No Wonder Russia Is Paranoid

[Purveyor]

The West finds it hard to understand, but Nato's expansion is provocative to Russian eyes

George W. Bush is absolutely wrong in his support for Nato enlargement. That goes without saying. What is more surprising is that Vladimir Putin is absolutely right in both the conclusion and the reasoning behind his outspoken, even threatening, opposition to America on this issue. And that applies with even greater force to Dmitri Medvedev, the incoming Russian president, who has gone farther even than Mr Putin in suggesting that a decision by the West to entertain the membership applications presented by Ukraine and Georgia to the Nato Council would be tantamount to a declaration of cold war.

If a genuine spirit of peaceful co-operation is ever to be created between the West and Europe's most populous country - and what may one day be its biggest economy - then our leaders will have to think much more deeply about the legitimate grievances that Nato's enlargement arouses in Russia.

Ever since the dismemberment of the Soviet Union by Boris Yeltsin in 1991, the enlargement of Nato and the EU towards Russia's western and southern borders has looked like to Russians the last remaining expansionist empire in Europe, perhaps in the world.

While EU enlargement on its own could be presented as an economic enterprise, designed mainly to raise living standards in Central and Eastern Europe and even to increase the potential of Russia's neighbours as trading partners, the combination of the EU and Nato is a very different proposition.

EU-Nato, under the Bush doctrine of continuous eastward expansion, becomes an unstoppable politico-military juggernaut, advancing relentlessly towards Russia's borders and swallowing up all intervening countries, first into the EU's economic and political arrangements and then into the Nato military structure. Considered from the Russian standpoint, Nato's explicit new vocation to keep expanding until it embraces every “democratic” country in Europe and central Asia, with the unique and critical exception of Russia itself, becomes hard to distinguish from previous expansions into eastern territory by French and German heads of state whose intentions were less benign than those of the present Western leaders.

---EOE---

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/anatole_kaletsky/article3670814.ece

[LakeSamish706]

1. I liken it to Canada and Mexico becoming a military part of either Russia or China each having...

a major military buildup by Russia or China. How would the executives of the US view something like that? Not very positively I might add.

[Purveyor]

2. Canada not, Mexico remote but maybe. Others in SA....more than likely.

This new 'game' is just getting started...