Politics & Power Quote by Pat Buchanan

The line is dressed up as restraint, but it’s really an argument about ownership: Europe should clean up Europe’s mess, and America should stop paying the security bill. Buchanan’s “that’s their business” sounds like a shrug; it’s a rhetorical border wall. By recasting the Balkan wars as a regional nuisance rather than a moral emergency, he drains the conflict of its capacity to obligate the United States.

The phrasing does two jobs at once. First, it signals toughness through withdrawal. “Remove every United States soldier” is absolute language meant to read as decisiveness, not abdication. Second, it smuggles in a broader worldview: alliances are optional, humanitarian rationales are suspect, and U.S. power should be conserved for threats that feel directly American. In the 1990s, with Bosnia and later Kosovo forcing a televised confrontation with ethnic cleansing, this position wasn’t neutral; it was a counterpunch to the emerging post-Cold War consensus that NATO could be a moral instrument as well as a strategic one.

Subtextually, Buchanan is also litigating American identity. He’s writing to an audience wary of “nation-building,” skeptical of globalist commitments, and resentful of what he frames as European dependency. The Balkans become a proxy for a larger complaint: that elites use distant crises to justify open-ended deployments and international entanglements. The quote’s power lies in its simplicity: it converts a tangled history into a clean exit ramp, turning complexity into a political advantage.