Word: nato
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...tables were spread in Brussels last week for a grand conclave charting the future of NATO. Foreign ministers representing the 16 partners in one of history's strongest, most successful alliances arrived with words intended to reaffirm its solidarity, even as the war in Bosnia was testing its inner strength. The mantra of the hour was articulated by Warren Christopher, who came armed with a freshly retuned U.S. policy toward a corner of Europe that has defied Western peacemaking efforts. Declared the U.S. Secretary of State: "The crisis in Bosnia is about Bosnia, not about NATO...
...emergency concerns not just NATO but also the U.N. and other instruments through which the U.S. and the West's other powers have sought to enforce peace and deter aggression. In practice, if the "international community" means anything, it denotes the U.S. in tandem with Britain and France. Russia must be consulted, Germany and Japan write occasional checks, and China's nonobstruction is sometimes needed; but Washington, London and Paris are the governments that count...
...Even as NATO's pep rally began in earnest in Brussels, it was treated to a shower of ice water from Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev, who set the meeting back on its heels by suddenly refusing a long-prepared deal offering Moscow a special relationship with NATO in coordinating European security. Kozyrev's rebuff might have been meant to fend off nationalists at home, but its timing suggested that lessons from the Bosnia debacle were taken into account...
Last week the Western front was roiling just about everywhere. As Christopher was peddling a revamped approach before NATO, Bob Dole was winding up visits to London and Brussels during which he called for an end to the arms embargo against the Bosnians. The man who will soon become the Republican majority leader in the U.S. Senate was given short shrift in Britain, where Defense Secretary Malcolm Rifkind termed American criticisms of British policy "disgraceful" and demanded that Washington remain silent if it would not send troops to Bosnia...
Dole, displaying what he surely hoped would be regarded as presidential stuff, said he was unconvinced that reprisals against the Serbs could not work. "I want to express my strong support for a strong NATO," he stressed in Brussels. Yet he still planned to introduce an embargo-lifting resolution in the Senate, perhaps tacked to a veto-proof spending bill, sometime after the new Congress convenes in January. He predicted at least 70 to 80 votes in favor...