Could Russia Join The West? by Fareed Zakaria

June 25, 2001, U.S. Edition

Could Russia Join the West?
Bush softened his stance toward Russia before his meeting with Putin
By Fareed Zakaria

As any real-estate agent can tell you, location matters. So naturally the Poles were thrilled to hear President George W. Bush declare last week that their country lay not at the eastern edge but rather at "the center of Europe." This was more than just a symbolic affirmation of Poland's rightful place in the Western world. The president made his point in a speech urging the continuing expansion of NATO. In embracing a new geography of Europe he is hinting at a radical possibility--that one day Russia might become a member of the alliance. After all, Warsaw is closer to Moscow than it is to Paris or London.

Over the past month the Bush administration has markedly softened its stance toward Russia, a process that culminated in the cheerful meeting between Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin last Saturday. In his speeches in Europe last week Bush was more explicit than any president before him in saying, "Russia is a part of Europe... The Europe we are building must also be open to Russia," and "We look forward to the day when Russia is fully reformed, fully democratic and closely bound to the rest of Europe." His national-security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, told CNN that in their meetings Bush would make clear to Putin that "he doesn't believe that there should be any geographic or historical red lines against states" seeking to join NATO.

A senior American official, Richard Haass, director of policy planning at the State Department, explains, "There is no reason why, in principle, Russia could not become a member of NATO. Naturally it would take a while, but if Russia met the conditions set forth by current members, I don't see why not."

It's not just that Russia can change but that NATO has changed. The administration's desire to expand the alliance aggressively and rapidly suggests it recognizes that NATO is in the midst of a transformation. Its future lies not as a rigid military alliance with one overriding function (defense) but a flexible political club whose members collaborate in a number of ways. From mutual assured destruction to mutual assurance, one might say.

The surest sign of this change is in the decision to push for the membership of the Baltic republics. Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia could well use the badge of NATO membership to stabilize their transition to liberal democratic capitalism. But the Baltics are militarily indefensible (Russia could overrun Latvia in a few hours). The only way NATO could defend the Baltic states from a Russian invasion would be to launch a pre-emptive nuclear attack.

Obviously none of this is going to happen, which is precisely why NATO is changing. It signals a shift in the alliance's basic purpose and strategy. "NATO has always been a military and political organization," says Haass. "The balance is shifting somewhat toward the political." The reality is that NATO, like most defensive alliances before it, lost its original purpose with the end of the cold war. It survives because it has redefined itself as an instrument for consolidating new European democracies.

NATO retains a military component; witness its actions in Bosnia and Kosovo. But far from strengthening the military arm of the alliance, those wars actually revealed just how difficult it was, without a clear overriding common threat, to conduct a war as a group. (Remember NATO's structure requires consensus; every member-state has a veto.) Former NATO supreme commander Wesley Clark's recent memoir describes how the political consultations and cooperation among the alliance members were so thorny that they almost derailed the entire military effort. The lesson that the Europeans took from Kosovo was that they needed their own defense capabilities so that they were not utterly bound by American decisions. For its part the Bush administration is wary of new military interventions.

Increasingly, NATO is a political alliance. As such, it should keep a seat open for Moscow. After all, the most important democratic experiment taking place on the European continent is in Russia. And just by entertaining the possibility of eventual membership, the West could have a powerful effect on the course of Russia's political and economic development.

President Bush's words about Poland, consciously or not, echoed Ronald Reagan's famous speech to the British Parliament in 1982, in which he prophesied that "the march of freedom and democracy will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history." In that speech Reagan also affirmed that Poland was at "the center of European civilization." He noted that there was a sign at the center of Warsaw that says that "the distances from Warsaw to Moscow and Warsaw to Brussels are equal." This was meant to remind people that Poland belonged in the West. Ironically, it now reminds us that Russia is not so far, either.