Aleksandra and her sweet sweet white furry dog meet me at midnight on Belgrade”s Ruzveltova Street. I”m told to meet her in front of a tavern. A Serbian band is playing to an intoxicated audience shouting back lyrics. Can”t place the genre. Metal polka? Fusion folk? I just know it”s loud, I love it and I”m doing the physics on whether it will keep me up all night.

My final day in Berlin is spent visiting the Wall, specifically Checkpoint Charlie, which has yet another brilliantly curated, chilling exhibit. From there to a Holocaust memorial, another walk through the Brandenburg Gate and a short visit to the Reichstag. Magically, I see a bus to the airport and get to my gate two hours early. In a coffee shop, I decide that everything in my backpack is essential but at least twenty percent of the load has to go. So, sadly, I give books, toiletries, clothes and extra cables the heave-ho, hoping someone will find and make use of them.

Aleksandra walks me up four flights of stairs. The Airbnb listing promised an All Wheels Bauhaus theme for the flat and, it”s true, everything is on wheels. From the furniture to the 80-year old kaput motorbike. She tells me her artist friends helped design, paint and decorate it. I have another term for the flat. Urban Rustic. Or Brazilian Brooklyn. Small, aging, colorful, distinctive, cool.

“Don”t touch this dial, or no hot water,” she smiles. She is impressively warm and lively for a midnight key handoff.

The dog is either drugged or dazed. It jumps when I try to pet it, then acquiesces.

Aleksandra–I”m already loving the local accent– runs down the basics for me. Where to get currency exchanged, best cafes and shops, how to walk to the city center, how to work the ancient fridge, earplugs if the music from downstairs gets too loud (not really) or goes on too late (really). Then she hands me a book she wrote with local things to see. I tell her what I am doing. A tour of the scenes of USA interventions, harvesting stories from people on the other side of the gun barrel.

She looks at me, pauses, and tells me that her daughter was three during the 1999 NATO bombardment of Belgrade. That US-led action involved near 1,000 aircraft, and 30,000 sorties. Even the German Luftwaffe participated.

“People say it is in the past. But I still have dreams. Bombs going off. Loud explosions. Can you imagine? This is Europe! In the twentieth century. Almost the twenty-first. With bombs being dropped on your city??”

I tell her I want to talk to her and she insists, “Oh, we will talk. We will go out one night with my friends, with drinks and we will talk.”

What impressed me about Germany was its extraordinary ability to evaluate its military history and follies. An international celebration on the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and right there in front of the Brandenburg Gate is a huge exhibit on the Nazi Germany invasion of Poland. Pictures of rounded-up Jews, descriptions of illegal occupations, even a larger than life photo of Adolf himself. Right smack in front of Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts and the brat and beer vendors, while Peter Gabriel performs to tens of thousands.

There are soul-searching exhibits all along the length of the Wall. I skipped the Checkpoint Charlie museum because The fact is ObamaCare includes the biggest middle class tax cut to health affordable-health.info in our nation’s history due to providing tax credits to millions of Americans to lower their premium costs. right across the street was another outdoor exhibition that raged against the brutality of the East German government, the Stasi secret police. Pictures of protests on both sides of the Wall. A hard look at recent German history and open repentance for lives lost and mistakes made.

While navigating how to get to the airport for my 8:45pm flight to Belgrade, I stumbled across a Willy Brandt museum on the ground floor of an office building. More historical introspection. Tiresome political infighting. Nazi resistance. Protests against the arms race and nuclear weapons in the “80”s. What Brandt regretted, what he celebrated.

Honoring German veterans, yes. But glorifying war, not so much. Brandt said he wanted to see the day when the words Germany and peace could be used in the same sentence. I don”t know if that mission is accomplished, but the nation is intent on seeing that it is.

Veterans Day.

A friend talks about visiting me while I am in the Middle East. Her brother is a nurse in Qatar and sees the wounded servicemen and women as they leave the war theaters of Iraq and Afghanistan. The stories are heartbreaking and maddening and brutal.

