NATO Transformed: The Alliance's New Roles in International Security
Written before nato's intervention in Kosovo, this book provides a comprehensive and serious review of NATO's historical evolution to its new post-Cold War roles. Yost analyzes NATO's often contradictory relations with its former adversaries as it lurched from the Partnership for Peace to enlargement and hovered between inclusiveness and effectiveness. A long chapter examines the chances for European autonomy within NATO and the alliance's involvement in the Yugoslav wars, arguing that allied consensus on future collective security and intervention, whether or not through the U.N. Security Council or the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, does not yet exist. Tragically, Kosovo is only the most recent and dramatic example. Yost's warnings about the tension between traditional collective defense and recent domestic interventions, and the difficulty of preserving unity without a clear enemy (or with too many enemies) are timely and judicious.
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Tony Judt is right to have doubts about the future of European union, but his jeremiad lacks an eye for detail.
The history of the Atlantic Alliance is a history of crises. But we must distinguish between the routine difficulties engendered by Western Europe's dependence on the United States for its security, as well as by the economic interdependence of the allies, and major breakdowns or misunderstandings which reveal not simply an inevitable divergence of interests but dramatically different views of the world and priorities. At the present time, complaints from West European leaders about the effects of high American interest rates on their economies, or about President Reagan's skeptical approach to North-South economic issues, belong in the first category. The current controversy in Europe over nuclear weapons belongs in the second, and now confronts the Alliance with one of its most dangerous tests.
Not much attention was paid in March 1985, when the European Council, whose members include the chiefs of state and government of the 12 member states, decided that it should constitute a single market by 1992. After all, the European Community had been established in 1957 with the goal of a common market, and many people believed that the goal had been reached; tariffs within the Community had been abolished, a common external tariff put in place and a controversial common agricultural policy instituted.

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