Audio of NATO Conference Call
Posted by Adam Blickstein
NSN held an excellent Conference Call with three experts on NATO, US/European, and US/Russian relations examining this week's NATO summit, Bush's NATO legacy, the future of US/Russian relations in the context of NATO expansion and the missile shield as well as NATO's role in Afghanistan. Needless to say, the call covered quite a bit of territory...
Listen to the call that featured Dr. Charles Kupchan, Council on Foreign Relations Senior fellow for Europe Studies, Dr. Stephen Hanson, Director of the Ellison Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies, and Dr. Celeste A. Wallander, Professor of Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies at Georgetown here.
I agreed with Stephen Hanson's analysis of the Russian domestic political scene and strongly disagreed with Celeste Wallander's view of Russian politics. What Wallander doesn't seen to realize is that Russia's paaranoid view of the West is not just manufactered by the Putin administration but rooted in Russian history. Russians remember the Time of Troubles in the seventeenth century in which Poland and Sweeden tried to take over the Russian throne and also the English and American invovlement in the Russian civil war from 1919-1921. Finally there is the invasions by the Swedes in the first decade of the 1700s, Napoleans invasion of Russia, and the conflict with Germany during the two world wars that adds to Russia's fear of the west. What these experts failed to answer what really is the point of expanding NATO eastwards, and would the populations of the west really want to risk a potential nuclear conflict with the Russians over the Ukraine and Georgia? My guess is that they believed what ended the Cold War was the democracy movements in Eastern Europe in the late nineteen seventies which presured the Russians to change their political system. To carry on this logic further if those countries bordering Russia become Westernized through NATO then Russia too will change. The only problem with this view of the ending of the Cold War is that it is wrong as Archie Brown writes in his new book about perestroika in that it was Gorbachev alone who changed the Soviet Union and the events in Eastern Europe only strengthened the hands of the Communist hardliners in the early eighties before Gorbachev took power in 1985. This misreading of the end of the Cold War i