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16 Aug 2008 11:16 am
International Equilibrium
Jeffrey Tayler, writing from Moscow, has a smart dispatch on the war in Georgia. His thoughts on NATO:
...that the United States would even consider proposing Georgia for membership in NATO reflects a blindness to the consequences of the first two rounds of NATO expansion and defies elementary strategic logic.
Leaving aside how enrolling a tiny, technologically backward nation
located in the remote Caucasus region jibes with NATO’s treaty-adjured
mission to “promote stability and well-being in the North Atlantic
area,” the next round could kill what remains of Russia’s strategic
cooperation with the West—cooperation the West will need, for example,
to fight Islamic extremism in Central Asia, contain nuclear threats
from Iran and North Korea, and control the proliferation of nuclear
weapons. And Russia, with vast reserves of oil and gas, its arsenal of
ICBMs, its million-strong conventional forces, its advanced arms
industry, and its close relations with states like Iran, Syria, and
North Korea, retains considerable capacity as a maker or breaker of
international equilibrium. The West needs Russia on its side, much more
than it could benefit from admitting Georgia to NATO, and even more
than it would profit from the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan and Baku-Supsa
pipelines. Moreover, NATO’s previous encroachments into formerly Soviet
terrain, in conjunction with NATO’s 1999 war to prise Kosovo from
Yugoslavia (an historic Russian ally and fellow Orthodox Christian
nation) ignited in Russia the very anti-Western passions that have
propelled nationalistic Vladimir Putin to sustained approval ratings of
between 70 and 80 percent and threaten a new cold war.
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