#5
The Guardian (UK)
11 April 2002
Moscow dispatch
Russia relaxes opposition to Nato
The Kremlin's objections to Nato's predatory plans have fallen silent just as the western alliance is poised for its biggest expansion to date
By Ian Traynor

Ever since the mid-1990s when the Clinton administration responded to the end of the cold war by expanding Nato into the earlier Kremlin satellites of eastern Europe, Moscow has been crying foul. It wasn't fair. The Warsaw Pact had been dissolved. The red army had beat a retreat from east Gemany and the Baltic states. And yet Nato, left without the great enemy and its raison d'etre, not only persisted but got bigger and mightier.

Nato should be consigned to history's dustbin, supplanted by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe in which Russia has an equal voice, the Kremlin argued. Fat chance, Washington responded, reluctant to entrust European security to the OSCE, a feeble if occasionally useful talking shop.

But the whingeing from Moscow about Nato's predatory plans has fallen silent, at least at the policy-making level, just as, paradoxically, the western alliance is poised for its biggest expansion to date.

The Russians have recognised that bigger means smaller as far as Nato is concerned, and that if by the end of the year Nato has added seven new members to become an alliance of 26 (as opposed to 16 as recently as four years ago), it will be taking the fast road to irrelevance.

It remains difficult for Russian generals and great power nostalgics to accept a Nato that includes the Baltic troika of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, and the former Soviet states who look likely to be admitted at a Nato summit in Prague in November.

But the realists around President Vladimir Putin see weakness in size and discern a military alliance morphing into a political community - a Nato, in fact, which is becoming the OSCE by another name.

The shift in both perception and policy has been catalysed by September 11. Nato has been marginal to the war in Afghanistan. The White House has made little effort to exploit the resources of America's fundamental military allies and treaty partners.

Unlike in the US-led Nato war against Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia in 1999 which caused a crisis in relations between Russia and the west, Nato has been irrelevant to all intents and purposes in the Afghan campaign.

Russia, indeed, has been more useful than Nato to the Americans in supplying intelligence and giving a green light to US military deployments in post-Soviet central Asia.

Furthermore, in the broader war on terrorism, the US has made plain it will concentrate on building "coalitions of the willing" for its support, meaning ad hoc alliances with partners which can be summoned or discarded as dictated by events.

Nato might be useful to the Americans here, but not indispensable. Marginalised by the seismic shift in geopolitics since September 11, Nato's European members (Britain apart) find themselves concentrating on peacekeeping in Macedonia and elsewhere in the Balkans, coaxing wannabe members in eastern Europe into military reforms, resolution of ethnic tensions, and monitoring human rights.

It is all valuable work, but it is a far cry from the functioning war-fighting machine of the original Nato. It resembles rather an OSCE with (some) guns.

Russia's relaxed new approach to Nato is also helped by the plans for a new inclusive Russia-Nato council which is to give Moscow an equal say in various policy areas - not in core matters of Nato self-defence, but in the areas that now dominate the alliance's activities such as peacekeeping, arms and nuclear proliferation, crisis management, and search-and-rescue missions.

In Madrid on Thursday, the Russian foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, argued that this new relationship should be sealed at summit level, meaning that President Putin should attend Nato's summit in Reykjavik in May. The US secretary of state, Colin Powell, did not appear to object to the idea.

The prospect is of Mr Putin welcoming George Bush to his native St Petersburg and to Moscow next month for both men to sign a sheaf of papers sealing a new "strategic framework" between Russia and America and then Mr Putin going to Iceland a few weeks earlier to meet Nato heads of government as an equal ally and partner, confident that the bigger Nato becomes the more it withers away.

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