Word: sovietizers
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This is astonishing. When one thinks back to how dangerously unstabilizing the collapse of the Soviet Union was thought to be in the early 1990s, it is little short of miraculous that the Continent should have been so peaceful, and so prosperous, for so long. Even the wars of the Yugoslav succession, long and brutal though they may have been, were contained. In the mid-1990s, there were fears that other parts of Central and Eastern Europe would see the same sort of ethnic cleansing as the former Yugloslavia. It never happened...
...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...
...much for the courtship. The intimidation of Europe's East - the Baltics, Poland, Ukraine, the Czech 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...
...fact, the short freeze in the aftermath of Georgia was the exception that proves the rule - which reads: "When in doubt, seek to please." Call it instinct, call it reflex - the fact is that Europe (minus those Easterners who remember the terrible old days under the Soviet knout) will seek to avoid confrontation. The Russians know it, and the Obama Administration will learn this soon enough...
...other side, Russia remains true to the quip of former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt about the Soviet Union: "An Upper Volta with nukes." OK, today it is not just rockets. The Kremlin's power also flows (more effectively, in fact) from those pipelines that have hooked Europe on Russian oil and gas. But for all of its fabulous riches in the ground, Russia remains a kind of Third World country, an extraction economy whose welfare and clout fluctuate with the price of oil. Today, oil fetches less than one-half of what it did when Russia, flush with cash...