Meeting Gorbachev's Challenge: How To Build Down The NATO-Warsaw Pact Confrontation
Dean, a former U.S. conventional arms control negotiator, knows his subject better than anyone; his historical chapters and appendices provide a wealth of useful background. His call for a sharp conventional arms build-down, cast against the rush of events since his writing, raises sharply the question of whether the bloc-to-bloc arms control format that seemed promising when the Russian bear was strong still makes sense when the bear is weak, the Warsaw Pact crumbling and East European states eager to be rid of Soviet forces.
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Long the bulwark of the transatlantic security relationship, NATO now faces a threat from within Europe itself. The proposed EU constitution makes clear that the new Europe seeks to balance rather than complement U.S. power-making European political integration the greatest challenge to U.S. influence in Europe since World War II. Washington must begin to adapt accordingly.
The West has triumphed over its adversaries, but all is not well in the realm. Its voters are unhappy, its politics adrift. Now is not the time to pursue ambitious plans that would simultaneously deepen and broaden existing institutions. The West must lock in and eventually extend the greatest achievement of the past century: the creation of a community of democratic states among which war is unthinkable. The mechanism would be a transatlantic union committed to a single market and collective security.
Expanding NATO east is unwise. It will not promote democracy or capitalism, and it is premature to assume Russian belligerence.
