Jeremiah Smith: “It is still going to take a commitment, whether you are in NATO or not, it is still going to take a commitment to defend…”

“It is still going to take a commitment, whether you are in NATO or not, it is still going to take a commitment to defend Poland, period. You have to have a will to do that, whether you are in NATO or not. The point here is we have an opportunity, where the Russians have reached out to us ever so slightly, but as the Senator from Virginia has talked about in strategic weapons reduction, in trying to look at what Yeltsin has gone through, the market reforms--1000 percent inflation a few years ago down now to 8 percent. They have worked hard to try to make this thing work with a lot of strong leadership. I don't think this is the way to encourage them to continue to do that. This Senator, I guess much like Nixon going to China, is hardly one who has been soft on the Russians or the Soviet Union over the past several years of my public life, and certainly I have been in as strong opposition to them as anyone else. But also a strategist has to look at the real world, and I don't think we ought to be looking at just simple, cheap analogies here. We ought to be looking at the real world, and the real world is today, not what it was yesterday. Yesterday the real world was Stalin, was the cold war, was the ``evil empire,'' was expansionist tendencies, and was the NATO which came forth to block all of that. Today, we don't know what the future will bring; therefore, we do need NATO.…”