Word: pacts
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...year-olds, many of them far from their backward, non- Russian homelands, bouncing around in the back of clunky trucks on potholed roads leading nowhere useful to their country's devastated economy. Yet they are counted under the ominous rubric of 4.25 million men under arms in the Warsaw Pact. So are over a million troops, most of them draftees, from the East European states. They include some of the same Hungarians who chanted, "Russians Go Home!"; the same Czechoslovaks, many of army age, who thronged into Wenceslas Square and exorcised the Politburo by clinking their key chains...
...alliance was invented to maintain the standoff between two giant blocs. But the great ideological divide of the Iron Curtain is giving way to messier divisions among nation-states and nationalities within states. NATO is simply not constituted or equipped to deal with trouble between two highly uncomradely Warsaw Pact members, Hungary and Rumania, or between two feuding republics of nonaligned Yugoslavia, Serbia and Slovenia. NATO should be maintained during a period of transition, as long as it is understood to be playing that temporary role. To his credit, and the Administration's, James Baker, in a thoughtful and farsighted...
...governments of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Rim want a permanent, visible American military presence in that region as a counterbalance to China and Japan. That is a bit like suggesting, as many are suddenly doing, that now more than ever the world needs NATO -- and the Warsaw Pact -- to fend off the specter of German reunification and remilitarization. New rationales are being concocted for old arrangements...
...President Nicolae Ceausescu's paranoid dictatorship last week seemed to take ten hours. On Thursday night the megalomaniacal leader and his wife Elena were ensconced in the presidential palace in Bucharest; by Friday morning, they were gone. But unlike the bloodless revolutions in the rest of the Warsaw Pact countries, the Rumanian convulsion was soaked in blood. The number of casualties is still not known, but if the estimates of thousands killed turn out to be correct, Ceausescu's name will be indelibly linked to one of the largest government-inflicted massacres since World War II. Ceausescu fled his grandiose...
...sleep as a hobby that he once had time for. "In soft, soothing tones that the Metternich school of diplomacy would doubtless endorse, they first apologize profusely for waking you and then tell you that the editors need to know, generally instantly, something like the GNP of each Warsaw Pact country. The secret, which they have mastered, is to be smooth and nonchalant...