Only with America's Help Can 'Northern Civilization' Be Saved (Gazeta, Russia)
"Savvy Western politicians have come to realize that if there is a worldwide threat to U.S. and European security, it comes from the south, not the east. And in this sense, Russia is the most important partner and ally of European nations. ... We must permit our minds to let go of our memories, tormented as we are by past grievances, and understand that only with the United States can the European Union and Russia save northern civilization from political decomposition and civilizational death under the onslaught of the 'new Southern cultures.'"
By Dmitriy Rogozin
The author is Russia's permanent ambassador
to NATO
As NATO begins its summit in part to mull over what to do about Russia, this column from December 15, 2009, written by Russia's then-permanent ambassador to NATO Dmitriy Rogozin, shows just how far things have gone - in the wrong direction. Rogozin discusses how outdated East European and Baltic suspicions of Russia are, why Russia had no choice but to take South Ossetia from Georgia, and how important Russia is to American and European efforts to defend 'northern civilization.'
The main problem with our ties
to NATO is that the organization now consists of almost 30 countries, each with
a different historic memory of Russia. That is why NATO's degree of cooperation
with Russia is “hospital average."It's composed of warm, almost friendly ties between
our country and the states of “old” Europe; icy stares from our former
“brothers” in the Warsaw Pact; and constant fluctuations of “electricity” in U.S.-Russia
relations - from “overload” to “reset.”
[Editor's Note:
In Russia, the average temperature of everyone in a hospital, including those
running a fever and those who are recently dead, is known as 'hospital
average'].
In recent years, I fully put the
instability and unpredictability of our relations with NATO down to the fact
that during the period since the collapse of the “Eastern bloc” and the Soviet
Union, the ranks of the North Atlantic Alliance have swelled with the addition
of states that used to be our neighbors in the “socialist
communal apartment.”
I remind you that from the
moment NATO seized the geopolitical space of the Baltic States and former Warsaw
Pact - and its close work with the political elites of Moldova, Ukraine and
Transcaucasia - the Alliance’s propagandists have cleverly exploited the idea
that, supposedly, after joining NATO, the relations of new member states with
Russia drastically improved. This isn't true, of course. I would suggest the opposite.
Regrettably, if anything is hindering the process of improving Moscow's relations
with NATO and the West, it's our former allies.
Some of my friends joke: try asking
your former communal apartment neighbors what they think about one another, and
your knowledge of curse words will be greatly expanded and enriched. It's the
same between countries: relations are better the further away they are. That's
true and it's also untrue. In my opinion, the Russophobic elites of the Baltic
and Eastern European states operate on the principle, “to
spite my grandma, I'll get frostbite.”Warm
relations with a huge country, with its bottomless market and fantastic
economic and energy potential - that’s manna from heaven for our neighbors.
If I was a Lithuanian or
Latvian nationalist politician, I would embrace the Russian community and use
its connections with Russia to ensure the prosperity of my proud little state.
Isn't
this so?
To explain their destructive
behavior toward Russia, some of my Baltic colleagues in the halls of NATO have
offered me an explanation. "You know, old man, that if we don't maintain
the turbulence in Russia-NATO relations, they'll simply stop paying attention
to us. We're a small, vulnerable country - and the Russian bear is so large and
close. As long as Russia threatens us, we get help, pampering and cuddling. And
if it doesn’t, we still have to ensure that everyone believes it does."
Now, I hope it's understandable,
despite the idealism of political idiots in our country and the idiocy of
political idealists in the West, why our relations with the new 28-member NATO are
much worse than they were with the NATO of the “Cold War,” when the Alliance
had no Eastern European or Baltic recruits who, together with their school knapsacks,
brought the cockroach of "Russophobia" into Brussels.
In the late 90s before its “leap
to the east,” the Western political elite decided to throw the Russian bear a
“sugar bone.” This was how the idea of a NATO-Russia Council
was conceived, the members of which were supposed to communicate with one another
not as part of a bloc, but in an individual, national capacity. The idea wasn’t
too bad on paper - even promising.
