Shrewd Move for NATO Expansion?
This might be a shrewd maneuver by NATO and by the US in particular. While I have had serious doubts about our expansion of NATO to include two former Soviet republics (namely becuase it seems like needlessly provoking Russia in an area of only tangental interest to us when we need their cooperation on more pressing matters like Iran), I wonder whether this is actually meant to be a lever we use when dealing with Russia on the other issues.
If Russia proves cooperative by not giving more assistance to Iran on nuclear plant development, maybe we'll tone down our rhetoric on NATO expansion moving eastward. If they don't, we can keep pumping it up and making the Russians nervous. Make no mistake the future of Ukraine and Georgia is far more important to Russian feelings of relative security than it is to ours, so pushing the envelope for the right reasons may not be as bad a policy as I had thought. We'll see if this is shrewd or just idealistic...
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