Rethinking The Red Menace

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For much of the past year, it was considered bold to ask, What if Gorbachev really is willing to disarm significantly? What if he is prepared to demilitarize Soviet society and Soviet foreign policy? What if he adopts levels and deployments of troops, types and numbers of weapons that give real meaning to his slogans of "mutual security" and "nonoffensive defense"?

The question marks are now out of date and therefore out of place. Gorbachev is already doing the things spelled out in the litany of conditional clauses. This fall the prestigious London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies solemnly concluded that the unilateral cuts that Gorbachev has already announced "will, once complete, virtually eliminate the surprise attack threat which has so long concerned NATO planners." In November the Pentagon said virtually the same thing. That certification is all the more meaningful coming from two organizations that have long believed such a threat existed not only on paper but in the real world.

To its credit, the Bush Administration has gone from asking what-if questions about Gorbachev to what-now questions about the American share of responsibility for transforming the military competition. But it would be easier to come up with a new answer to the perennial question about defense -- How much is enough? -- if there were a clearer realization that the old answer was excessive.

It also is time to think seriously about eventually retiring the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, with honor, to be sure, but without too much nostalgia. Yes, NATO has helped keep the peace. But so has the existence of nuclear weapons, and so has the inherent weakness of the Soviet Union -- the nakedness of the red emperor before his enemies.

There is no danger that NATO will be dismantled precipitately, since virtually all leaders in the West and even some in the East agree that the alliance is necessary to help handle the dislocations, instabilities and potential conflicts that are almost sure to attend the disintegration of communist rule in the East. But NATO is at best a stopgap until something more up-to-date and effective can be devised to take its place. The Western 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 speech earlier this month in West Berlin, seemed to be inviting Western statesmen and thinkers to join in the search for new ideas and institutions that will ensure the security of post- cold war Europe.

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