As the Solana report for the EU has recently shown, this could take the form not just of economic and humanitarian crisis, but of risks to global and regional security.
But, in any event, Mr Solana is quite skilled at both.
The job that has given Mr Solana his current prominence has had to be tucked in between these feel-good encounters.
Mr Solana spent much of this week trying to convince official America that the Europeans in future would have America's security concerns in Asia at heart.To this end, his officials explained that the Europeans have updated and tightened regulations first adopted in 2000 on the transfer of dual-use equipment and technology.
She should have waited a few months before taking office, to prepare herself, perhaps asking Mr Solana to stay on two or three more months.
Even those Petersberg tasks are open to interpretation.Mr Solana is working on a new European security doctrine to resolve such issues.
There was no Mr Solana present, and no Mr Berlusconi either.
This week it was the Europeans' turn to do some fence mending.Javier Solana, the EU's high representative for foreign policy, was in Washington, DC, to inaugurate a new "strategic dialogue" on Asia.
With this retrospective, which includes around 70 career-spanning works and opened this week, Mr Solana hopes to convey how central and influential Pissarro was.
Five years on Mr Solana was back, as the European Union's foreign-policy head, fulminating at "appalling" and "intolerable" behaviour that led to 28 deaths, the ethnic cleansing of 4,000 Kosovo Serbs and Roma (gypsies), destruction or damage to 366 houses and attacks on 41 Orthodox churches and monasteries.Some 100,000 Serbs live in Kosovo, amid a population of some 1.8m ethnic Albanians.