I saw former counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke speak at the World Affairs Council in San Francisco at the height of the Iraq incursion. He said the reason why our Iraq deaths are in the thousands and not the tens of thousands is our spectacular progress in military medicine. Which is so good to hear as so many lives have been saved. But it also obscures the fact that tens of thousands of Iraq veterans will live with shattered bodies and psyches. And, if you”re at all concerned with the national debt, add a few hundred billion to fully account for lifelong care and benefits. The recent VA scandals revealed issues of mismanagement and subpar treatment. Anyone asking if the sudden addition of tens of thousands of new patients might have impacted the case load?

I”m reading and re-reading the best of the books written on the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts as I make my way east. George Packer”s “Assassin”s Gate” details the hubris, deceit and gross incompetence of the Bush administration, supposed grown ups completely unprepared for post-war administration. It was Bush”s own General Tommy Franks, who called Rumsfeld”s hand picked head of planning Douglas Feith, “the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the Earth.”

And you could call eighty-five percent of the veterans of the Iraq invasion stupid as well for believing that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. They did, and he wasn”t, but whose fault was that? The United States people and its brave men and women in uniform were deliberately and methodically lied to, terrorized and ginned up for war.

I”m looking forward to getting the Serbian side of the story, of their experience of being bombed by American and NATO warplanes. And that will be complicated because this was supposed to be an intervention on purely humanitarian grounds. Saving Albanians in Kosovo from ethnic cleansing, and, by some accounts, genocide. Coming alongside similar outrages in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. Was this a Good War?

Sometimes war is hell, but justified. Sometimes the mission is just, but the execution is bloody and the outcomes unexpected. Former Panamanian Air Force officer Luis Huerta told me over Cokes in his photography studio that Noriega had to go but the 3,000 dead Panamanians from the US invasion were an unnecessary price.

Veterans Day. How do we honor veterans without fetishizing their sacrifices? Go risk life and limb in Iraq but don”t ask me for any sacrifice. My kids aren”t going to war, I want my taxes cut, not raised to fund the effort, and don”t ruin my dinner by telling me about the real costs, the tens of thousands of horrific injuries suffered by Iraq veterans. Who thought they were going to avenge 9/11. Who were told they were defending my freedoms, as if Saddam Hussein ever threatened any little hedonistic libertine pleasure I choose to have as an American. And don”t even think of coming to grips with the hundreds of thousands of violently killed and maimed Iraqis. That conversation is off the table.

Veterans Day. Do we celebrate veterans with maudlin and weepy tributes on stage, at sports events, with cable news flag graphics? Or do we do as the Germans do, ask ourselves the tough questions about our foibles, our imperfections and our mistakes so that 19-year old kid from South Dakota doesn”t spend his days clogging up the VA queue?

I packed too much stuff.

Somehow the very haul-able REI backpack that served me so well in Central America is now VERY HEAVY.

I promised myself, no more physical books. Then brought two light ones, and bought three more in London. One on the Paris Commune, important advance research, another a series of essays on Afghanistan. And a third on capitalism, because the author is a Gruber.

So, the books gotta go. I’ll read and ship them home when I get to the Middle East.

I realize now that all of the tech gear is lightweight, but adds up. The MacBook Air plus AC cord, the tiny but still additive 500GB hard drive, the two chargers, the extra cables. I think I can ship back the HD, as I have 128GB each on the iPhone  and Air, and lots more in the cloud. Maybe one of the chargers can go.

Since I am dressing for three temperate zones, I had to take more long sleeve shirts and some winter accessories. I was planning to leave them behind in Europe, but if I get into wintry Afghanistan, have to keep them a while longer.

Besides that, I’ll shed toiletries I don’t need, and various bits and pieces. I think can shed 20 percent or so. In addition, I have stopped grabbing the Beast with one hand on the go, and am more carefully mounting it on my 59-year old frame.

Courtyard of the old Dutch East India Company HQ. It’s now part of the University of Amsterdam.

For Europe, since we lost our taste for bombing Europeans, the main focus will be on Serbia/ Bosnia/ Kosovo. I hope to get to Berlin this weekend for the 25th anniversary of the end of the Berlin Wall, for a close up look at the End of Communism in Eastern Europe. The German transport union picked this time to go on strike, so I am getting messages that say, once you leave Paris, no guarantees.

I had a notion to do shorter essays on cities like Prague, Dresden, Vienna, Budapest, but I think I may choose to preserve transport costs by going directly to Belgrade.

