Word: russian
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...Paul Quinn-Judge: No. And if public opinion polls are to be believed, it's one of those rare occasions when Russian popular feeling agrees entirely with the rhetoric of the Kremlin. The Russians have never reconciled themselve to losing the Baltic states (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, which hope to join NATO), even though they only took them in 1941 under extremely brutal circumstances - although they had been, unhappily, part of the Russian empire for a couple of hundred years. It's a kind of vestigial nostalgia for empire of the type you saw in Britain 30 years...
...Baltic states to join NATO. Of course, that raises the question of what his own plans for the Baltics might be. That's certainly something the Baltic leaders are going to worry about. But Putin can't afford to simply buy the Bush line on NATO expansion, because the Russian president is trying to project the image of a confident, assertive new Russia, ready to stand up for its interests. And accepting NATO expansion onto its doorstep would be a throwback to the Yeltsin foreign policy of rolling over for everything the West demanded, a policy which all of Russia...
...nothing to fear from the alliance; on the other hand they say everyone is free to join but Russia is not. It doesn't take a super brain to suspect, then, that the alliance is directed against them. NATO has tried over the past few years to alleviate Russian concerns through various consultative structures, but that's done nothing to mediate the flaw in the NATO argument or Russian suspicion...
...chill in post-communist Russia's relationship with the West, and primarily the U.S., began with Kosovo. The Russians are certainly paranoid about international forces intervening in bloody, brutal domestic conflicts - they think of Chechnya, for example. So the principle of intervention was unacceptable. But NATO's show of force was also seen by the Russians as aimed at them, to show off Western military capability in the face of Russian military decay...
...Their role models, of course, are Ronald Reagan and (although they'd never admit it) Bill Clinton, who each, in their own way, personalized their relationship with European and Russian leaders to Washington's advantage. But Europe in the Reagan years was mostly governed by conservatives and lived under the shadow of the Soviet military. Post-Cold War Europe is mostly run by center-left governments that have precious little in common with Bush's conservativism. Moreover, the maturing European Union is beginning to claim an increasingly important diplomatic role for itself, in which deference to the United States...