Daisy Sindelar: One of the reasons we wanted to talk to you today is because you have extensive experience specifically in Europe and Eurasia. The transatlantic relationship is something you’ve spent your entire career dedicated to thinking about. I’m really curious, given the long and significant arc of your career, what you’re now hearing from former colleagues, contacts, and friends in this part of the world, who surely must be asking you the question, What is going on in the United States? 

Phil Reeker: You do get that question all the time. I mean, you get that question in the United States, too. We are definitely at a moment of great change. I think ‘inflection point’ is the term some people use. 

I would compare it in some ways to 1989, which is a critical year for me. I was living in Berlin, actually, in 1989, totally by chance. I was studying German before starting graduate school and of course, there was this popular movement for freedom – something certainly the United States embraced, but very cautiously, under the presidency of George H. W. Bush. This is after Reagan exhorting ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’ 

I had been a student of history at Yale, and was interested in an international career. And suddenly, you know, everything changed. The world that we knew, the one that I expected would continue – that is, the Cold War paradigm, the Iron Curtain – was changed overnight. I was there in Berlin when the Wall opened. Came down, as they say, but literally the gates went up. And in a sense, that [period] was over, and it was a whole new opportunity. 

You remember the sort of excitement, the delicate diplomacy, the embrace, and then this sort of emerging friendship, one could call it, with what was still the Soviet Union. And I actually studied in Moscow. I was so interested in what had happened, I thought, well, I’d better understand better the Soviet Union from which this came. [I was] welcomed in 1990 as a student doing a program in Moscow. This was perestroika, glasnost, opportunities, capitalism, democracy, the American model, ‘the bright shining city on the hill.’ 

That motivated me to join the Foreign Service and actually seek to come to this part of the world. And that happened – I ended up in Budapest in 1993, sort of there, then in the Balkans, through the difficult times with the breakup of Yugoslavia – this other part of Europe that also wanted not just the freedom without communism, but the prosperity and demonstrating shared values with us. 

So, to now jump so far ahead – having worked in these countries, having seen them become members of NATO, many of them members of the European Union, consolidating the West – now to see and hear what is said [in the U.S.] about Europe, potentially our alliances, about the European Union, I think is quite shocking. And what lies ahead, we can’t know or predict. But like with any inflection point in history, history moves on, geography doesn’t, and so this part of the world needs to figure out how to adapt.

The United States is still here and engaged diplomatically, and certainly with business and investment. These are key things. There are communities of immigrants from this [Central European] part of the world that helped make America, from the 19th century – even before – and certainly through the 20th century, including those who came at times like 1968 [from Czechoslovakia] or 1956 from Hungary. And then those who have been educated in the States. All of these things, that I think people began to take for granted, are in question when they see and hear our approach. I think there’s less interest in Europe generally, both Central Europe, South Central Europe, the Balkans. So that will remain an area where I think we have to look to others besides government, perhaps, to maintain this engagement, maintain the dialogue. 

So you talked about the origins of your curiosity about Europe and your experience there. But can you take us back a little bit further? When did you first become aware of the world outside your hometown, outside of Pennsylvania, outside of the United States? And what sparked your curiosity in learning more about Europe? 

I was born in Pittsburgh, which of course is a city that is enriched and very much a part of this [Central European] part of the world in terms of Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, and others that helped build Pittsburgh, a tremendous industrial base, a city of great prosperity and wealth that then went through a very difficult period after I was born in 1965. The decline and collapse of the steel mills, but then the transformation and transition into a city that is on the cusp of tech and biotech. The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and the incredible breakthroughs it makes. It’s an extremely popular city, one of the most desirable places in the country to live. 

I don’t know Pittsburgh that well, but it’ll always be the place of my birth. My father was a computer scientist, got his PhD in Pittsburgh at Carnegie Mellon in the early days of this new field called computer science. And so we moved around as he pursued an academic career that took us overseas to Australia, where I went to high school. That introduced to me a real international interest. I was proud to be an American and what that stood for, with the criticisms that went with it, even from Australian kids who broadly loved the United States. 

I think I’d learned about Europe from traveling with my parents. Early on, I think the first time they brought us, my brother and I, to Europe, I was 7. I was always interested in that. My grandparents, my mother’s father, was an immigrant from Hungary in one of the earlier waves after the First World War. So I kind of knew there was a world out there. But I was very proud to be an American, and went back to the United States to go to university. But I was really interested in not only history, but trade, the world as a whole. This was the era when globalization wasn't considered a bad word and it was coming along with great technological change. So going to Berlin in 1989 was a way to really get to know Europe better. And then going to Moscow, as I said, was a way to understand what was still then the Soviet Union and at that time, 1990, nobody was expecting it to collapse completely and dissolve within a year. 

