Thursday, May 22, 2014

Letter From Europe - NATO Steps Back Into the U.S.S.R. --- LONDON — The best line about NATO was always the simplest: If NATO is the answer, what’s the question? -- After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the question was unclear. But it seemed resolved on Sept. 11, 2001, when Al Qaeda attacked the United States. NATO invoked Article 5, the red line of collective defense, for the first time. NATO went “out of area,” fighting Al Qaeda and the Taliban alongside the United States military. -- Now, with Libya in chaos and Afghanistan winding down, NATO is having a vivid fight over its future, which is actually a vivid fight about its past. With Russian revanchism in Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea, are we back, back in the U.S.S.R.? Or as Marx said so trenchantly, is history repeating itself, not as the tragedy of the Soviet Union, but as farce? -- Stated more simply: Is the confrontation a Ukraine problem or a Russia problem? Is it a blip, which can be treated like a speed bump before returning to the straight, rich road of commerce, or is it something fundamental, not so much a challenge to the postwar order as a break with it, blowing a hole in that road? -- With a NATO summit meeting in Wales in early September, these questions matter, because an alliance communiqué must be negotiated among 28 member states. It would be impossible for NATO not to take a position on Ukraine and Russia in September, senior diplomats from NATO countries agree, but what should it say? -- How much should NATO pull back from its policy of cooperation with Russia and the 1997 Founding Act on mutual relations? Should it end the 2002 NATO-Russia Council? More concretely, should NATO reverse its pledge not to deploy troops permanently on the territory of countries once behind the Iron Curtain, like Poland and the Baltics? -- More fundamentally, should NATO now see Russia as it saw the Soviet Union — as the main antagonist that drives alliance thinking — or should it continue to hope for cooperation with Moscow, on the presumption that Vladimir V. Putin has just had a Ukrainian moment? -- After all, in 2008, when Russia trapped Georgia into a short war and occupied two Georgian territories, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, NATO only suspended “business as usual” with Russia, although “cooperation” continued on issues like counterterrorism and Afghanistan. Just a year later, business was back to normal, at little cost to Moscow. Mr. Putin did not, however, annex those territories — he just proclaimed their independence. Russia could argue that it had not changed Europe’s postwar borders by force. -- But that is precisely what Moscow has done in Crimea, and even NATO countries most sympathetic to Russia are having a hard time looking away. -- The early days of this debate within NATO are bitter, a NATO diplomat says. If resurgent Russia provides NATO a renewed raison d’être, it has also resurfaced the repressed differences between “old Europe” and “new Europe,” the former Soviet bloc countries. -- For old Europeans like Britain, France and Germany, the Russian threat is far away. And there is business to be done, from energy and arms deals (the Mistral, anyone?) to oligarchic wealth management. -- But for new Europeans, the threat feels existential, and they want reassurance from both NATO and their reluctant European Union partners. -- The NATO debate is not about the unacceptability of what has happened in Ukraine, but what it means and what to do about it. President Toomas Hendrik Ilves of Estonia speaks for many when he says that Mr. Putin has broken the postwar order put in place with the 1975 Helsinki Accords and the end of the Cold War. The West, and NATO, this view goes, must create something new. -- Others fear that something new is really something old: the restoration of the Cold War. It’s too soon for that conclusion, they argue, and it would inflict too much pain on a Europe already suffering stagnant growth. -- NATO needs to find consensus on how to interpret Russia and what that means for military deployments. But the larger challenge remains: to define NATO’s future. - STEVEN ERLANGER, NYTimes, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/23/world/asia/nato-steps-back-into-the-ussr.html?ref=world

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