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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 172 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 172, February 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Officially it’s a ‘Partnership for Peace’. That’s newspeak for the strategy of gradually pulling the countries of Eastern Europe into the Western orbit, announced by US President Bill Clinton at the NATO summit last month.
Officially the series of treaties begun by Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev are leading to a reduction of nuclear and conventional forces. In reality something very much more dangerous is happening – the new world order has led to an international arms bazaar of military hardware.
The Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty was meant to reduce the risk of war by limiting the amount of non-nuclear weapons that each country could hold. But the vast majority of weapons have not been destroyed. NATO has followed a policy of ‘cascading’ weapons from the countries that are above the CFE limits to those of its allies that are below the CFE limits.
So, although the US army has lost some equipment, this is ‘mainly through the “cascading” to European allies of tanks, APC (armoured personal carriers) and artillery in excess of the CFE Treaty limits’, according to the International Institute of Strategic Studies.
This process has led, for instance, to the Greek army receiving 590 American M60 tanks and another 170 German Leopard tanks plus 70 203mm self propelled guns. The Greek navy has benefitted to the tune of three US destroyers, one German frigate, three frigates from the Netherlands and three German corvettes.
Under the same scheme the hardware of the Turkish army has ‘risen drastically’ according to the IISS. Some 700 M60 tanks, 20 Leopard tanks, 60 APCs and 70 artillery pieces have found their way to the country that borders on two of the hottest spots in the world – the Balkans and Iraq. Hundreds of tanks, artillery pieces and APCs have also ‘cascaded’ into the armouries of Spain and Portugal.
A similar process has been taking place in the former Eastern bloc countries. The Hungarian ruling class, worried by the war in the neighbouring Balkan states and mindful of nationalism directed against Hungarian minorities in Slovakia and Romania, have been buying arms from Russia. Yeltsin has been happy to do the deals in return for the cancellation of rouble debts.
So $800 million worth of modern Mig29 fighters are now on their way to Hungary. A further deal to supply new surface to air missiles is now likely. Both bits of equipment are likely to be aimed at Serbian aircraft which overfly Hungarian airspace on route to Croatia.
Germany, not to be left out, has given Hungary spare parts and equipment from the vast stockpiles of the old East German army. Indeed much East German military equipment has turned up in the Russian Baltic port of Kaliningrad, making it ‘one of the great arms bazaars in a region awash with military equipment and demoralised soldiers’ according to the Financial Times.
Slovakia, unnerved by the Hungarian deal, has now made a similar debt for Migs arrangement with Russia. Poland, meanwhile, like the Czech Republic and Slovakia, is rebuilding its arms industries, partly via close links with foreign, including Israeli, companies.
This great fissuring of the world system in the wake of the Cold War is what the rulers of the major powers fear most – Yugoslavia is the nightmare waiting to unfold across parts of Eastern Europe and through the successor states of the USSR.
That is why Clinton spent so much time promising money to Russia and gradual inclusion in the Western club to the former members of the Warsaw Pact.
But NATO itself is not free of strains. Clinton wants to shape the future of Europe, but he no longer has the money to pay for the privilege. That’s why US troop numbers in Europe are down to 100,000, a third of their Cold War numbers. It’s also why, for all the talk of NATO solidarity, the summit declaration insisted that the ‘European pillar’ of NATO must be strengthened.
The US military is already reshaping itself for this new system. Equipment and rapid force deployment spending has hardly fallen, neither has spending on nuclear weapons, but savings have been made in the unworkable Star Wars programme and in cutting nearly 100,000 personnel from the armed forces.
These cuts will reduce US defence spending to a postwar low of just 3 percent by 1998. In the last three years some 400,000 workers in the US defence industry have lost their jobs. Similar numbers have been made redundant in the former USSR. The same pattern is observable in every arms industry.
The result will be smaller, more ‘professional’ armies equipped with the most destructive weapons money can buy – ‘more bangs per buck’ as the military like to put it. And their cast off weapons circulate in the biggest and most dangerous tank boot sale the world has ever seen.
Meanwhile, beneath it all the economic certainties guaranteed by the high arms spending of the Cold War are disappearing faster than ever.
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