So it was certainly a time of great change. And it was a time when the whole world looked to America for guidance, for inspiration, I might say, for investment and opportunities. Many Americans did very well. And there was great hope in terms of security as well, because the feeling was the Cold War had ended. Of course, you know, a lot of pundits – Francis Fukuyama being the most famous of them – said, well, history is over. Now we’ll all just live in this democratic, this liberal-democracy ideal. Things of course punctuated that, and perhaps that was naive at the time to realize. And we shifted. As I entered diplomacy, the State Department, the U.S. Information Agency were all changing because of this new paradigm. ‘We don’t need many of these tools that we developed in the Cold War. We don’t need to be telling America’s story to the world because we have Hollywood and we have television, and that was then superseded in many ways by the internet, which was going to make everybody have access to information. Of course, we’ve realized how not quite correct that is. There’s great access, but it also has some real downsides in terms of disinformation, and in terms of those who want to undermine this. 

So the beginning of what might be perhaps the end of American curiosity about the rest of the world came out of a positive chapter of American involvement, which was the collapse of the Soviet Union. 

I think 9/11/2001 was then the next great inflection point. And of course that was a horrific experience. I was in Washington at that point. I was the deputy spokesman of the State Department on that day, you know, really there inside the department, waiting to see what might be next. And that changed everything in so many ways, and shifted us into this war on terror, which of course was a reaction based on fear and anger. And those are not the most positive of emotions, and I think we have yet, frankly – as a nation, as a society – to come to terms with our post-9/11 era. With how we reacted to that horrific attack on us, how it changed our society. How we lived, the focus on the security state, the emergence of these threats that suddenly seemed to be everywhere and took away the veil of the idea that we were moving into a new era of shared prosperity and freedom. 

And I think we still haven’t come to terms with that. With how we then proceeded into Afghanistan, which ended up being a quarter of a century, almost, of war. Entire generations.  You know, [by the end of U.S. involvement] we had soldiers in Afghanistan who hadn’t even been born on 9/11. And Iraq, of course. I served in Iraq in 2007-2008 [as the U.S. Embassy counselor for public affairs] with [U.S. Ambassador] Ryan Crocker and [U.S. General and multinational troop commander] David Petraeus, as we tried to, with the so-called surge, to find a sort of way not only out but to bring back some semblance of stability after what had happened there. 

And I don’t think we’ve fully addressed this as a nation. We haven’t talked about that. It’s similar to the way that it took us a long time to deal with Vietnam, the Vietnam era. Vietnam ended in 1973. I have early memories of that, of the war, of the protests against the war, then of the popular culture view of the war. It really took a long time before people were comfortable talking about that and how our leadership had brought us into that. Many people felt betrayed, I think. They weren’t told the truth about those things. And I think we’re having a similar reaction, if you listen to Vice President JD Vance and others talk about the so-called ‘forever wars’ and what Republican administrations – but then, you know, continued under a democratic president as well – did. 

So it’ll take us a while until I think we reconcile with some of those impacts and how the world reacted to us. Remember that it was our European allies that immediately came on 9/11 to invoke, for the first and only time, so far, Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty to come to our support, and then joined with us in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Over half of the U.S. population has no recollection of that period, wasn’t born when the Berlin Wall came down. So that new era to them is a history that they don’t understand. We don’t study history that much in the United States. Curricula, I think, are very short on history. They’re short on civics and understanding our nation and what made it great, our constitution. A lot of that is then manipulated and played with. And of course, it’s at this point quite typical to hear about people being locked in their bubbles and their echo chambers because of the internet and the way algorithms are deciding what we hear. 

You’ve masterfully anticipated my next question, which is, well, how do we get back to that curious state, the curious state that got you interested in European history and traveling abroad? How do you resurrect interest in the real meaning of American foreign policy?

I mean, you have to go back to some of the days when I think, in some ways, we were at our, some would say our zenith of power, our respect in the world, but when in domestic politics we started blaming government. ‘Government was the problem.’ Government, not defining that, but somehow government was the problem that should be solved instead of understanding how good government and good governance really can make a difference and had built the institutions of government that we had built in the post-war period, particularly, but in our case going all the way back to the founding of our country almost 250 years ago, had played a major role in building America into this incredible, some would say experiment, but you know, a country of enormous potential, which was realized with incredible prosperity, opportunity – you know, all of the things that many Americans probably took for granted. 

Then you jump forward and you do see that things like USAID had no domestic constituency, particularly. I think that's one of the reasons that it was targeted first. ‘Let's see if we can get away with this. Let's see what we can do.’ There's always been a misunderstanding, and I was keenly aware of this as someone in the diplomatic service who worked with USAID here in this part of the world, in the Balkans. I could see that people didn't understand what development assistance was about, let alone even disaster assistance and aid in general, and USAID in particular. It had no real domestic constituency. And there was this mythology that somehow huge portions of the U.S. budget, the federal budget, were spent on foreign assistance. And that simply isn't true! It never was! And that's demonstrable. That's not a question of different sets of facts. That's just you go and you look at the budget and what was allocated by Congress and then spent. It was never more than 1% of the budget. 

