Eastward Ho!

5 April 2004


NATO Adds 7 New Members

Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Latvia and Estonia are now members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, bringing the total to 26. When the US and its western allies formed NATO, three of those countries were part of the Soviet Union, three others joined a rival group known as the Warsaw Pact, and Slovakia was married to the Czech Republic and an additional member of the WarPac. Needless to say, the Russians are making all kinds of noise about this expansion, which is meaningless jabbering designed for domestic consumption.

Vladimir Putin's Russia is not the Soviet Union, although it isn't quite a western, bourgeois liberal democracy either. It does not have the same sense of threat from the west that the paranoid gerontocracy of the Marxist-Leninist empire did. For that reason, Russian has actually chosen to cooperate with NATO on a great many issues, not least of which is anti-terrorism which Chechnya has brought into so many Russians' lives.

However, the Russians do have, within their body politic, a nationalist streak that is descended from Pan-Slavism and that looks back on the Cold War as the good old days. Having Belgian F-16s flying Civil Air Patrol over the former Soviet Socialist Republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia bothers these people. It makes them feel the loss that the system under which they labored suffered, despite being better off now than they were back then.

Thus, the fussing from the Kremlin, but there are no concrete actions in response, and there won't be. The fact is that Russia's security issues no longer come from the west but from its south. The countries known as the 'stans (Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, etc.) and their growing Islamic nationalist populations offer Russia much more scope for worry than London, Paris and Washington.

Indeed, within a decade, the time for Russia to join NATO, which still is an organization looking for a purpose beyond just coordinating the military activities of the winners of the Cold War, will have arrived. With Moscow's accession, the opportunity to turn NATO into the global police force that the UN was supposed to have been may enhance the prospects for peace within Europe and beyond. For now, the bluster means nothing, and needs ignoring.

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