Center Warns Of Potential Triple-Play In Paris

On the eve of key meetings of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) in Paris on 18-19 November 1990, the Center for Security Policy expressed concern about the three-part agenda likely to dominate these sessions.

In an analysis released today entitled Agenda for the CSCE Meetings in Paris: Three Steps Backwards on European Security?, the Center expressed serious misgivings about the components parts of this agenda:

• The prospect that a substantial effort will be made to supplant the deterrent functions and military command structure of NATO with some form of CSCE-sponsored mechanism;

 

• The signature of a Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) agreement that is seriously flawed with respect to its equitableness, verifiability and impact on European security; and

 

• The probability that President Bush will use the occasion of his meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev and other leaders to commit vast new U.S. taxpayer resources to propping up the ruling Soviet regime.

Each of these initiatives, taken in isolation, would be detrimental to U.S. and allied security interests. Moreover, especially when taken together, they will serve to strengthen precisely the wrong sorts in the Soviet Union — the central authorities in Moscow.

"The most promising development in Europe today is not the completion of a CFE agreement, the bonhomie of a CSCE meeting or the emergence of a formidable, integrated Europe ’92," said Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., the Center’s director. "Instead, it is the burgeoning, genuinely democratic and free market reform movements taking hold in virtually every corner of the erstwhile Soviet empire. These movements have the potential to enhance not only the well-being of their own people but also to reduce dramatically — and possibly irreversibly — the threats posed to the West by the communist regimes they seek to replace."

The Center believes that it is incumbent on the West to use every tool available to help these democratic, free market forces to succeed. The first step towards doing so, however, must be to refrain from taking diplomatic, military or economic actions that would undercut such forces, actions like those contemplated for the Paris meetings this weekend.

Click here for copies of Agenda for the CSCE Meetings in Paris.