Word: nato
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Washington hawks insist that the remedy to Russia's military humiliation of Georgia is to expedite the smaller country's incorporation into NATO. After all, Moscow might think twice about attacking any nation able to trigger the Atlantic Alliance's Article 5, which obliges all member states to respond militarily to an attack on any one of them. President Bush, in fact, toured Europe last spring to stump aggressively for Georgia and Ukraine to be granted Membership Action Plans, the first step toward joining the Alliance. But despite Bush's high-profile campaigning, the proposal was rebuffed at NATO...
...Perhaps the best preview of Russians' brewing rage at their lost grandeur came in Kosovo, when, in the wake of NATO's 1999 war against Serbia - a war Russia opposed - Russian forces seized the airport that NATO had intended as headquarters for what many Russians considered an occupation force. No shots were fired, but Western generals found it jarring to see how far Russia would go for a territory so marginal to its wealth and security...
...When Western countries recognized Kosovo earlier this year, Russia's NATO ambassador, Dmitri Rogozin, telegraphed Moscow's plans by threatening to "proceed from the assumption that to be respected, we have to use brute military force." Putin said the "stick" that Western countries had employed "will come back to knock them on the head...
...occasion, Western countries have consciously avoided humiliating militant powers, fearing the consequences of emasculation. Having neutered Germany following World War I, the Allies showed West Germany respect after World War II, investing heavily in its economy and absorbing the country into NATO. And while President George W. Bush seemed unconcerned about Russia's simmering fury when he lobbied for Georgian and Ukrainian entry into NATO earlier this year, many European governments rejected the proposal, showing that they - perhaps because of their own history - were more attuned to the risks of compounding Russia's growing and alarming sense of victimhood...
...predictable: A frustrated Russian government feeling increasingly encircled as NATO's membership expanded steadily eastward, its coffers engorged by $110-a-barrel oil, facing a pesky neighbor - and former Russian imperial territory - cozying up to the United States and inviting U.S. troops in to train its soldiers. Whether or not Washington or Tbilisi could have avoided the Russian invasion, the very fact that the U.S. has no desire for war with Russia should have acted as a brake on Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili's annual (since 2004) August skirmishes with pro-Moscow separatists in South Ossetia, which triggered last week...