Russia and NATO: Rethink the Reset
FOR 20 years NATO has wooed the Kremlin, with disappointing results. The alliance has repeatedly said it does not regard Russia as a threat and has forsworn putting nuclear weapons (or indeed anything else significant) in member states that were once part of the Soviet empire. Indeed, so keen was NATO not to offend Russia that for the first few years after the newcomers joined in 2004, it made no plans to defend them.
Yet Russia’s behaviour to NATO is becoming nastier. The chief of the general staff, Nikolai Makarov, recently spoke openly about a first strike against future American missile-defence installations in Poland and Romania. Russia has conducted ostentatious military drills on its border with the Baltic states, NATO’s most vulnerable members. Vladimir Putin, newly reinstalled in the Kremlin, has gone back to bashing the West. He is shunning NATO’s Chicago summit next week (and also the G8’s, even though his hosts moved that one from Chicago to make him happier). Residual cold-war thinking is exemplified by Russia’s espionage efforts at NATO’s Brussels headquarters, where its military observers are rather generously given an office and formal accreditation.