Word: warsaw
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...reasonable standard, both treaties were estimable accomplishments. CFE blunted the threat of a Soviet-led blitzkrieg by the Warsaw Pact against Western Europe; START brought about a substantial reduction in MIRVed ICBMs, particularly Soviet ones, the potential instruments of a nuclear-age Pearl Harbor. However, by the time CFE was signed, the Warsaw Pact was nearly defunct, and one of its member states, East Germany, had ceased to exist -- or more to the point, had defected to NATO. Soviet divisions were pulling out of Eastern Europe for reasons that had nothing to do with CFE and everything to do with...
...foreseen where reforms would eventually lead. He told me in 1989 that he had not appreciated how deep the dissatisfaction was in his own country. He wanted improvements but could not accommodate a complete rejection of the past: the unification of Germany, the ignominious end of the Warsaw Pact, the pressure to reduce expenditures and troops...
NATO was conceived to deter armored columns from the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and East Germany (remember East Germany?) from rolling to the English Channel. The alliance has survived the victory of the West and the disbanding of the Warsaw Pact. But unless it can help defuse disasters like the one now destroying Yugoslavia and threatening peace throughout southern Europe, NATO too will end in retirement. Thinking about what will take its place has barely begun...
Most East European countries have gradually turned onetime monuments to communist rule to more progressive purposes. In Warsaw the massive building that once housed the party's Central Committee is now home to Poland's fledgling stock exchange, of all things. Last spring Hungary passed a law to facilitate the return of properties nationalized by the communists to their former owners. The issue is also under debate in Poland and what was East Germany. But restitution will be expensive; Hungary estimates the cost at about $1.5 billion. And the process promises to lead to a crush of legal disputes...
...pull the plug on Soviet support for the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and pressure them into elections they would lose? More crucially, could he permit "fraternal" regimes to topple in Eastern Europe, giving up the buffer zone that Joseph Stalin had created after World War II and retiring the Warsaw Pact...