Love is lost between NATO and Russians

WASHINGTON — It was December of 1991, the very month that 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 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 become transmogrified into something considerably less historic.

Moscow’s attitude by then had elements of both its old and new psychology, 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.

U.S. criticism

The part of the story that is taking place in the West sees American Defense Secretary Robert Gates at a major Western security conference in Munich, bitterly criticizing the European powers, especially Germany, for their refusal to send more troops to fight alongside Americans and Canadians in Afghanistan. At the same time, Canada was threatening to remove its 2,500 soldiers from Afghanistan unless NATO’s European members were sent to aid the fight.

Gates further warned that NATO was in danger of 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 the formation of the European Union, which is dramatically extending its membership to Eastern European countries such as Hungary, Poland and Bulgaria. The E.U. 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 retired Marine general (and former NATO supreme allied commander) 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.

Carrying those negative analyses further is an amazing interview with retired Singaporean prime minister and brilliant statesman Lee Kuan Yew, conducted last week by the era’s classic foreign correspondent Arnaud de Borchgrave, United Press International editor at large.

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 U.S. realizes that Afghanistan cannot succeed as a democracy, the world balance of power will shift in favor of Russia and China.

Look eastward

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, 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.”

“We see how under the guise of declarations of freedom and open society the sovereignty of countries and entire regions is being destroyed,” Putin said.

How things have changed since 1991, since 2002, since even a couple of years ago.

Universal Press Syndicate