NATO and the East European Security Dilemma

Abstract

The West is confronted by a number of major challenges centring upon the impact of political change and the search for stability and predictability in the security domain. As we have seen, these challenges are brought into focus by developments in a number of interrelated sets of issues: the EU’s and NATO’s attempt to ‘revalue themselves’ by adjusting to the new circumstances, the responses of nation-states to the new environment, the Yugoslav conflict, the new state system in Central and Eastern Europe, and in the former Soviet Union. At the same time, these and other changes intersect with a number of uncertainties about the changing world politics agenda, the effectiveness of power, the traditional linkage between strategic concepts and the perception or the reality of threat and, last but not least, the institutional context of the new ‘bargain’ between the West and the post-communist East.

We have a ‘secret weapon’ that will work almost regardless of the American response — we would deprive America of The Enemy.

Georgy Arbatov, 1987