The Black Sea is connected to the North Atlantic, so that’s covered. 
Depends on whether you want to maximize your ability to project (or deny) naval movement within the Mediterranean. Don’t forget Greece and Turkey are NATO members as well.
I don’t agree that Russia is a super power, but it is a swing State. The EU is more concerned about a steady flow of Russian oil than new NATO members. The U.S. doesn’t carry the clout to trump Russia on this one.
NATO is very important for smaller countries to join.
First of all, many of those countries have an army that is not exactly state-of-the-art and powerful. However, by becoming a member of NATO, the basically have insurance should a neighboring country suddenly decide to make some nasty moves in their direction. It is always nice to have a few big bullies as friends when you are involved in a dispute.
Also, it alleviates some of the pressure to build a bigger and mightier army…if you feel safer because you have military allies with big guns, then you are less inclined to spend 60% of your GNP on military hardware.
And lastly, it makes settling disputes a bit easier. Should two NATO countries want to go to war against each other, they have some serious considerations to make - and a large group of countries who will have some major influence before they go off to war.
NATO might not be perfect, but for many smaller countries in Europe, it is the best damned insurance they can get to keep them safe.
Agreed.
Sure, not the cold war, that was capitalism vs communism. Today it’s more about Nationalism, and Russia is still a belligerent and powerful nation sitting on tons of mineral reserves with strategic influence across Eurasia. The big five Superpowers of the 21st century are going to continue to play the sphere of influence game. This is just the current chapter.
The U.S., Russia, China, and . . . who else? India? Europe-as-a-unit?
I presume he means the UK and either France (who is on the UNSC also) or the EU as a political and military entity.
I think expanding NATO is a good thing actually (though the US could drop out any time at this point I suppose)…it’s a mutual defense alliance after all and it binds the Euro’s together into a single military collective. Which is probably a GOOD thing just in and of itself (it keeps them from backsliding to they natural tendency to want to whack each other ).
-XT
Or Mongols, or Huns, or even Swedes or Lithuanians, for that matter. Their history with being invaded and destructively occupied, and not even worst by the Germans, goes back a millenium or so before WW1.
Even the Soviet military strategy in the Cold War was based on avoiding “encirclement”. NATO and EC expansion are not at all focused on tightening the cordon, but it plainly could appear that way to Putin and his fellow neoauthoritarians, no matter how much a President who can speak of an “Axis of Evil” might try to assuage those fears.
I never understood why no US administration, most prominently Bush 1, didn’t try harder to include Russia itself in the Western system, when the reformist Yeltsin might have been persuaded to aim in that direction. By missing that chance, whether actively or passively, it does seem that the effect has been to support the Putin paranoid approach to governing and set the groundwork for another generation of unnecessary tensions.
We haven’t initiated phase 2 of the Celtic Tiger yet but when we do you’ll know, you’ll all know!
The details are more complex than a simple statement can summarize, but in essence the Western governments took a “Wait and See” approach to economic and political reform in Russia and the Ukraine. A small minority of analysts and pundits thought it was all a scam, while more realized that it was a genuine paradigm shift, but almost no one really believed that it would blossom out into genuine and accessible democracy. This was accentuated by the fact that in the more central republics, the people involved in the new goverment were some of the same people in the old Communist-controlled governments. It was one thing to support Poland and Czechoslovakia (with their long entrenched reformist movements taking over); quite another to support former Communist High Party members running things in the Baltics and the Slav republics. Yeltsin himself was an affirmed Marxist before the transition (and had he not been, he’d never have been in any position to take over) but was also an avowed reformer, championing revolutionary change over Mikhail Gorbachev’s more modest (but still unprecidented) attempts at reforminging the existing Soviet system. Add to this the fact that the Western world, and in particular the United States, was suffering an economic recession at the time, and the result was tepid and indifferent support from the West.
In retrospect this was penny wise and pound foolish, because for a very modest outlay (compared to strategic defense budgets) we very likely could have effected a very dramatic reduction if not outright elimination of nuclear arsenals in both the former Soviet Union and the United States and Great Britian, a concept vigorously championed by Reagan and Gorbachev, but not, unfortunately, by their successors. This also could have cemented a favorable political and economic relationship between Russia and her domains and the United States and Europe, rather than a decade of economic hardship in the East and resultant suspicison and political posturing.
Today nuclear proliferation and the emergence of a multifaceted global arms race is a very real possibility, and there is little that can be done about it even if the current administrations of the various parties were interested in doing so. A new entrenchment, along somewhat redrawn lines, exists, and the number of nations with incipient or demonstrated nuclear weapon capability has increased from a handful to a dozen, and threatens to double that number in less than two decades. Expanding the domain and membership NATO won’t help anyone in this regard.
It’s about time the Irish had their shot at the title.
Stranger
You put it very well. I was in Budapest not long after Hungary joined NATO, and the attitude among the people there was essentially, “Now, at last, we are protected from being attacked by foreign nations.”
Ed
It keeps Europe on a leash with fragmented national militarys rather than have a Europe with a single dedicated military unit that can either defend or power project.
Right now you see alot of national angst against military power projection from EU citizens , mainly against American foreign policy, but that wont always be the case. With Nato being refurbished with newer nations that are more grateful towards the American side of the Alliance, control and influence can be used.
Regardless of what they say , Russia can be contained , but a full up EU military would be a major inconvience.
Declan
In any case, and again over Russian objections, NATO just announced its support for building a missile-defense system in Eastern Europe.
What are the odds of the latter happening anyway? Movements to establish a European Defense Force have got nowhere so far.
I don’t understand why Russia needs to be contained. It isn’t a military threat. The Russian oligarchs are more concerned about the global market than NATO. Putin’s new Russia isn’t going to make the same mistakes made by the former Soviet Union, nor is the EU going to alienate Putin because almost half of EU’s oil comes from Russia.
NATO expansion is a point of contention with Putin because he fears it is the forging of a new international alliance to replace the UN.
Yeah, that’s how I’d break it down.
Parag Khanna wrote a must read in the NYT describing the realignment of the world into three major economic superpowers: The EU, the Unites States, and China.
The point of containment is you contain them so they aren’t a huge threat. It’s a bit naive to think that the global market and NATO are not linked.
You’re right.