ABSTRACT
During the transcentury period (1990s and early twenty-first century) a factor long divorced from national security planning—economic performance—will inspire radical alterations in the security environment of the United States. If that environment is defined by the intensity of the foreign threat and the resources available to meet that threat, the impact on it of prolonged superpower economic decline became shockingly evident in 1989. The threat posed to the United States by the Soviet Union and its alliance system—a threat that has dominated U.S. national security planning since the late 1940s—commenced a remarkable retrenchment as economic pressures compelled the first contraction in Soviet real national defense spending since the 1950s and set the stage for a startling descent in Communist party power in Eastern Europe and, as a result, in the military credibility of the Warsaw Pact. At the same time, after four years of negative real growth in budget authority for U.S. national defense, the Bush administration was forced under severe budgetary pressure to accept further defense spending cuts deep into the 1990s.
