Last week, Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin signed several declarations, ending the Cold War. This week in Rome, they signed another declaration together with the leaders of NATO countries, once again ending the Cold War and making Moscow an almost-equal NATO partner.
So many Cold War endings happening at the same time obviously stretched speechwriters' imaginations. Putin has been declared to be a friend, a trusted friend, a very special trusted friend and so on. It may be time to codify the relationship by introducing a system of recognizable abbreviations, like those for French cognac -- V.S., V.S.O.P., X.O. -- to mark the maturity of the friendship between East and West.
Putin, in turn, announced at the Rome summit that Russia has finally made its choice and that it is returning to the family of civilized nations. This week in Moscow, NATO at long last opened its military mission that was envisaged in the 1997 NATO-Russia Charter but not opened because Russian military chiefs did not want it and used any possible pretext for delay.
Now the mission is finally here, but the Defense Ministry has no plans to fight alongside NATO troops anytime soon, and it is not seriously interested
in achieving inter-operability -- the standardization of equipment and military procedure that NATO is basically all about. Joint peacekeeping operations in former Yugoslavia show that handpicked small Russian units can
work perfectly well with NATO colleagues. But ceremonial peacekeeping and real combat are very different things.
To prepare former Eastern-bloc soldiers to go into combat with NATO, the West initiated the Partnership for Peace program in the early 1990s . The Russian
military brass was never much interested in PFP; they formally withdrew because of the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, are still out and in no hurry to return.
Of course, the Defense Ministry is very much interested in knowing how Western militaries operate, which new weapons are up for procurement, what the new defense plans are and so on. A high-ranking Russian military mission
was opened almost immediately in NATO headquarters after the signing of the 1997 Charter. Now the NATO team, in turn, has come to Moscow and the Russian
military-intelligence community will take them for what they believe they are -- a bunch of spies.
This new group of Western diplomats in military uniforms will be treated like the rest: closely followed and isolated from any meaningful contacts with the bulk of Russian officers as far as is humanly possible.
It was announced that in the new NATO-Russia Council, Moscow may have an equal say in discussing international terrorism, proliferation of weapons of
mass destruction, peacekeeping and other important issues. But NATO is incapable of dealing with terrorists. Under the command of joint NATO military staffs, Western bombers can successfully hit enemy capitals, disrupt electricity and other utility supplies, demolish bridges and so on. But Osama bin Laden does not have a permanent capital city. Brute military force is mostly unsuccessful and counterproductive when used against terrorist networks, as Israel and Britain discovered long ago.
Successful counterterrorism and nonproliferation work is over 99 percent intelligence-gathering and political-diplomatic manipulation. But NATO does not have its own intelligence-gathering agency and its diplomatic capabilities are limited.
What will be the practical results of NATO-Russian cooperation on terrorism under the new format? Will Russian "investigators," based in Khankala, Chechnya, and U.S. interrogators from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, run joint seminars to teach Danes and Poles how to run "mopping-up operations" in remote villages?
True alliances between nations are based on common values and interests, not
nice declarations. The real threats in the near future that will put Russia and the West in one boat are possible regional nuclear wars between India and Pakistan, in the Middle East or over Taiwan that will send hundreds of millions of refugees running in panic from death and radioactive fallout.
It could be like the refugee crises in former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, but a hundred times worse. Are Russia and the West ready? At a rhetorical level,
yes. But in practice, they only encourage disasters by providing billions of
dollars worth of new weaponry to all sides in troubled areas of the world.
Pavel Felgenhauer is an independent defense analyst.