Word: nato
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When Russia sent shells raining down on Georgia, it seemed initially as if Vladimir Putin was savagely pursuing what he saw as Russian national interests. Moscow claimed Georgian aggression against Russian loyalists in South Ossetia and has objected to both Georgia's bid to join NATO and the Pentagon's arming and training of the Georgian military. But a closer examination of the run-up to Putin's inexcusable invasion suggests that Russia's action had as much to do with its wounded pride as with its alleged impaired security...
...Russia's litany of indignities dates to the early 1990s when the Soviet empire collapsed. A bipolar universe gave way to a world in which the "sole superpower" boasted about how it had "won" the Cold War. Russia was forced to swallow the news that NATO would grant membership to former client states in Eastern Europe, along with former Soviet republics. Russia, the fallen empire, would have to content itself with membership in the largely symbolic Partnership for Peace...
...Perhaps the best preview of Russians' brewing rage at their lost grandeur came in Kosovo, when, in the wake of NATO's 1999 war against Serbia - a war Russia opposed - Russian forces seized the airport that NATO had intended as headquarters for what many Russians considered an occupation force. No shots were fired, but Western generals found it jarring to see how far Russia would go for a territory so marginal to its wealth and security...
...When Western countries recognized Kosovo earlier this year, Russia's NATO ambassador, Dmitri Rogozin, telegraphed Moscow's plans by threatening to "proceed from the assumption that to be respected, we have to use brute military force." Putin said the "stick" that Western countries had employed "will come back to knock them on the head...
...raised the rhetorical temperature several degrees in his statement. "Russia's ongoing action raised serious questions about its intentions in Georgia and the region," Bush said in a Rose Garden announcement Wednesday. In a veiled threat of isolating Russia from the World Trade Organization, the G-8 and the NATO consultative relationship it has held for more than a decade, Bush said Russia was "putting its aspirations [of international integration] at risk...