BEIJING - In recent weeks, influential American personalities such as former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, and senior officials, such as National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, have given high marks to Russian President Vladimir Putin and tried to reassure Moscow about the enlargement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to include the Baltic states.
Russia should not be worried about the enlargement, say the Americans, because it is not aimed at Moscow, and the proof of the good US faith is that America is willing to consider Russia's accession to NATO in due time.
This simple proposal that has been put on the table may help defuse many real problems in Europe with Russia. NATO enlargement with Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania would de facto close off the Russian territory of Kaliningrad from the rest of the Russian states - it would be surrounded, and possibly besieged, by the Baltic States and Poland, thereby disrupting territorial continuity within the land ruled by Moscow. Furthermore, many ethnic Russians living in the Baltic States would be marshalled into NATO, giving them divided loyalties, to their host country, say Latvia, and their mother country, Russia.
This revives memories of a nightmare that Europe has already seen, between World War I and II, when East Prussia was isolated from the rest of Germany and millions of ethnic Germans lived in Poland and Czechoslovakia.
In addition, there is Russia's legacy of MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction), where thousands of atomic warheads were amassed against the former American enemy and which still have the political power of blackmail if sold piecemeal on the world's black markets of anti-Western terrorism. In other words, the West needs to make sure that pieces of this aging yet still dangerous arsenal do not fall in the hands of the latest dictator or terrorist hiding in Afghanistan or in some remote cave of the Sahara Desert. As Hollywood keeps on telling us, the possession of a single atomic warhead and the possibility of its delivery onto Washington, London, Rome, Tokyo, New York or Berlin could bring Western countries to their knees, similar to, or even worse, than Cold War times.
To avoid this possibility, NATO needs to get its hands on the arsenal, and it figures the best way to do it is to admit Russia into NATO. However, it is clear that admitting Russia would not be a clear-cut deal. It could pose more problems than it solves. Russia, and thus its "dwarves" - Byelorussia and Ukraine - would be a mass of over 200 million people, twice as many as the most populous European nation, Germany. This would pose issues of balance that could not be easily solved, even by a stronger American commitment in Europe, which in fact has decreased since the times of the Cold War and which Washington does not seem to want to increase.
Russia's entry into NATO would also stretch NATO borders to the Far East, directly to Japan, China and Korea, raising myriad new questions. Japan could readily be admitted to NATO as Tokyo has a strong bilateral agreement with the US. This, though, would recreate a situation of friction between two NATO allies, as is the case between Greece and Turkey. Japan's role in the alliance would be important for the crises in the Balkans and the Middle East, but Moscow and Tokyo have not resolved the contentious issue of the Kurile islands, which were occupied by Moscow at the end of World War II but which Tokyo still claims. This huge enlargement would on the one hand stretch NATO territorial contiguity all around the globe, but on the other it would pose a number of questions. What should be done with South Korea? Should it be in or out? Either way, big problems would emerge.
Then there is the biggest problem, China. Again, should it be allowed in, or kept out? Senior Chinese officials have indicated that their response to the enlargement of NATO to include Russia would be to ask for Beijing's admission to the alliance. And if this did not occur, even if Beijing did not file an application for joining the alliance, keeping China out of NATO could be tantamount to a declaration of Cold War, just at a time when its economy is increasingly becoming an important part of global trade.
It could turn into a geopolitical quagmire as the ever-astute Chinese diplomatic strategy could be to create all kinds of problems in Asia and in the rest of the world. This does not take into account the political paradox that by the time Russia is admitted into a new NATO, a China more democratic than some NATO member states might have emerged. Would NATO then be able to justify why it had turned an ideologically motivated alliance formed to defend the free world from the communist threat into a purely geopolitical pact whose only defined purpose was to contain China's development?
Another possibility would be to admit China into NATO, but then, of course, one would have to consider admitting India, all of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations countries, and why not Pakistan, and so on.
Would then NATO's ambition be to replace the United Nations? This could be worth examining on a purely theoretical scale, but in fact such a possibility is many decades away. Relatively easier trade negotiations, such as the Uruguay Round or China's accession into the World Trade Organization (WTO) took about 14 years each. Far more complicated issues over NATO's enlargements could then take us well into the next century.
Meanwhile, altogether different realities would have emerged and would need to be tackled more urgently, which of course would change the political landscape of the proposed enlargements.
In the next decade China's economy will most likely double to be as big and that of the rest of Asia, including India but without Japan. Meanwhile, Japan's economy could still be be stalled, could have exploded, or by some miracle emerged out of the doldrums. In any eventuality, it would change the whole world scenario.
On the other end of the Eurasian continent the same could be true for the European Union, which could have moved towards political integration, stalled or exploded, as with the Balkans. Like Japan, this would change all geopolitical odds for NATO. In other words, NATO's enlargement to include Russia seems fraught with problems, and while it would solve some issues on the European horizon, it would create many new ones of a global scale.
Part 2: Russia as a buffer (2001-08-28 Asia Times)
