John Borawski - Böcker

Borawski and Young provide a serious analysis of the major issues confronting European-North American relations. They draw detailed attention to the fundamental political and military issues before the Atlantic Alliance.They illustrate that NATO remains essential to Euro-Atlantic security. Only the Atlantic Alliance can bring to bear well-tested military capability under US leadership to promote its members security, interests, and democratic values. However, to remain vital, the Alliance must undertake a serious review of its major purposes: enlargement to the former Warsaw Pact nations, a strategic partnership with Russia, defense against weapons of mass destruction, and a more mature transatlantic relationship drawing on the lessons of the former Yugoslavia. This is an important assessment for policymakers, military planners, scholars, students, and others concerned with current European-American relations.

Given the disappointing history of arms control negotiations and agreements, disconcerting trends in the balance of power, and emerging technologies that challenge conventional assumptions about deterrence, new ways to promote security through negotiations must be identified and utilized if arms control is ever to play an integral role in enhancing deterrence and reducing instabilities. Confidence-building measures (CBMs) may offer one way out of the contemporary arms control morass. Instead of focusing on limiting the number and types of weaponry, CBMs are designed to control how, when, where, and why military activities occur. By clarifying military intentions and regulating the operations of military forces in times of both crisis and calm, CBMs can help diminish the opportunities for war arising from surprise attack or from miscalculation, accident, or failure of communication. This volume assembles leading CBM experts from government and academia to assess the utility of CBMs in a wide variety of areas. It is intended to serve as a basic primer on the subject, as well as to contribute to the ongoing national debate over the role of arms control in strengthening national security by analyzing new and fruitful avenues toward that over-riding objective.