United States-East European Relations In The 1990s
The format is an interesting and useful one: academic experts sketch the current state of affairs in individual countries (the Warsaw Pact states plus Yugoslavia and Albania), and then present or former diplomats discuss policy. The contributors are well chosen, many are well known, and the book is informative. However, any such attempt to read the future invites skepticism. These authors should be required to read in 1999 what they have written in 1989.
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The difference between the factions in Bosnia is not morality, as the Bosnian Muslims and Western press insist, but power and opportunity. All have the same goal: to avoid living as a minority. All have committed crimes against other ethnic groups. Despite its claims of neutrality and preaching against military solutions, the United States has favored the Bosnian Muslims, keeping silent as they launched offensives from U.N.-guarded safe areas. Since air strikes cannot resolve the conflict, the United States must discourage violence by all sides and let Russia--the one country Serbs trust--take the lead in negotiations.
Despite the myriad setbacks of recent months, the U.S.-European alliance is not doomed. But repairing it will require a strategic overhaul no less bold than that which followed the end of the Cold War. The key to today's transatlantic divide is not power but purpose. To revive and revamp the alliance, therefore, the United States and the European Union must forge a new grand strategy capable of meeting the great challenges of the era: expanding the Euro-Atlantic community and stabilizing the greater Middle East.
Both the United States and France benefited from the geopolitical freeze during the Cold War. Now that the bipolar stalemate is over, Germany is preoccupied with reunification, England is economically hobbled and blanches at the European Community, and migration of the rising populations of North Africa and the Middle East may soon threaten more disruption than post-Soviet states. France alone among its neighbors has the desire, ambition and means to lead the reordering of Europe's security. Yet its efforts must fuse with U.S. policy, not snuff it out.

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