Love Lost In Russia, NATO

Team Infidel

Forum Spin Doctor
Washington Times
February 16, 2008
Pg. 9
By Georgie Anne Geyer
It was December 1991, the very month the Soviet Union was officially dissolved. I was interviewing Manfred Woerner, the impassioned German secretary-general of NATO, when he made some memorable comments about all the East Bloc and Russian officials suddenly — and amazingly — courting that Western military titan.
“After you leave,” he told me, “an hour later I have the deputy foreign minister of Russia. Next week, the foreign minister himself, Eduard Shevardnadze, will be here.
“All are turning toward NATO, and the reason is very simple — we are the only functioning security organization, and we are the only organization of stability. When I started out with NATO in 1988, I could not even see an East Bloc ambassador.”
It was an amazing moment — communist Russia was now trying to join the hated West’s military condominium. But it was just that — a moment.
By 2002, as it happened, I was interviewing another former secretary- general of NATO, the Spaniard Javier Solana. The idea of Russian membership had transmogrified into something considerably less historic.
Moscow’s attitude by then had elements of both its old and new psychology, Mr. Solana said. “Russia is a great power of itself. They want representation in NATO, but they do not now want to become a member.”
And today? Just this fall and winter, this old question of Russia and its relationship to NATO has taken some stunning new turns, not all of them public as yet.
The part of the story taking place in the West sees U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates at a major Western security conference in Munich, bitterly criticizing the European powers, especially Germany, for refusing to send more troops to fight alongside Americans and Canadians in Afghanistan. At the same time, Canada threatened to remove its 2,500 soldiers from Afghanistan unless NATO’s European members were sent to aid the fight.
Mr. Gates warned that NATO risked becoming a “two-tiered alliance,” divided between those who fight in Afghanistan and those who don’t.
But the Europeans are today deeply involved in forming the European Union, which is dramatically extending its membership to Eastern European countries such as Hungary, Poland and Bulgaria. The EU fervently wants an end to the wars that have rent Europe for so many centuries, and so naturally was never enthusiastic about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It has not helped that not one, but two, recent highest-level American reports on Afghanistan have been almost unrelentingly negative.
NATO forces there are in a “strategic stalemate,” according to the Atlantic Council of the United States, chaired by former NATO supreme allied commander, retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones. Taliban insurgents are expanding their control of sparsely populated areas, the council reports, and the central government is failing in reforms and construction. The second report, the Afghanistan Study Group, came to the same conclusion. Gen. Jones even said: “Make no mistake, NATO is not winning in Afghanistan. Afghanistan remains a failing state. It could become a failed state.”
Carrying those negative analyses further is an amazing interview with retired Singaporean prime minister and brilliant statesman Lee Kuan Yew, last week by the era’s classic foreign correspondent Arnaud de Borchgrave, editor at large for United Press International and The Washington Times.
The senior Asian statesman predicted that NATO’s very future is at stake in Afghanistan, and unless America’s European allies abandon appeasement and the United States realizes Afghanistan cannot succeed as a democracy, the world balance of power will shift in favor of Russia and China.
Mr. Lee fears that failure in Afghanistan will alter the world balance of power in favor of those two rising powers, Mr. de Borchgrave reports, because they “would be faced with a much weakened West in the ongoing global contest.” He cited the Bush administration’s request for more troops to bolster the 21,000 U. S. troops and 20,000 NATO troops now in Afghanistan, as well as noting the enormous apprehension with which the Europeans today look upon spending for defense.
Mr. Lee is looked upon as one of the most, if not the most, brilliant analysts on international affairs today.
The second part of the story — the part in the East — sees not only China developing at breakneck speed, but also sees Russia taking more aggressive positions on the chessboard.
In a revealing speech given recently, only weeks before Russia’s March 2 presidential elections (in which he has already chosen his temporary successor), Russian President Vladimir Putin lashed out against NATO expansion and the U.S. deployment of missile defense systems on its borders, calling it a “new arms race.”
“NATO itself . . . is approaching our border. We drew down our bases in Cuba and in Vietnam,” he said. “What did we get? New American bases in Romania, Bulgaria. A new third missile defense region in Poland. . . .
“We see how under the guise of declarations of freedom and open society the sovereignty of countries and entire regions is being destroyed.”
How things have changed since 1991, since 2002, since even a couple of years ago. And if one is to search for reasons why any possible rapprochement with Russia has been so totally lost, not to speak of our love relationship with NATO, one has only to look at the last seven years.
Georgie Anne Geyer is a nationally syndicated columnist.
 
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