he necessary consensus, despite considerable domestic opposition, for the placement of American long range nuclear missiles in Great Britain and West Germany in the mid-1980s. By then, moderating influences in Soviet foreign policy and internal weakness within the Soviet Union were generating strains within NATO.
Diminution of the Soviet Threat. The ending of the Cold War placed in question the continuing validity of NATO's reason for existence, the Soviet military threat. Rosner (1996, July-Aug.) said that after 1989, "it is time to recognize that NATO expired" (p. 14). Serious opposition to NATO and certainly any expansion of its role, began in the early 1980s. It covered many elements of the political spectrum in Western Europe and the United States.
A leading conservative critic of NATO, Kristol (1995, 6 Feb.), says that "NATO is a vast irrelevance. Let it slide into obsolescence . . . The Cold War is over, and with it the phase of world history --the European phase" (p. A14). On the left, the
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