Word: warsaw
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...planning to fight the last war. American military men are no different; for 45 years they have prepared for a Soviet version of the blitzkrieg. Panama, Grenada, Libya, even Korea and Viet Nam were all essentially sideshows. The Big One, if it ever came, would begin with the Warsaw Pact's tank and armored columns charging across the Fulda Gap into West Germany, starting a conflict that could escalate to a nuclear Armageddon. The effort to deter or defeat a Soviet invasion of Western Europe shaped almost everything about the U.S. military establishment: manpower requirements, weapons design, budget requests...
Such thinking seems curiously out of tune with the world as it looks in 1990. The Warsaw Pact, for all practical purposes, is dead as a military alliance. Soviet troops might have to fight their way through Warsaw, Prague and even Berlin before getting anywhere near the Fulda Gap, much less Bonn, Rotterdam or Paris. And while the Soviets were long considered capable of mobilizing for a strike at Western Europe in as little as 14 days, Pentagon analysts say that NATO could now detect preparations a month in advance. Some outside experts argue that signs of war would...
...what military planners call "a diminished threat perception" in the West. They fear that this will lead to a precipitous and unwarranted U.S. withdrawal from Europe, whose defense accounts for about 24% of the annual $286 billion Pentagon budget. "What we consider to be the immediate threat from the Warsaw Pact has receded," says NATO Secretary-General Manfred Worner. "We have to base our security preparations not on the intentions of the other side but on the potential...
...times of confusion and hardship, desperate politicians often cannot resist the temptation to use ethnic minorities as scapegoats. The sudden arrival of new freedoms in the Warsaw Pact states at the end of 1989 has brought with it a broadened right to be demagogic and irresponsible, threatening the region's proclaimed goals of democracy, cooperation and stability. "People are able to make decisions for themselves again, and they ) are starting at grade one," says Deyan Kyurianov, a leader of Bulgaria's opposition Union of Democratic Forces. "Nationalism is easy to understand and quick to arouse...
...Japan and the U.S. can help relieve the ethnic pressures with economic cooperation and technical-aid programs. At a two-day meeting in Paris last week, representatives of 27 Western nations laid the groundwork for a $12 billion development bank to channel loans to emerging private businesses in the Warsaw Pact countries. But money without artful diplomacy will not completely exorcise the ghostly rivalries that increasingly haunt Eastern Europe...