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From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com
Organization: American Cybercasting
Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com
Subject: For the Record
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 92 04:44:31 EST
Message-ID: <14.1992Nov19.044432@AmeriCast.com>

For the Record

  From comments yesterday in Arlington by Gen. Colin Powell,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to the Professional Ser-
vices Council: Q:  Doyousee any possibility of a return to a Cold
War footing if things deteriorate (in the former Soviet Union)?

  A:  ... If I spent enough time on it, I can conjure up one of
these terrible scenarios that people like to do, return to some-
thing or other.

But I really don't see it.  Russia will be a major power.  It is
a land of enormous natural resources.  It is a land that has an
educated population.  It is a land that has technical capability,
as evidenced in the weapons systems that they have produced over
the years.  It will be a power, a world power, once it gets its
political system straight, once it obtains some kind of economic
and accounting and business system to harness this resource that
it has within its boundaries. And it will be a military power
just by size and by the nature of where it lives.

But I see that energy and that power being used to control its
own destiny and deal with problems on its immediate border.  I
don't see that power being used once again in an imperial way to
try to threaten Western Europe or Eastern Europe, the former
republics or the nations of the Warsaw Pact and the Baltic na-
tions.  I think one way to guarantee that is to ensure that NATO
remains alive and well and strong and that the United States con-
tinues to perform a leadership role ... with a military com-
ponent, a solid, real force in Europe for the foreseeable future.

Our Western European friends want that very badly. Our Eastern
European friends want that very, very badly.  And even our Rus-
sian friends, and friends in other republics of the former Soviet
Union, see utility in the North Atlantic connection remaining in-
tact as a source of stability for this changing world.

02:12 11-19C9999-----

Copyright 1992, The Washington Post.  This story is from the
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