Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Payback for NATO Expansion

By Ivan Eland
July 18, 2007

Those of us who opposed the expansion of NATO in 1999 (admitting Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic) and 2004 (Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, and the former Soviet republics of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania) warned that it would lead to problems with Russia. Those problems have arrived.

A resurgent Russia—flush with oil revenues and a strong leader who is using accumulated anti-U.S. resentments to become even more autocratic—has just suspended the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty in retaliation for U.S. abrogation of the Anti-ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and U.S. plans to put components of a missile defense system into Poland and the Czech Republic.

Read on.

1 comment:

J.A. DiCarlo said...

The Baltic states are worth protecting regardless of their strategic benefit to the US. They are democrats & like minded capitalists who share traditional western values.

Also, your argument that Russia has a legitimate reason to dislike NATO expansion into the Baltic & CIS countries because invading powers traditionally use routes through those regions to make incursions into the motherland is pretty ridiculous.

Are any EU member states looking for a fight these days or is Russia worried about a resurgent Norway or Switzerland?

If I were Russia I would stop obsessing about western democrats & their defensive missile shields & start concerning myself with a eastern communists & their unseemingly unquenchable thirst for natural resources.