In 2002, the Rome Declaration
was signed and the NATO-Russia Council became a reality. Of course, many
serious analysts questioned the viability of this new forum for political
dialogue. Then, not even three years later, NATO aircraft flattened Serbian towns
killing thousands of innocent civilians in the long-suffering country, so
closely-related to the Russian people by blood and spirit. They drowned under
the bombed-out bridges over the Danube. But human memory is such that the years
erase scars and the bad is quickly forgotten.
Russia seriously, albeit with
reservations, has begun to cooperate with NATO when it seems mutually
beneficial, and desperately resists when the Alliance, with its
self-congratulatory smugness about victory in the Cold War, meddle in our
interests. Russian diplomacy managed to dethrone “NATO-Trotskyism,” and halted
attempts to suck Ukraine and Georgia into NATO.
[Editor's Note: By
NATO-Trotskyism, the author means the equivalent of "it's my way or the
highway."]
The haste with which the strategy
of accelerating the seizure of “no man’s land” with the Alliance's notorious “Membership
Action Plan” to expedite Ukraine and Georgia fueled an all-out political
crisis in Kiev and pushed the not-so healthy [Georgia President] Saakashvili
into a reckless night bombardment of South Ossetia. Russia ultimately had no
choice but to show its teeth and force the aggressor to accept peace, with all of
the ensuing consequences that had on Georgia's Stalin-era borders.
Posted by WORLDMEETS.US
NATO as a military and political
alliance now finds itself in a difficult position. How does one find a balance
between Article 5 of the Washington Treaty (collective defense - an attack on
one is an attack on all), and the desire to “project power” far beyond its area
of responsibility, aspiring to boast of its heightened geopolitical ambitions?
Although frankly, NATO's war in Afghanistan hasn't especially impressed anyone,
including the Taliban. A bulldozer can hardly cope with the challenges that
confront a washing machine. The threats of the 21st century are such that they
don't fit the logic of conducting military campaigns in a theater of operations.
How can one use tanks, cannons and submarines to address “international
terrorism,” the lairs of which have long been in the capitals of leading
Western countries - right under the noses of NATO?
After the self-destruction of
the Soviet Union, the North Atlantic Alliance lost, as diplomats put it, its
“identity.” In Brussels, a reasonable question arose: what threat is our
friendship based on now? That's why a bloated NATO is ready to engage in an
improper military alliance as part of the fight against climate change, freedom
of information and energy security. As a result, civilian affairs began to displace
the Alliance's military component, even though NATO was created solely as a union
designed after WWII to deflect the threat of war in the usual sense of the term.
The problems within NATO were only exacerbated with its expansion in the east,
which went ahead Stakhanov-stylewith
all possible speed. As a result, the Alliance absorbed so many “new democracies”
that even the strongest medicine couldn't help digest them.
Moreover, without adding
anything serious or substantial to NATO's combined military capability, our
former "brothers" brought into the Alliance their own squabbles,
forcing their "senior partners" to sort them out when the need arose.
I'm now firmly convinced that NATO as it existed from the 50s to the 80s of the
last century was far more able to benefit the peoples of the countries that
formed the Alliance.
As strange as it sounds, the
August 2008 shake-up of Russian-NATO relations has worked to our advantage.
Under the Alliance's new secretary general, Anders Fogh
Rasmussen, NATO is behaving more pragmatically and predictably.
Savvy Western politicians have
come to realize that if there is a worldwide threat to U.S. and European
security, it comes from the south, not the east. And in this sense, Russia is
the most important partner and ally of European nations.
We must permit
our minds to let go of our memories, tormented as we are by past grievances,
and understand that only with the United States can the European Union and
Russia save northern civilization from political decomposition and civilizational
death under the onslaught of the “new Southern cultures,” so to speak.
Today’s brutal and fragile
world really does contain influential powers that put our right to exist under
question. To them we - Russians, Americans, Europeans - are all of the same face.
Posted by WORLDMEETS.US
The proposal put forth by the
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev for a balanced European security system to secure
the principle of its indivisibility - not to address one’s own security at the
expense of one’s neighbor, to categorically reject military solutions to
political problems, and to take into account the interests of Europe's largest
power - Russia; all of this is common sense and beneficial to the West - and on
a large scale. But to understand this, we shouldn't have to deal with a bunch
of logistically overwhelmed European bureaucrats, but with national leaders who
are conscious of their responsibilities to future generations.
