ABSTRACT
Americans have been at once heartened and puzzled by events in Europe. The demise of Communist authoritarianism in Poland threatens to be replaced with an assertive Catholicism that intrusively overlaps church and state. Elsewhere in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union the forces of disintegration, fueled by ethnic controversy and varieties of intolerance, threaten to destroy nation-states and erode regional security through the spread of cancerous border disputes. Gerald Frost's case for retaining North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) rests on an analysis of the weaknesses of what he perceives to be the primary alternatives: the less inclusive Western European Union, and the more inclusive Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. NATO's role inheres in coordinating the various Western approaches to security, which suggests some shift away from NATO's traditional function as a collective-defense entity and toward some yet-to-be defined element in a larger European security community, with a concomitant emphasis upon intra-alliance diplomacy.
