A long time ago, when I was part of the opposition to Communist dictatorship, I thought that if the Iron Curtain ever fell, communism collapsed and the Warsaw Pact was dissolved, NATO would also lose its raison d'etre as a principal tool of the policy of "containment." But once the Iron Curtain did indeed begin to fall, and I entered practical politics, I soon realized how naive I had been and how important was NATO's continued existence. In today's Washington Post, Vaclav Havel, the president of the Czech Republic, defends the growth and sustainment of NATO for a future fraught with unpredictible enemies and complex global relationships among nations. |
