The Realist Resurgence

Since then, the realists have stayed their restrained course, and events have strengthened their hand. Immediately after the fighting began, the United States, NATO and the EU demonstrated openness to compromise with a sensible Russian government—a role President Dmitry Medvedev quickly adopted—but they showed contempt for the flailing bear. Gates told a conference at Blenheim Palace, where that bulldog of a realist, Winston Churchill, was born, that Georgia would be rebuilt with $1 billion of U.S. money to help it get along. Its ties to the West would be strengthened. But "Russia faces a decision: to be a fully integrated and responsible partner in the international community, which we would welcome, or … to be an isolated and antagonistic nation viewed by much of the world as little more than a gas station for Europe."

For now, the Medvedev faction, at any rate, seems to have made its choice: reintegration, not isolation. Last week Russian troops withdrew from the checkpoints they'd established deep inside Georgia and pulled back to the contested enclaves where they were before last summer's war. But the tensions are likely to continue at least as long as NATO's expansion goes on, and the encirclement of Russia, politically if not militarily, progresses. In every direction Moscow looks, its neighbors (and former provinces and satellites) have signed Individual Partnership Action Plans that are the first step toward joining the military club in Brussels. Since Georgia signed up in 2004, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Moldova and Kazakhstan have, too. They are a long way from the North Atlantic, but right in the middle of the Near Abroad.

Since the fighting in Georgia, NATO is also finding it harder to fudge its commitments to new members. Paris, London and Washington may claim they do not see the Russians as their adversaries, but the Baltic states sure do, and they are pushing for concrete ground defense plans that they've never had from NATO before. All the while, despite Medvedev's moderation, hawks on Russian state television continued to trumpet the military might demonstrated by the Stability 2008 exercises. The machos in the Kremlin seemed determined to show that if the United States and NATO could play around in Russia's backyard, Russia could play around in America's. So the fleet led by the Kirov-class guided missile cruiser Pyotr Veliky (Peter the Great) continued toward Caracas. And so, by last report, did the tugboat.

With Barrett Sheridan in New York and Anna Nemtsova in Moscow

© 2008