Defensive Defence
As popular fears of Soviet aggression against Western Europe declined during
the 1980s, and the difficulty in rebutting anti-nuclear attitudes increased
correspondingly, there was a series of efforts to devise defence policies which
would be cheaper, less potentially aggressive or destabilizing, and would not
depend on nuclear weapons. The general principle was that theWarsaw Pact
should not be seen as having territorially expansionist policies of its own, but
instead to be motivated largely by an insecurity worsened by fears of Western
aggressive potential as exemplified by currentNATOpolicies. The plans, none
of which were ever accepted by NATO defence departments, varied enor-
mously in detail, but were taken very seriously by some parties, especially the
Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and important elements of the
British Labour Party. All the plans had the same common core, which was to
construct a military posture which would be physically incapable of advancing
into Eastern Europe, or indeed of attacking it by any means. At the same time
the plans argued for extensive use of lightly-armed reserves so that both the
cost and the symbolic threat of large heavily-armed standing armies would be
reduced. During the early part of theGorbachevperiod ofde ́tentethe idea
of defensive defence was picked up by the Soviet military as a bargaining
counter in arms control negotiations. The Soviet Union made great diplo-
matic play with proposed military reforms which, by making it less likely that
the Warsaw Pact armies could or would themselves advance westwards, put
pressure on NATO to adopt similar policies. Ultimately, the speed of the
collapse of the Soviet military economy and of Soviet control in Eastern
Europe overtook these more modest plans. They could have been extremely
influential, however, as Western fears of defence expenditure had already led to
a pressing need for conventional defence reductions, as manifested in the
Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treatyof 1990.
Deficit
All countries are prone to have deficits on any one of a number of financial
accounts at any time. However since the early 1980s the deficit, specifically the
gap between public expenditure and government revenues, has been a parti-
cular problem in the USA. This deficit grew extremely rapidly under President
Ronald Reagan because he combined a huge increase in defence expenditure
with major tax cuts in his first two years of office. In the 1992/93 financial year
the deficit was estimated at $350 billion, this being over 5% of US gross
domestic product (GDP). The deficit has become a persistent political sore,
because the only two ways of dealing with it, a cut in federal expenditure or a
major increase in taxes (seefiscal policy), are both too politically sensitive for
politicians to consider. US political culture has always been ‘tax-sensitive’,
Defensive Defence