In 1990, just months after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communist rule in Eastern Europe, I attended a North Atlantic Assembly conference in Brussels, Belgium, on the future of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

The North Atlantic Assembly — renamed NATO Parliamentary Assembly in 1999 — brings together legislators from the (now 32, then 16) NATO member countries.

Europe at the time was experiencing a renewed sense of freedom, confidence and triumph, something it hadn’t experienced in decades. The key questions facing conference attendees were “Is NATO still necessary?” and “Couldn’t a country other than the United States lead it?”

U.S. Sen. William Roth, R-Delaware, informed the gathered parliamentarians that, alas, the U.S. Constitution required an American as c

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