My interest in international relations grew originally out of an interest in military history. I have visited many World War II and Civil War battlefields, and have worked a summer at a Grand Army of the Republic (Civil War) museum in my home town. I have also conducted approximately five hundred hours of tape recorded and videotaped interviews with sixty one veterans of the World Wars.
In the course of this study, I have gained a sense of the horror of war that is as personal as it can be for one who has never directly experienced them. At the same time, I have been led to expand my reading and thought from the experience of war to the causes of war. In the course of this personal study, I have become convinced that, at a fundamental level, war is a consequence of the failure of diplomacy. Obviously, individual wars have individual causes, and these are often deeply rooted in national resentments and hatreds, economic conflicts, or other factors which cannot be settled merely by diplomatic niceties.
Nevertheless, I have become convinced that, in Winston Churchill's words, "jaw, jaw, jaw is better than war, war, war." Understanding of international relations and the diplomatic process cannot, by themselves make Arab love Israeli or Serb love Croat. Careful, realistic diplomacy, combining firmness with understanding of particular situations from all points of view can, however, keep even hostile people from one another's throats.
The end of the Cold War era seems to represent not the end of foreign policy as a critical arena in American public life, but if anything a time in which foreign policy, and creative American diplomacy, will play a greater role than ever before in shaping America's future. The Cold War era was a bipolar era, and in that sense the problems it posed were relatively straightforward. We confronted just one great threat, and save for the later Vietnam years
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