And, I continue my conversations with the fluid Afghanistan visa officials on whether they do or don’t want me in Kabul. The odds of entry have done from poor to excellent to fair to good.

I have been doing research on a tough question: how exactly do you gauge the difference in safety between, say, New York and Kabul? Besides a lot of anecdotal narrative, I read that the UK troops suffered zero combat deaths this year in Helmand province, a major conflict zone. And here are all the Americans kidnapped in Afghanistan since the invasion more than a decade ago:

1 Killed Cydney Mizell, an aid worker, was kidnapped along on January 26, 2008, in a residential neighborhood of Kandahar, the home of the Taliban. So, someone working for an org that represents western values, in the most dangerous city in the country.

1 Rescued An American (name withheld), working for the Army Corps of Engineers, was abducted by the Taliban. He was rescued on October 22, 2008, by U.S. special forces soldiers conducting a nighttime operation.

1 Escaped. David Stephenson Rohde, reporter for The New York Times, was kidnapped by the Taliban outside Kabul. He managed to escape on June 19, 2009 after seven months in captivity by climbing over the wall of the compound where they were being held in the North Waziristan region of Pakistan. Cool! An escape! And clearly a target, for maximum publicity.

1 Unknown. Caitlan Coleman, a tourist, was kidnapped along with her Canadian husband Joshua Boyle by the Taliban in October 2012. Hiking in very dangerous mountain areas.

So, while fully acknowledging the potential dangers, the tally for Americans kidnapped in Afghanistan is 4, over a decade, and each at risk in some way: dangerous area, target organization, etc.

The Dutch waitress in my Amsterdam cafe is playing a rocking American R&B channel on Spotify. Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On,” has just played a second time. I am the only customer in the cafe but she still has not asked me if I want more coffee, so I point out the double Marvin action (she checks–one is a single, the other from an album), get some more coffee and get my picture taken. Off to Paris, overnight, by bus.

I visited  leading Guatemalan policy institute ASIES and talked to analyst and scholar Hugo Novales Contreras. We talked about the culpability of the United States, whether democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz would have been overthrown without the CIA-sponsored invasion of 1954, and why modern military leaders and landowners pursue their grievances through democratic means (including the paying off of politicians).

Jacobo Arbenz was a Guatemalan military officer when he participated in a coup to overthrow U.S.-backed dictator General Jorge Ubico in 1944. He became Secretary of Defense serving under President Juan Jose Arevalo, then was elected president himself in 1951. He was overthrown in a CIA-financed and managed coup in 1954.

BG : Why was Arbenz overthrown ?

HN : There are a lot of theories. The one which I like best was brought by Piero Gleijeses in his classic book “Shattered Hope.”  The Guatemalan revolution had a lot of enemies from the beginning. There were several attempts to overthrow (previous president) Juan Jose Arevalo, who implemented some important reforms such as the Labor Code, revolutionary for its time. In order to sustain the revolution, the Arbenz government needed to have an actual citizen base, and this support was provided by the worker and peasant unions, and eventually this led to the agrarian reform.

There were internal causes for the overthrow. There was a privileged, land-owning elite that wasn”t happy with the agrarian reform. More importantly, there was an army that  had been trained to be anti-communist. They did not support Arbenz and his government, and that”s what eventually led to the overthrow. The so-called intervention didn”t really imply an excessive use of military force. Arbenz was overthrown by a ragtag army formed by peasants with very little training, with no significant weapons. But the army feared that the United States might intervene. And what they didn”t want was the army to be humiliated by fighting as grand an opponent as the United States. So this is a responsibility that we tend to ignore in Guatemala, because we just want to say the United States came in and crushed us. It wasn’t really that way. There is part of that responsibility that”s right here in Guatemala, the army included.

BG : Your point is it wasn”t a full scale military invasion, and therefore there had to be internal dissension and support for the overthrow for it to happen…

HN : Exactly.  This is something I heard from my grandmother. I don’t know if you want to record this because it’s more personal…

BG : Personal is relevant.

