Maritime Threat Perceptions after the Cold War

Abstract

The past two years have witnessed a diplomatic revolution in East-West relations that has undermined if not overturned the essentially conflictual conceptions that governed the conduct of both sides during the Cold War, and that has significantly altered and greatly diminished the sense of military threat each alliance was formerly thought to pose to the other. In Central Europe, in particular, the Cold War military confrontation is being dismantled: the division of Germany has ended; the Warsaw Pact has collapsed; Soviet forces are being withdrawn from Eastern Europe; and the agreement on conventional forces in Europe, signed at the Paris summit in November 1990 after negotiations of remarkable swiftness, will reduce and regulate the deployment of conventional forces in Europe and will put in place a substantial mechanism of verification. While the net military impact of these developments is debatable, there can be no doubt that the military environment in Central Europe is being dramatically transformed and threat perceptions have changed accordingly.