1.   For all these years we had this huge military alliance designed to thwart the dreaded Commies.

2.   He said this summer that the Warsaw Pact had to become a political rather than a military alliance.

3.   NATO has been the most successful military alliance in history.

4.   Attention focused chiefly on strengthening the European pillar of the military alliance, although members failed to agree on how precisely this was to be achieved.

5.   The most visible public presence of the communist and capitalist blocs, however, is through their military alliances.

6.   Although the president publicly described the intervention as a humanitarian action, the preservation of NATO as a meaningful military alliance was an underlying reason.

7.   America, therefore, refrained from entering into military alliances with foreign nations.

8.   An American-dominated military alliance rumbling across Bosnia or anyplace else in Europe is anathema to the Russians.

9.   As a purely military alliance, NATO is ill equipped to ease those tensions before they explode as they did in Bosnia.

10.   As our military alliance expands, the European Union will feel pressure to bring in members, reducing the threat of a dominant Germany.