"And we successfully were able to deter the Soviet Union and the Cold War ended without any shot being fired, and -- and we started after the end of the Cold War to try to build a partnership with Russia. We enlarged more and more of those countries that were previously members of the Warsaw Pact. They became NATO members. And people started also to ask whether we needed NATO anymore, because the reason why we existed, to confront the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, didn’t exist anymore. But then we soon discovered that it was still a...need, still a reason to keep NATO as a strong alliance, because we saw that we had instability around our borders close to NATO allies, first in the Balkans, where we had a civil war in the 1990’s, or several wars in the 1990’s, and NATO moved into Bosnia and Herzegovina with a big military operation. We...went into Kosovo to preserve, or to...end the war and to preserve the peace and stability in the Balkans. That was, of course, important for our own security because the fighting and the civil war we saw in the Balkans was also a direct threat to NATO allied countries."
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Jens Stoltenberg, Oxford Union Address and Q&A, delivered 24 November 2016, Oxford, United Kingdom
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Yugoslav_Wars
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Yugoslav Wars
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