Word: nato
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...changes facing Europe today are not just military, and NATO also serves a political function. Inclusion in the new NATO will strengthen the values and institutions of democracy in the new member states. The very possibility of membership has already encouraged a number of countries to step up their internal reforms and improve relations with one another. This sort of progress is a potent vaccine against the kind of plague that befell the former Yugoslavia...
Some have asked, Where are the geographical limits to NATO expansion? The right answer is, Let's see--and let's not be in a rush to proclaim new limits. To draw a new line on the map would be a betrayal of the alliance's shared vision of an undivided, increasingly integrated Europe...
...Russian Federation is part of that community too. The idea that an enlarging NATO can contribute to Russia's own long-term security--which the alliance leaders firmly believe--is, to put it mildly, not self-evident, certainly not to the Russians (or, for that matter, to critics of enlargement in the U.S.). Yet as enlargement has moved forward, NATO and Russia have developed an increasingly close relationship. In May, at a landmark meeting in Paris, the leaders of the alliance and President Boris Yeltsin signed the NATO-Russia Founding Act. It lays the basis for a solid, growing partnership...
While the past few months have been auspicious, a number of challenges remain. Most immediately, the allies must reach consensus in Madrid on the first countries to join NATO. The U.S. favors the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, because these nations have met the toughest tests of reform, resolved every dispute with their neighbors and demonstrated that they are prepared to meet the military obligations of NATO membership...
Enlargement is the right thing to do, especially when compared to the alternative of freezing NATO in its cold war membership. Whatever the expenses and difficulties associated with enlarging NATO, there would be far greater costs and dangers of not doing so. If we were permanently to endorse the line Joseph Stalin carved across Europe in 1945, we would subject the alliance to the risk of irrelevance and perhaps dissolution. Rejected in their aspiration to join NATO, the Central and East European countries would scramble to jury-rig their own independent and therefore competitive security arrangements...