Word: membership
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...Alexander Rahr, a Russian expert at Germany's Council on Foreign Relations, suggests that the business lobby played a large role in Merkel's "dramatic" climbdown from her outright endorsement of Georgia's NATO membership in Tbilisi last month to her softer stance in Brussels. John Kornblum, a former U.S. ambassador to Germany who is now the chairman of the German unit of investment bank Lazard, says that while he opposes sanctions himself, Germany's tolerant attitude toward Russia goes even deeper. "Germans are very, very ready to take the Russians' side," he says. "This crisis will make the appeasers...
...After the Soviet Union collapsed, recall, NATO membership was extended to the East European satellite states of the Soviet Union and to the three former Soviet republics on the Baltic. In 1999, NATO, ignoring Russian objections, went to war with Russia's ally Serbia over Kosovo. Just this year, most Western powers recognized Kosovo's independence, and - while the issue remains unresolved - at the very least considered eventual NATO membership for another two former Soviet republics, Georgia and Ukraine. So the question becomes: Has the West needlessly provoked Russia for more than a decade? Is it somehow to blame...
...those who warned that it was unwise to poke the Russian bear in the eye, there were those (myself included) who believed that as the principal victims of the Cold War, those who had lived under Soviet oppression deserved any protection they sought. If what they wanted was NATO membership, then that was what they should...
...Beyond that, the key lesson of the past is a depressing one. There were no good, costless choices over NATO expansion, much less over Kosovo. A decision to withhold NATO membership from Eastern Europe, and to leave the Kosovars to their fate, would have exposed as hypocrites those who had spent the Cold War taking the high moral ground against the Soviet Union. But sometimes, we have just been reminded, good intentions are not enough to ward off tragedy. That's one reason why it's always worth keeping a volume of Yeats' poetry close at hand...
...holidays from history have ended," Polish Foreign Minister Radowlaw Sikorski said, adding that Russia's "imperialism" had been a wake-up call. He also warned that the E.U. - and NATO - had to be serious about its security pledges: they could no longer think of membership as cost-free, but being backed by force...