ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, April 15, 1997 TAG: 9704150066
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
The West assumes NATO expansion poses no real theat to a noncommunist Russia. But do the Russians know that?
TO AMERICANS, Russian fears of an expanded NATO are hard to understand.
America and Western Europe aren't exactly in attack mode these days. The trend in the United States is, if anything, toward a sort of neo-isolationism.
Besides, why threaten a peaceful, democratic Russia? Surely the Russians, now that communism has collapsed, understand that no longer, as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright tried to tell them when she visited Moscow a few weeks ago, is it a situation of "you vs. us."
Well, yes. Except that in international relations, perceptions also matter. Regardless of what the West believes its intentions to be, how does NATO expansion look to the Russians?
Downright dangerous, according to academic students of Russia like historian Abbott Gleason of Brown University.
To many Russians, Gleason observes, the United States is the only superpower in a world where the old Soviet Union once shared that status. Germany, the Soviet Union's great enemy in World War II, is again Europe's dominant power. Via NATO, the United States and Germany are allies: To expand NATO into Poland and the Czech Republic is to remove the last vestiges of the territorial buffer that Russia acquired after that war.
Not that Russia, in its current militarily and economically enfeebled condition, is in much shape now to do anything about it.
But now isn't forever. Nor is it clear how durable are the beginnings of democracy in a country that before decades of communism was the land of the czars.
If NATO expansion evokes in many Russians a nationalist dread of incursion from the West, America and her European allies must take care that the result isn't a Western nightmare - democracy's early death in a frightened, resentful Russia.
LENGTH: Short : 42 linesby CNB