End of the Ice Age

If you believe the messages from Brussels, the winds of change are blowing through the halls of NATO. The soft spring breeze is courtesy of Hillary Clinton, America’s new Secretary of State. It’s a gentle breeze, we’re told, and it blows all the way to Moscow. Even before yesterday’s pact meeting, love letters from Washington had already arrived in Moscow in the form of America’s offer to shelve the U.S. missile defense shield planned on Russia’s very doorstep in exchange for Russia’s cooperation in opposing Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Clinton also stressed the new administration’s desire for future cooperation with Russia. The first manifestation of that comes in the revival of the Russia-NATO Council over the objections of eastern European NATO member states. Pressure by the Bush administration was the main reason the dialog was unilaterally shelved last year after the Caucasus war.

The return to normalcy will be greeted in Moscow as “a victory for common sense” and is, in fact, one prerequisite for solving serious questions of national security policy, whether global or regional. How durable this thaw will be, however, remains to be seen, since Hillary Clinton also announced yesterday that the door to NATO membership will be held wide open to countries like Georgia and Ukraine. That will hardly be seen in Moscow as cause for a return of affections.