Word: east-west
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Ironically, the end of the East-West conflict has rekindled those old animosities, tamped down for decades under communist rule. The re-emergence of Balkan rivalries unnerves many in Europe, but Yugoslavia's turmoil today is important -- and dangerous -- mostly to its own people and its nearest neighbors. When reports of fighting in Slovenia reached Washington, Secretary of State James Baker fell back on some of the old terminology. "It is truly a powder-keg situation," he said. Actually, while bloodshed in Yugoslavia is tragic and unnecessary, this time it does not threaten to ignite a world...
...most of the Soviet empire around the world, Gorbachev is reluctant to offer ammunition to his hard-line opponents at home by cutting ties to Cuba. With its listening post in Lourdes, the island continues to offer some strategic value to Moscow, though satellites and the end of the East-West cold war have diminished its importance...
...that the cold war is over, intervention need no longer be quite so suspect as a cynical gambit on the East-West chessboard. The concept of benevolent interference is already coming back into fashion. Last year, while Liberia was in the throes of its tribal self-immolation, five European envoys in Monrovia pleaded for the U.S. to send in troops to stop the killing. "The interdependence of nations," said an Italian diplomat, "no longer permits other nations to sit idle while one country plunges into anarchy and national suicide." Or, he might have added, mass murder at the hand...
Mikhail Gorbachev may hold out hope for the return of perestroika, but he won't be getting much encouragement. "Among Gorbachev's top advisers, just about everybody is gone," claims John Mroz, president of the Institute for East-West Security Studies. Many other reform-minded leaders have left the country altogether. The latest departure: Boris Fyodorov, the respected finance minister of the Russian republic, who will take up a job in London later this month at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Most of Gorbachev's policy shapers have been replaced by unknowns from the Central Committee's ideology...
...benign reading of Bush's new world order is that with the end of the cold war -- presumably, the end of the old East-West struggle -- the powers of the world can find new configurations. The United Nations may be able at last to fulfill the hopes of its founders as a mechanism for collective security. The gulf crisis, under Bush's masterful organization, brought together an extraordinary new coalition, including the U.S., the Soviet Union, Egypt, Syria and 24 other nations, to confront an outlaw state...