Meanwhile, the two men were connecting on a more personal level. They liked each other’s company, and they shared deep, bonding experiences—combat in Vietnam, weight lifting. It didn’t take long for Zinni to become one of Armitage’s right-hand men.

After a time, somebody asked Zinni, “Okay, so what are you now? What do they call you?”

Zinni gave the question a second’s thought, and then made up his title: “I’m the Military Coordinator for Armitage,” he said. The title stuck.

Zinni was provided an office with Armitage’s team at the State Department in Washington, and he had another office at the Rhine-Main Air Base53 in Germany, where they were running the JTF. But he spent most of his time crisscrossing Europe with Armitage. They flew to Moscow and St. Petersburg, to Ankara, to Brussels. They dealt with NATO and the EU. They coordinated support, participation, receipt, and distribution of the aid and the future larger-scale reconstruction effort. They worked with U.S. government assessment teams on the ground in the FSU and with local officials. They were all over the place.

The airlift operation ran until the end of February and delivered 2,100 tons of food and medical supplies to twenty-two locations.

Zinni spent three months on Provide Hope after the end of the airlift. During that time, Armitage worked tirelessly to transform into reality the vision he and the Secretary of State had put together.

As time passed and the military requirements ended, Zinni’s work for Armitage took him increasingly into the economic54 and political realm. Though Armitage wanted to keep Zinni around, it had grown obvious that the military aspects of Provide Hope had faded away.

“There’s no point in your hanging around here anymore,” Armitage told Zinni finally. “Why don’t you go back to EUCOM? As things move on, we might get you back in, but there’s no sense in your hanging out here.”

The need for Zinni to come back never materialized. By the end of spring, the mission was folding. The silence from the international community had been deafening. Other countries did not have the will or share the vision; they were simply not interested in participating in a new Marshall Plan.

What kept them away?

The world of the early ’90s was not the world of the late ’40s. This wasn’t a devastated Europe threatening to collapse into communism. It was a Europe of individual nations who were not only beginning to feel their own oats but had serious problems of their own to solve. The Germans, for instance, had to pay for German reunification.

No one was interested in working under a U.S.-led program . . . or in laying down the necessary resources.