IPFS News Link • Russia
Why Russia Fears NATO
• http://nationalinterest.org, Ted Galen CarpenterHe begins his rebuttal with a drive-by smear that is increasingly in vogue among neoconservatives, dismissing such arguments as coming from "Russia's apologists." Elsewhere in the piece, he resorts to the even uglier smear of NATO critics as "Putin's apologists."
Twardowski begins his substantive case with the argument that if Russia truly feared NATO because of the alliance's allegedly belligerent actions "then it makes no sense from a realist perspective that U.S.-Russian relations warmed at all following the Soviet Union's disintegration." That is a puzzling argument. Moscow clearly hoped for a new, united European security architecture in the years following the demise of the Soviet Union. It was only when NATO intervened in Bosnia in 1995 (some four years later) and idle talk about expanding the alliance eastward turned into an actual offer (three years after that) that Russian suspicions about Western, especially U.S., intentions became prominent.