#2
The Russia Journal
November 23-29, 2001
Time to plan a real military coalition
By ANDREI PIONTKOVSKY
A military coalition between the United States, Russia and Britain has had its first victory since 1945. Armed by Russia and supported from the air by the United States, the Northern Alliance has achieved such rapid success that many analysts fear it has created a political vacuum in Afghanistan.
This is a serious problem, but we shouldn’t forget that the allies came to Afghanistan not to bring liberal democracy, but to destroy al-Qaida’s infrastructure and the Taliban regime that sheltered it. This far more practical objective looks close to being reached.
More serious in my opinion is the problem of a conceptual vacuum in the relations between the partners in this de facto coalition. President Vladimir Putin’s march on the West, which he began on Sept. 11, has been just as rapid as the Northern Alliance’s push into southern Afghanistan.
Giving institutional status to Russia’s partnership in the anti-terrorist coalition and reinforcing Putin’s foreign-policy change of tack is an ever more urgent task to tackle. The military and political logic of the war against terrorism makes it a pressing issue, as does the domestic political situation in Russia, where Putin has run ahead of his own political class in his understanding of Russia’s geopolitical interests in the 21st century.
Putin and his closest partners, U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, are all well aware of this need to institutionalize Russia’s full membership in the union of Western democratic states. But the approach they have chosen, while obvious enough, isn’t the best choice of path to follow.
In Washington, Putin said his goal was "an equal partnership" with the NATO military alliance, and that he wanted to go "as far as the Atlantic Alliance is ready to go."
In their "Joint Statement on a New Relationship between the United States and Russia," Bush and Putin pledged "to work together with other NATO members to improve, strengthen and enhance the relationship between NATO and Russia with a view to developing new, effective mechanisms for consultation, cooperation, joint decisions and coordinated joint action."
Finally, Blair last Friday addressed a letter to Putin and the heads of all the NATO member states, in which he proposed a "new security framework under which Russia would take part in decisions on key issues" and suggested transforming (or renaming) the existing NATO-Russia Permanent Joint Council into the Russia/North Atlantic Council.
Blair was undoubtedly acting out of the best intentions, but the bureaucratic clumsiness of his pompous initiative (transforming one rather empty organization into another just as empty organization) illustrates perfectly the futility of attempts to use NATO structures as a foundation on which to build partnership relations between Russia, the United States and Britain.
For a start, the military logic of the global coalition’s fight against international terrorism shows that NATO plays only a formal and rather rigid role in this combat. After being hit by such audacious attacks, the United States found that its only really serious allies were Britain and Russia, which isn’t even part of NATO. So why try to squeeze the essential task of now building a genuine military alliance between these countries into the ill-fitting framework provided by NATO?
Second, as Blair also pointed out, Russia will not be able to join NATO at any time over the coming decade, as it obviously doesn’t meet a whole host of criteria applied to member states. But we need to resolve how to build an alliance today.
Third, there’s no real reason why Russia should have to join NATO. If the provisions of the NATO Treaty’s Article 5 were applied to Russia, it would bring political guarantees for the security of Russia’s borders, but it would be absurd to expect or demand that say, Denmark or Poland will help Russia assure its security in the Far East. The only countries that could be serious partners in this issue are the United States and perhaps Britain.
One can but assume that when Bush said "Why not?" in reply to Putin’s tirade about Russia joining NATO, he realizes that his "why not" implies the United States’ readiness to establish an alliance with Russia that would include mutual security guarantees. This is what must be discussed here and now. And there’s no point in burdening a couple of dozen other countries with the issue.
(The writer is director of the Center for Strategic Research.)
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