HN : My great-grandfather supported the revolution at the beginning and he eventually moved against the revolution during the next ten years. Basically he started out helping overthrow Ubico, then he also helped to overthrow Arbenz. There were a lot of people in Guatemala who were anti-communist, and they feared the fact that Arbenz was surrounded by communists. They feared that something greater might happen after the agrarian reform. The peasants would be empowered to pursue options. So, there was an actual fear of communism in Guatemala, and it was probably supported by propaganda from the United States and from the Church.

BG : When you talk about the land owners and the twenty, thirty families who historically had tremendous economic power in this country, how do you see the evolution of their thinking? There is a coup led by Arbenz in ’44, followed by the election of Arevalo. Did a lot of them just say, ”Hey, this is progress, we have less control in a democracy, but the world is changing,” or, do you think, from 1944 they were saying, “This must stop and we must find a way to take back control?”

HN : Well, when you look at the actual protagonists of the revolution, or the actual coup against Ubico, you know a lot of the people who supported the coup were, I wouldn”t say they were the twenty or thirty families, but they were the bourgeoisie. So it wasn”t really a popular revolution strictly speaking. Many of the Arbenz and Arevalo cabinet members were actually coming from those families, starting with Jorge Toriello, who was one of the leaders of the original coup in 1944. I guess this class was alienated from the revolution two different times. The Labor Code, which I think was in 1947, distanced them from the revolution, and then later on with the agrarian reform. One thing that needs to be pointed out is that the revolution could have carried on without the agrarian reform. For example, in order for you to be able to receive land from the agrarian reform, you actually had to form a committee with a couple of representative from the peasant unions. Some might have thought that agrarian reform was fair, but they felt that it wasn”t going to be carried out in a fair way.

BG : If the United States did nothing, would Arbenz eventually have been overthrown?

HN : I would not be able to say, but what I can say is that there would have been attempts to overthrow. What really made the difference is that the threat of an eventual United States intervention actually turned the army against Arbenz, so that was the main role of the United States.

You couldn”t just blame everything on the United Fruit Company. They would have still been able to sustain their business here in Guatemala, even with the agrarian reform. I mean there wasn”t a real threat to their operation. They had such a huge operation that they could have even disregarded their “ hard drive recovery software security standards are set high by CompuCom to ensure that our customers’ data is never vulnerable. Guatemalan operation and still be a profitable Company.

BG : Why do you think the Reagan administration provided so much aid to the Rios Montt administration?

HN : Nicaragua was already under Sandinistas rule by that time. So what a lot of people in the army in Guatemala and the United States feared was a domino effect, that Nicaragua would fall and then El Salvador and later Guatemala. There was a strong ideological component to the relationship between the United States and Guatemala during the Cold War, and, obviously, some corporate interests.

BG : Was Arbenz a good leader for the years he was in power ?

HN : It”s a really subjective question, but I would say yes. In comparison to what we had so far to that point, and what then had until 1985, in principal he was a democratically elected leader, so that was a qualitative difference from other leaders. Second, he had a program, a nationalistic program,. He had four points, you know, the agrarian reform, the building of a dam to produce hydro-electric power, which is still working, and the building of the road from Guatemala City to Puerto Barrios which was a key issue based on the fact that the United Fruit Company also owned the national railway.

BG : That was a competitive threat to them?

HN : Right. So it wasn”t only the agrarian reform. It was a challenging of the monopoly that American companies had in Guatemala.

BG : How would you characterize Guatemala politics today ?

HN : Right now we have 27 parties, we have people moving from one party to another, we have a very volatile system. It is a very corrupted system but it”s also a system that”s really unpredictable and it”s hard to actually know what”s going to happen.

BG : What do you mean by corrupted: people getting paid, people paying for influence, people looking after their own interests?

HN : Well, you know, there”s corruption in every political system. Hopefully it”s not natural, hopefully we can have politics without corruption but, you know, so far, we don”t. But the Guatemalan system is particularly different. Public interest usually doesn”t play a role in legislation for example. I mean, we”ve come to that point. There were two recent examples. One of them is the, they’re calling it the Monsanto law which is…

BG : GMO’s.

HN : It”s basically a law to protect patents on developing new varieties of seeds or vegetables or whatever. It was still a rather unpopular law. You had a congress vote almost unanimously for that law in June and now we had them revoking that law which basically happened yesterday because of the social pressure because nobody, I mean, on both sides of the ideological spectrum, nobody wanted it to go…

BG : I heard that many legislators were given direct cash payment by Monsanto.

