Word: nato
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...world around it, and see little point in going out looking for dragons to slay. Barack Obama may be Europe's darling, but he will find that his suitor's ardor cools pretty quickly the moment he asks European parents to volunteer their sons and daughters to beef up NATO forces in Afghanistan...
...same peace and prosperity that Europeans now enjoy. From that logic of geography should flow two pressing priorities of European strategic policy: closer engagement with Russia and with Turkey. Both nations feel aggrieved at their treatment by Europe, Russia because (in breach of promises made in the early 1990s) NATO was extended not just to the borders of the old Soviet Union but actually inside them; Turkey because it thinks that the E.U. intends to dangle the carrot of accession, while never truly intending Turkey to nibble...
...payoffs haven't been bad. During the August crisis in the Caucasus, Chancellor Angela Merkel sounded as if she might welcome Georgia and the Ukraine into NATO soon. No more; it is back to a pretty clear nein for a very long time. To Moscow, Berlin now offers "as close and reliable a partnership as possible...
...Republic - is also doing fine. Ukraine and the Baltics, after all, were once part of the Soviet Union, and the others were satrapies until the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Never mind that all of them, with the exception of Ukraine, are now firmly embedded in E.U. and NATO; for Russia they are either the "near abroad" or what the tsars used to call Russia's "sphere of influence...
...Prague. You would have thought Russia's march through Georgia and its quasi-annexation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia would have instilled a healthy sense of ursophobia in Berlin and points west. You might also think that Russian pressure tactics against the newer members of the E.U. and NATO would sharpen doubts about Moscow's pledges to be a "good citizen...