"NATO and Russia: In Need of a Bold Step"

Gareth Evans and Alain Délétroz

2 April 2009

The biggest unresolved challenge facing the NATO countries’ leaders when they meet on the Rhine this week is how to manage the organization’s relationship with Russia. Nobody wants to relive the Cold War, but habits of mind from that era persist on both sides, continuing to influence behaviour and inhibiting the clean break from the past that would be in everyone’s interest.

Russia’s invasion of Georgian territory last year seemed to confirm every latent NATO fear about the aggressive resurgence of the beast-from-the-east which the organization was formed sixty years ago to counter. And it is hard to argue that Moscow’s response to the situation in South Ossetia was not an indefensible overreaction, whatever judgment one makes about President Saakashvili’s contribution to the course of events. But what was missing from nearly all the Western reaction was any thoughtful reflection on what its own leaders’ contribution might have been, over the years since the USSR collapsed, to Russia’s newly assertive posture.

It is not fully appreciated, even now, in most NATO capitals how strongly Moscow feels that the organisation’s expansion, deep into the former socialist camp and the former USSR itself, was a brutally insensitive and confrontational response to the quick and generous Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Germany and Central Europe. The West rightly argues that all new NATO members have joined freely, and certainly not under pressure from the U.S. or EU member states. But the vast majority of Russians see NATO as an offensive military alliance, bombing Belgrade in 1999 without UN Security Council approval and now trying to surround Russia in spite of promises made to Mikhail Gorbachev not to expand eastwards.

NATO has become an easy target for nationalists in Russia who want to buoy anti-Western sentiment and convince the population that they are facing a significant threat from outside - basically the same as that during the Cold War. It is unquestionably the case that in the present environment any new enlargement towards Russian borders, particularly to Ukraine and Georgia, will be universally perceived in Russia as an unfriendly act that will demand retaliation.

How can these tensions be defused in a way that will be constructive and forward-looking, but also acknowledge the political reality that neither NATO nor Russia will be very keen to fundamentally change its narrative of what has occurred so far? The best starting point, in our view, would be to acknowledge that the problem with NATO’s expansion was not so much that it extended to Russia’s borders, but that it stopped there.

The most helpful single step, accordingly, that NATO leaders could take at this Summit would be to make a very clear statement that NATO is an alliance of the free open for membership by all countries on the European continent, including Russia itself, and encouraging Moscow to seek membership at a time of its own choosing.

Making such an explicit public statement would have at least three positive consequences. It would place the ball in the Russian leadership’s court, forcing it to consider the offer seriously and articulate a response. It would ease tensions surrounding Ukraine and Georgia: possible NATO enlargement here could no longer be seen as inherently unfriendly act towards Russia if the door is open for Russia itself to join the alliance. And it would paint into a corner the most nationalist politicians in Russia who use NATO so flagrantly to undermine any serious move toward real democratization at home.

Crisis Group has recently tested this approach in private conversations with a number of senior officials in Moscow. Their reaction has been surprisingly uniform, and fascinating: Medvedev and Putin would think very seriously about it, and the military would probably be in favor. For the military, joining NATO would mean enhancing standards and being in the same game as the world’s most modern armies.

For the Kremlin leadership, NATO’s transition to a visible new ‘collective security’ role, finally abandoning its Cold War ‘collective defence’ remit, might be a way of giving real content to President Medvedev’s call nine months ago for a new security architecture in Europe, as to which Moscow has not yet proposed any specific blueprint.

What Medvedev has done is launch a very bold reform of the Armed Forces that, if carried out as presented, would mean that the Russian army will cease to be an broad defensive block facing the West, and instead become a modernized, quickly deployable outfit, capable of acting in regional or global hot spots, very much like its Western counterparts. There is a potentially significant message here which NATO should not ignore.

If Barack Obama in Strasbourg this Friday were to state publicly that NATO at 60 is also there to welcome Russia should it decide to join, subject to satisfying the same conditions as every other new member, he would press a major “reset” button indeed in US-Russian relations. The risk for the alliance in such a statement is negligible. Russia could say “no, thank you”, but will have difficulty thereafter in claiming that NATO enlargement is targeted against Russia. Or it could respond positively, in which case it will have to start working hard on, among other things, creating the necessary democratic controls on its armed forces and its intelligence services - something that many Russians and people in the West have long been waiting for.

A chaotic world demands bold leaders capable of taking bold historical steps. Two decades ago, Ronald Reagan made a vibrant call in Berlin to Mikhail Gorbachev to put his words into deeds by tearing down the Berlin wall, and he answered by doing exactly that. Opening the door for NATO membership now to Medvedev’s Russia is another step that would have profoundly positive implications for the future stability of Europe and the wider world.

By Gareth Evans, President, and Alain Délétroz Vice President (Europe) of the International Crisis Group.

This article appeared today in Reuters: The Great Debate under the title "NATO and Russia".

Moscow Presses NATO on War Blame

22 December 2008

Moscow said it would insist on determining the cause of the August war in Georgia as NATO and Russia restarted diplomatic contacts that have been suspended since then.

Friday's statement came as diplomats at the Vienna-based Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said Russia is jeopardizing the future of the OSCE's mission to Georgia.

NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer and Dmitry Rogozin, Moscow's ambassador to the alliance, met over lunch in the first high-level meeting after a four-month hiatus caused by the war. The informal meeting aimed to explore how formal contacts could be restarted.

NATO spokeswoman Carmen Romero said the two sides would look to hold an informal meeting of the NATO-Russia Council at ambassadorial level next month. In Moscow, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the Russian side wanted to discuss the root causes of the brief war in which Russian forces occupied large swaths of Georgia after Georgian troops shelled and invaded the breakaway region of South Ossetia.

The United States and some Eastern European nations have blamed Russia for causing the bloodshed, but Moscow says its military actions were defensive and in response to Georgia's aggression.

"Now, when our NATO colleagues talk about restoring relations, we will insist that the restoration of ties starts with the discussion of the causes of the Caucasus crisis which our NATO partners dodged in August," Lavrov said.

Rogozin said that probes conducted since the conflict showed conclusively that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili was responsible for starting the war and that NATO would have to acknowledge that.

A Georgian parliamentary commission released a report late Thursday saying mismanagement and poor communications hampered Georgia in the conflict, but it supported Saakashvili's claims that Russian military movements forced him to launch an attack targeting South Ossetia.

Meanwhile, Russia has demanded that the OSCE divide its operations in Georgia to reflect the "independence" of separatist South Ossetia if it wants to extend its monitoring mission beyond Dec. 31, diplomats said Friday.

The United States and European allies in the 56-nation OSCE have not recognized South Ossetian independence. Moscow did so after the hostilities in August.

"Russia doesn't want the OSCE's Georgia mission to have any say or responsibility over activities in South Ossetia to underline that 'facts on the ground' have changed," said an OSCE diplomat who requested anonymity due to political sensitivities.

Russia has prevented OSCE observers from returning to South Ossetia, despite pledging under a ceasefire to let them back in. It says South Ossetian authorities should decide -- a firewall since most countries do not recognize them.

Russia and Georgia also blamed each other Friday for delaying repairs to a pipeline that pumps gas to South Ossetia. "According to our estimates, Georgia could repair the problem very quickly," Lavrov told the Federation Council. After Lavrov's statement, a Georgian minister said the damaged pipeline was located in a village occupied by Russian soldiers. "If they allow us to enter, we are ready to repair it," said Georgian Energy Minister Aleko Khetaguri. "But first they must remove their troops. Only then are we ready to consider resuming gas supplies to South Ossetia.

Source: The Moscow Times

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/article/1010/42/373348.htm