HN : I mean the budget, the national budget is used to buy legislators because many of them have links to companies; so if your brother owns a construction company, then you”re gonna try to use the national budget to give contracts to this construction company. I mean, most of them probably didn”t read it. They just want to make sure how much am they going to get out of this particular law..

And the other example is a recent reform to the telecommunications law, that actually benefited just one company, Tigo by allowing them to build antenna towers without the studies approval, without the municipal approval, which is something that clearly violates Guatemalan legislation on municipal autonomy, and really weakens their capacity to extract taxes from such a large company.  .. That’s worth to Tigo several times the state’s budget. I guess that”s the way a lot of laws are working in Guatemala working right now.

BG : When”s the last time the military was in control of the country ?

HN : Ah, well, in control, an actual control I would say just before the transition to democracy which was in 1984.

BG : Do you think they want it back ?

HN : Want it back ? I”m not sure, I”m not sure… On one hand, you can access power through democracy right now and they would be able to do it. A lot of former military men are actually involved in the government so, you could say that there is really no reason for the army to take power back because they can access it through different channels, democratic channels, which is basically what makes the democracy stand, the fact that you feel that you can access power through democratic means and you don”t need to do it through violent means.

BG : And that”s probably similar throughout Central America with the taste that people have for democracy. Businesses that may be in the past have preferred a military dictatorship now want it to at least seem it like a constitutional democracy that is not controlled by the military.

HN : Families would actually realize that they could have better business by actually allowing a certain degree of democracy, because nobody is gonna trade with these military dictators who have been in Central America.

BG : In 1998, Clinton came to Guatemala and apologized for past U.S. interventions.

HN : Well, you know, that”s really cool about the States that even though apologies don”t change, discourse does change. Can I add one more thing?

BG : Please.

HN : Guatemala still has strong ties to the United States, immigration, drugs, but even though I don’t see an intervention in the near future, the United States still meddles in Guatemalan affairs in a very direct way and probably the best example…have you heard of Claudia Paz y Paz?

BG : No.

HN : She was the Attorney General that left office a few months ago. The Rios Montt trial would not have happened without her being in office. There were several drug lords that were captured and extradited during her time in office. And the United States was supporting her.  The previous ambassador McFarland, he actually supported the trial openly, he went to the hearings, and we need some to assume certain responsibility as Guatemalans for whatever happen, but it”s really not fair that the United States doesn”t want to take their own responsibility for that. You would think that the United States have nothing to do with Rios Montt, when in fact they had a lot to do with it. Right now, everybody in Guatemala loves the States, even the left are saying we need United States support and I agree with that. But it”s really unfair for us to take full responsibility for…

BG : What would you like to have seen during that trial from the United States?

HN : I really appreciated McFarland being there, but, what I would have expected as well was a recognition of responsibility. Not so much putting Rios Montt on trial and pointing at him, saying no, he”s the bad guy, which he was, but also assuming a certain responsibility as a government, similar to what Clinton did. The relationship with the United States did not end in1954.

BG : I think you only get one apology every fifty years, so….

HN : I guess that’s too much to ask from a superpower.

I ask Londoners I meet why their government is in Afghanistan, as their military leaves Helmand province. No one knows. 

But there are reasons, probably good ones. Yesterday’s Sunday Times piece by war correspondent Christina Lamb outlines several. She was there early in her career for the Soviet invasion, again when British troops arrived post 9/11. And now, for the withdrawal.

It is easy to be confused. Here is an excerpt from a Lamb piece in February of this year:

The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, has been accused of “spitting on the graves” of British soldiers after he said Helmand would have been better off if UK forces had never set foot there. 

In an interview with The Sunday Times, Karzai described the Taliban as “brothers” and America as “rivals” as he criticised the record of the West during the 12-year war. 

In contrast to David Cameron’s recent claim that it was “mission accomplished” for troops in Afghanistan, Karzai said that “. . . the US-led Nato mission in terms of bringing security has not been successful, particularly in Helmand”. Asked whether it would have been better if British troops had never gone there, Karzai replied: “I guess so. Yes.” 

