and returning to the solidity of the transatlantic relationship which for we Americans is so important for our role in the world.
Second, there has been a very dramatic and undeniable shift in the European-American relationship, perhaps the most important in the century, and I think its impact is likely to be felt for a generation to come. And that is that the U.S.'s policy towards Europe is no longer about Europe. It is about the rest of the world. And the U.S. and European alliance is no longer about the divisions in Europe as it certainly was over the course of the 20th century, it's about what we together have to do to be effective and purposeful around the globe in all the regions of the world.
Think of it this way. Between April 1917 when Woodrow Wilson put a million American soldiers into Belgium and France to help and win the First World War-between that time and April, May, and June of 1999 when President Clinton rescued, along with our NATO allies, one million Kosovar Albanians from Milosevic's ethnic cleansing, United States policy around the world was centered on Europe. It was centered on the divisions in Europe, on the two world wars that we had to fight, on the Cold War that millions of American military fought for a generation. And if you asked any American diplomat any American member of the Atlantic Council for the last five or six decades what area of the world was most important, most vital for American national interest, it was certainly Europe. It was the epicenter of America's global and strategic thinking. It is why we stationed millions of young men in Europe from the spring of 1944 until the present day, and certainly through that time in 1989, 1990 and 1991 when the East Europeans liberated themselves from communism and when...
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