Victoria Nuland

In the 1930s, we offshore balanced our way into letting Hitler almost take over Europe, and the Japanese imperial forces almost dominate Asia.

But when Americans, Canadians, and free nations everywhere joined forces to vanquish those monsters and then built institutions like NATO, the EU, and the UN, we ushered in the longest period of security and prosperity the world has ever known.

But as Mike has said, hunting doesn't necessarily mean going to war or regime change, as they're trying to accuse us of.

As a career diplomat, I will always choose diplomacy first.

But it's got to be backed by power to deter, to contain, to constrain the monster, to dig a ditch that he falls into if we can't reach a settlement that neutralizes him or keeps him in his lair.

War must be the last resort, but history shows some monsters will not stop until they're vanquished.

As practitioners, Mike and I also know that each monster is different.

Each requires a different set of tools, ranging from inducements to negotiations to deterrents to political and economic pressure and combinations of those.

As strong nations, we have a full toolkit, but locking away those tools or watching from the sidelines is not the right answer.

Nor will Mike and I argue that the US has always deployed its tools right, or in the right way, or gotten the right outcome.

But not acting is often more dangerous, waiting not just for the monster to appear at our door, but for it to get into the house.

I personally remember vividly a time when we acted, did not act, and paid dearly for it.

During countless conversations that I witnessed in Moscow in the 1990s, including with Putin, senior Russians warned us about the growth of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and its potential threat to the United States.

U.S.

intelligence didn't take it seriously.

How could some dudes hiding in caves actually threaten us?

The Russians must be trying to trick us out of our offshore armchair, carefully balanced.

We learned our lesson on September 11th.

Inaction, inattention to the monsters in our midst can often be more costly than the mistakes we inevitably make during a complex monster hunt.

Here's another thing.