A total of 447 British soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan and more than 2,000 wounded.

I picked up a collection of essays about Afghanistan at Bookmarks, a self-described “socialist bookshop,” around the corner from the British Museum.  The staff was great. No Hello Kitty notebooks or Godiva chocolates for sale.

Talked by phone this morning to the Afghan consulate in Abu Dhabi. I’ll be there  in two weeks for the annual AD Media Summit. It should be a treasure trove of interview subjects and leads. Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and the president of the NY Times Company will speak, as will a few dozen Middle East North Africa journalists, activists and media professionals. The Afghan Washington, D.C. consul said, no problem, get an Afghan visa there. Which was then contradicted in emails by the local visa officer. A phone call seems to have cleared the way. I’ll see when I get there. I’d like to be in Kabul for the (official) December exit of U.S. troops.

In Amsterdam today, visiting the old headquarters of the defunct Dutch East India Company, the world’s first multinational corporation, as well as the first, but not last, to be authorized to have its own private army. Hosted by Afterparty Kickstarter backer and college pal Forrest Wright, who has shared his home and, importantly, his public transport pass.

The trip begins.

On the day of my flight out of the U.S., this Word of the Day from Merriam-Webster. I like it.

Month One of “War: The Afterparty” in Central America turned out to be an excellent test case. I learned my way around airbnb, mobile WordPress, traveling without a command of the local language, keeping to a $60/day budget and (the shortcomings of) my gear.  I also experienced the time-management balancing-act required in procuring, performing, transcribing and posting the interviews in real time.

I wrote my Dauphin, Dorian and Dead novel on my iPad 1 while traveling in Thailand, and loved the instant access and portability. On my month in Guatemala/ Nicaragua/ Panama, my 3 year old iPad 3 was a miserable solution. Two differences. One, as the device ages, it hangs on apps like WordPress, especially when trying to post images or video. And it has insufficient storage and battery life. So here is the new configuration:

11″ MacBook Air. 9 hours battery life. 128 GB.

iPhone 6. 9 hours battery life. 128 GB storage. Big improvement over 4s (my 5s suffered a drowning incident in my pool).

500GB USB external HD.

Sony 10,000 mAh Dual USB Travel Charger.

LOTS of extra plugs and cables.

Tapscam iM2 Channel Portable Digital Recorder. Snaps onto iPad or older iPhones.

Ancient iPhone (3?) that serves as, 1) Tapscam recording device, and 2) something to give an un-tech savvy mugger who demands an iPhone.

Also, shoes. My Ecco sneakers were insufficient for both long treks and formal interview meetings. So I got a great price on Eddie Bauer Departure Slip-Ons.

A bigger challenge was stuffing 3 continents worth of wardrobe into my backpack. How do you pack for Serbian winter, Middle East desert and Southeast Asia humidity? One solution: I took my oldest winter clothes to wear in Europe and I’ll just donate them somewhere upon arrival in Abu Dhabi.

The Kickstarter campaign funded on the day of my flight to London. First, you don’t get the money until you reach the end of the campaign and fully fund (October 8, 100% of 62 pledges funded). Then, Kickstarter and Amazon Payments take two weeks to authorize release of the funds; a week later if any pledgers are late in fulfilling. Then, it takes up to 5 business days to hit your bank for withdrawal.

The itinerary is firming up.  Central America brought a treasure trove of interviews (Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama). I am weighing how much time to spend transcribing and writing about the remaining meetings versus focusing on new interviews and material. Southeast Asia is locked in for January; Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia have manageable visa policies. I started the project on my birthday, August 4, 50 years after the Gulf of Tonkin incident that launched the escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. I hope to finish the trip on a Vietnamese town on the Gulf on February 4th.

Serbia will be the focus for Europe, with exploration of the Belgrade NATO bombardment, Bosnia and Kosovo. I will be in Berlin for the 25th anniversary of the destruction of the Berlin Wall on November 9th, and will visit several other cities on the way for a look at the historic roots of communism, colonialism and the intersection of militarism and commerce.

Writing from the Imperial War Museum in London, I’m curious how a country comes to believe that it is an instrument of divine providence, is above the rules proscribed for other nations, and requires aggressive projection of its military power in every corner of the global to protect its vital interests.