John Major, the former British Prime Minister, cautioned against short-sighted geopolitics in his Wednesday night speech to the ARCO Forum.

Major, who still serves as Conservative Member of Parliament, delivered the annual Gordon Lecture on Finance and Economics, peppering his address with criticism of Western regimes' handling of crises in Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor.

Major called for "a much larger look at the implications of words and actions of foreign policy."

When the Berlin Wall collapsed and communism fell, Major said, "the demons came forth" in the form of instability in the states of the former Soviet block.

Russia, which had previously helped to maintain a precarious balance of power in the Balkan region, was suddenly in no position to keep the peace.

So the West stepped in, which Major says was a mistake.

"Would the West have put ground troops in Bosnia if Russia was still a communist state?" Major asked. "The answer is, we would not."

Major said he concluded that Western triumphalism in the face of the collapse of communism failed to address long-term issues that eventually arose.

Although Major's strongest words of the evening were reserved for the Western response to the Balkan quagmire, he also voiced skepticism about the future of a unified Europe.