Word: nato
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...recently as January, Secretary of State Warren Christopher fought with French diplomats pressing for a more bellicose stand in Bosnia. According to an eyewitness, Christopher, chatting with British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd before the NATO summit in Brussels about the long-promised American commitment to help police a peace agreement, asked him, "How do we get out of that...
They didn't have to; they well knew. Air strikes against the Serbs could severely strain relations between the NATO powers and Russia, many of whose citizens empathize with the Serbs as fellow Slavs and Orthodox Christians. If the ultimatum had to be voted on in the U.N. Security Council, Boris Yeltsin's government would almost certainly veto it, if only to respond to public anger fanned by nationalists like Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who was in full cry last week. NATO finessed that by insisting that its ultimatum is justified under previous Security Council resolutions. U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros- Ghali...
...Paris, as well: the day after the blast, French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe and Defense Minister Francois Leotard were already calling for an / ultimatum, and Washington swiftly agreed. Transatlantic telephone conferences between Presidents Clinton and Francois Mitterrand helped iron out some minor differences. By the time NATO ministers met in Brussels Wednesday, there was a joint Franco-American proposal on the table, possibly the first in the 30-odd years since Charles de Gaulle began fulminating against "les Anglo-Saxons...
...some of the doubters had been brought into line. Britain reluctantly acquiesced on the condition that military action be severely limited. Clinton persuaded Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien to go along despite worries about the safety of 2,000 Canadian peacekeepers. Even Greece, the most pro-Serb of the NATO nations, decided not to vote for the ultimatum, but cast no veto either...
When the council finally approved the resolution after 14 hours of debate, NATO Secretary-General Manfred Worner, who left a sickbed against his doctors' orders to preside, enthused that its vote marked "a decisive moment in the history of our alliance." So it was, though a somewhat ironic one. NATO was formed 45 years ago to resist any Soviet Bloc invasion of Western Europe, but its first shots fired in anger, if any are, will be a pre-emptive, not a defensive, act against antagonists having nothing to do with a Soviet empire that no longer exists. A NATO diplomat...