Clear Choice For West: Friend or Foe

It is a sweet irony that a meeting of the CSCE, one of the world's most laughable international organizations, should have turned into a watershed of post-Cold War security, the moment when the honeymoon between the Western and Slavic worlds publicly ended and the various fig leaves that had been hiding the split were stripped away.


In the wake of the Budapest summit of the 53-nation Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, it will, for example, be difficult to go on arguing that the Partnership for Peace is much more than a diplomatic Trojan horse, constructed to bring NATO into Eastern Europe without Moscow noticing.


Similarly, the fiction that Russia and the West are working toward the same conclusion in former Yugoslavia, only using different tools, has been exposed. Asked to vote at the with the rest of the European world that the Serbs are at fault in the conflict in Bosnia, Russia used its veto.


It was Russia that took the initiative and spoiled the party in Budapest, not because Yeltsin is under pressure from nationalists at home or any other such homily, but because the passage of time and a Republican victory in U.S. congressional elections have made it impossible to pretend any longer.


The raw fact is that Russia and the West have different strategic interests that need to be reconciled. They have different clients in the former Yugoslavia, for example, and any policy on Bosnia must take this into account or suffer some very unpleasant surprises further down the road.


Similarly, the West must recognize that NATO is a military alliance, not a cuddly democratic club, and that it is actively extending its grasp toward its institutionally determined enemy: Russia.


True, Russia remains a military superpower, is politically unstable and is even less cuddly than NATO. But NATO's job is to ensure peace in Europe. So why does it need to expand to include Poland, when Poland is not under threat, yet the very act of expansion must provoke a negative response from Russia?


The world has changed since the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Every Russian troop movement since 1989 demonstrates that Moscow assumes its military is not required on the Western front, because it sees no threat there. By contrast, Moscow is deeply and aggressively concerned about security on its southern and eastern borders as we see now in Chechnya, Abkhazia and Tajikistan.


What Russia was asking at the CSCE summit is this: does the West want Moscow as an enemy again? If so, expand NATO to isolate Russia. If not, find ways to reconcile differences in strategic interests and take some financial risks to tie Russia into the Western economy. The choice is clear.