As the senior military assistant to Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger in the early 1980s, Powell had helped devise the Weinberger doctrine, from which his own doctrine emanated.
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His doctrine seemingly justified ignoring the Balkans in the 1990s, but we inserted troops anyway, and debilitating wars did not result—indeed, the stabilization of the former Yugoslavia and the expansion of NATO to the Black Sea indicate that the Balkan interventions were in the nation’s interest. An unwillingness to engage in any but the smallest deployments, or in big ones that carried the certainty of a clean conventional victory, can itself be a form of retreat and defeat. “What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about, if we can’t use it?” Madeleine Albright, then-ambassador to the United Nations, asked then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Powell in 1993, during a discussion of intervention in Bosnia.
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His doctrine seemingly justified ignoring the Balkans in the 1990s, but we inserted troops anyway, and debilitating wars did not result—indeed, the stabilization of the former Yugoslavia and the expansion of NATO to the Black Sea indicate that the Balkan interventions were in the nation’s interest. An unwillingness to engage in any but the smallest deployments, or in big ones that carried the certainty of a clean conventional victory, can itself be a form of retreat and defeat. “What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about, if we can’t use it?” Madeleine Albright, then-ambassador to the United Nations, asked then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Powell in 1993, during a discussion of intervention in Bosnia.
-Robert D. Kaplan, The Atlantic.