I'm someone – having worked in war zones and through conflicts and trying to help diffuse conflicts, negotiate, help countries come to agreements that hopefully save lives and prevent destruction and allow for people to live in peace and prosperity – I saw how important that soft power is, how our aid programs really contribute. They contributed in this part of the world in helping them understand free market economics and helping them understand what democracy is – civic education programs. Even if we weren't studying civics at home, we were helping these new democracies, countries that were returning to democracy, perhaps, after the dark years of communism. And that made a difference.

Does it mean all of the programs were perfect? Absolutely not. Were there elements of waste? Of course – you could see [waste] or, some might say, mismanagement, but that's typical of everything in every sector, the private sector as well. So you fix that, you focus on that, you have auditors, you have inspectors general, you have all of these things that were built in – congressional oversight – that were designed to try to help that. And you have a lot of debates about what AID should be doing, and programs. And one can see that those often became controversial and they went off in directions that people may not agree on. And you see changes over time with different administrations. But to suggest first of all that these were, you know, enormously wasteful and should just be wholesale removed, suspended, and destroyed in a short period of time is quite something.

And perhaps the worst of all, you make a decision that I guess is a policy decision, but then to accuse the people that have been doing this – often at great hardship and risk to themselves – of being corrupt and criminal, you know, is simply outrageous. There's no place for that, morally. To me, that is un-American. You may say, ‘We're concerned about this program or we are trying to deal with waste or we have to cut back the budget.’ All right. But then to attack people – and [the people who vilified USAID] know that that's not true, they absolutely know that's simply not true, and members of Congress know that's not true, because I used to work with members of Congress who would come on delegations and tour and get briefings and understand what we were doing. 

I think it's a big loss. I mean, in other parts of the world, it's meant a true loss of life. If you look where certain programs – health care programs, for instance – have taken place, you can read about the lives that have been lost. There's a vacuum where American assistance and support and professional know-how, expertise, is suddenly gone. And again, that doesn't resonate as much at home, because most people don't understand that. So there'll be a cost to that – to our prestige, to our position in the world, to our ability to influence and make a difference, I think, to our own values and morals. And what exactly that cost will be, we'll have to see.

I told Europeans often, you know, ‘Look, if you think we're burning bridges, you're free to have that feeling, but just don't burn them from the other side so that the foundations remain to rebuild and reconnect.’ And I think that remains valid today. And it means we just need to turn to the private sector and to individual efforts to maintain that. There's so much more to Europe and the United States – [in a] transatlantic sense, with lots of global ramifications – than simply how relations are conducted at official levels. We still have an enormous trade and investment relationship. That doesn't just go away. There may be tensions in it over tariffs and other things. There may be frustration – and I can tell you, from many of my private sector contacts, that there's a lot of uncertainty, because they don't know where the playing field is, and things seem to change from one day to the next, if not one hour to the next, in terms of what's tweeted or announced or negotiated. And so we've got to be patient and work on those things and just remember there's a lot more that binds us – shared cultural values, certainly shared history. 

I do think we have to recall what we did together and the huge contribution the United States made in the Second World War. My grandfather, who himself was a son of immigrants from Germany, became an American naval officer and came to Europe to fight the Germans and participated in landings across the Atlantic, including at Normandy. That was a major accomplishment. And then we worked together with allies to build a world, a set of institutions, that have guided us to a period of incredible stability relative to the course of human history and prosperity. Anyone standing in Prague in 1947 would be just amazed at what has happened in this part of the world. 

Does that mean everything is perfect? No, of course not. And do we need to look at defense and security? Is that important for Europeans? Yes. They need to take greater responsibility there. And they've acknowledged that. Maybe too slowly, but let's work with them on that. Do they still have things to offer us? I think yes. I mean, this was the cradle of the Renaissance. That is Europe in general. Certainly Prague is a part of that. Belgrade, where I just was, is too. And there's a lot to offer there. Europeans need to be introspective themselves. They have said they've fallen behind in terms of innovation and productivity, and they need to try to address that. But we've got to keep those things in mind in the U.S. as well. 

I do worry that things like exchanges, at the student level, Fulbright programs – these things that really made a difference over decades and generations in helping people on both sides of the Atlantic better understand each other – that those are endangered and we'll have to look for other ways to promote those ties. 

So I try to be optimistic, but also pragmatic about it. America has an incredible way of reinventing itself, and has done that many times in the course of our 250 years. We have the tools there. We have the institutions. I think we have the values. Our constitution remains a remarkable model for much of the world, although I dare say that the Founding Fathers probably couldn't have anticipated some of the things that have emerged. So it's just important for each of us, I think, to keep open minds. To inform ourselves. And the same goes on this [European] side of the Atlantic, where I'm sitting today. And tomorrow I’ll go home to the United States and continue to advocate for better understanding, helping businesses and individuals to navigate what's going on, but also to chart new procedures, new relationships, and even new institutions.

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You can listen to this conversation by following Weight of the World on Spotify and Apple. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.