Moscow's decision by Summer 1991 to abide by the terms of an agreement restricting conventional forces in Europe (CFE) caused new thinking among allied governments about the nature of new East–West security arrangements. A year and a half earlier, the former chief of the Soviet General Staff, and presently close advisor to General Secretary Gorbachev, Marshal Sergei F. Akhromeyev, remarked that the new Soviet political thinking and defense doctrine were inseparably connected. The companion foreign policy he described as threefold: demilitarization, democratization, and de-ideologization. The first element, he said, effectively excludes the use of force in relations with other countries. The second establishes the principle of equality in Soviet dealings with other countries, large and small. The third removes the ideological aspect in international relations in favor of greater reliance upon international law. The impact of this policy on the Soviet war machine, and, indeed, upon the political structure and forces of the entire Warsaw Pact, has been dramatic.

In consequence, as Soviet theater forces enter the final decade of the twentieth century, they find themselves marching to an unfamiliar drummer along a path winding through doctrinal terra incognita. The shell of the Warsaw Pact dissolved, and the myth of socialist solidarity and brothers-in-arms among the troops of the East European states has been shattered. The armies of the USSR's “allies” have undergone steep reductions in practically all dimensions, and the political milieu has changed so precipitously that the remaining forces share little more than the most superficial common grounds for coordinated action with their former masters.