Word: pact
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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unprecedented predicament. After decades of virtually absolute security beneath the American nuclear umbrella, the members of this alliance will soon be inferior to the Warsaw Pact in many crucial areas of military power. NATO will have to find the will and the resources to limit the duration of this perilous inferiority, or risk being defeated from its own underbelly, the source of its raw materials. Free of bullying and insensitivity, Washington must inspire, urge and cajole other NATO nations to make the decisions that will be neither straightforward nor easy...
Yugoslavia's Josip Broz Tito hurled the first challenge to East bloc unity; his country was ceremoniously expelled in 1948 from the Cominform, the Moscow-dominated alliance of Communist states, for pursuing an independent foreign policy. Thirteen years later, Albania effectively withdrew from the Warsaw Pact...
...Moscow's muscle lashed out again. In 1968 Czechoslovakia's party leader, Alexander Dučdek, was promoting a series of reforms that promised "socialism with a human face": a more flexible planned economy with touches of political pluralism. The Soviets countered by sending 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops into Prague under the guise of "fraternal assistance...
Meanwhile, the revolutionary fervor that existed in Eastern Europe after World War II has long since evaporated; it has been replaced by cynicism, opportunism and a sullen resentment of authority. With the possible exception of Rumania, other Warsaw Pact nations would be likely to assist the Soviets in an invasion of Poland. But the last illusions of East bloc cohesion would surely be shattered if the Poles fought back. In that case, says British Kremlinologist Edward Crankshaw, "the bogus fabric of the Warsaw Pact would be in tatters. The U.S.S.R. would be left a moral leper with a ruined...
Buthelezi argues that the homelands can never thrive because, for one thing, most of their best-educated young people will always aspire to live and work in affluent urban centers of white South Africa. While he hopes to see a broad, peacefully negotiated pact that will bring blacks into the South African power structure, he is not optimistic. The violence that has scarred urban ghettos like Soweto, he believes, could spread to the homelands...