In diplomacy, words matter, especially the wrong ones.

So I was at NATO there for about two weeks.

The ambassador had been there for a little bit longer, but we were doing her first major press conference.

And one of the, I forget who it was, the AP journalist or somebody said, hey, Russia has these dual-capable missiles parked on the border of NATO territory,

dual-capable meaning that they can carry nuclear weapons or they can carry conventional weapons.

Ambassador, what are you going to do about this?

What's the United States going to do about this?

And the ambassador said, well, we're going to take them out.

And in diplomatic parlance, that means you're calling for a preemptive strike on Russia.

And so I understood that, and I asked a journalist, I said, maybe we can rephrase that question.

And he rephrased it slightly, and the ambassador gave the same response.

John Johnson is a retired diplomat.

He was in the U.S. Foreign Service for more than 20 years, mostly working in public affairs.

So he has a strong, spidey sense for when news is being made in real time.

Between the time I closed questioning for the press conference and that my foot stepped off the stage,

there was already an AP Reuters story running that the U.S. was calling for a preemptive strike on Russia.

And that's one of those moments that scares the life out of any diplomat.

Where does your attention go first in a situation like that?

Media contacts or Russian embassy contacts or what?

The White House. Okay. Okay. Just to make sure that is not, in fact, our policy.

A, to make sure it's not our policy, and B, to have somebody really, really senior, come out and say

that's not our policy, because that's what you need to sort of stop it out. There's a day in the life of a diplomat for you, saving the world from World War III. Look, there's a ton of smart people in the State Department, and I bet you could plug, you know, most people in that situation, they would have done the same thing. But it was one of those moments where it could have turned this way, but it turned the other way, and I was able to be a small part of that.

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