Word: nato
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When the U.S. was faced with a new global threat 60 years ago, the expansionism of Soviet communism, its leaders responded with an awesome burst of creativity. Among the institutions they launched were the World Bank, the Marshall Plan and, most important, the mutual-defense pact and military alliance NATO...
...with a new global threat, that of terrorism from Islamist extremists, we could sure use some of that type of creative and bold thinking. What would George Marshall and Dean Acheson be doing now? At the top of their list, I suspect, would be forging a new version of NATO. They might call it MATO: the Mideast Antiterrorism Organization, a military, police, intelligence and security mutual-defense alliance between the West and our moderate allies in the Middle East...
...what would Marshall and Acheson do? They probably would have created, in addition to a NATO-like antiterrorism alliance, a worldwide coalition of true and free democracies, ranging from India to Turkey to Israel. This Concert of Democracies could work on ways to nurture and support our common ideals, even as the new antiterrorism military alliance could be used to protect our security interests. Washington could use both instruments, just as it now uses both NATO and the U.N., depending on the situation...
...explode, was whether it would have the same kind of disabling effect on Ronald Reagan's presidency as Watergate had on Richard Nixon's. That was a matter of great concern to both friends and foes, but particularly to U.S. allies. "There is a basic given within the NATO alliance," said a French official. "This is that we rely on the solidity of the American regime." His unspoken point was that, temporarily at least, this basic stability has come into question...
...Geneva aimed at narrowing differences before the next extended bargaining session, scheduled for January. Though Max Kampelman, the chief U.S. negotiator, announced only "limited" progress, he found the Soviets ready to do business as usual. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger traveled to Brussels to attend a meeting of his NATO counterparts and turned up in Paris to defend Reagan's secret dealings with Iran...