Word: nato
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...First there was the required stop at the outpost of what was once the center of "Old Europe" in the form of a meeting at the drab Brussels headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). It was largely a hand-holding exercise as the hugely bureaucratic organization struggles with its mission in Afghanistan-its first military mission outside its region. Gates held a quick meeting with NATO General Secretary Jaap de Hoop Scheffer to encourage NATO to stay engaged in Afghanistan, where NATO has some 20,000 troops...
...horror of anything that might smell of foreign intervention was evident long before Iraq. I visited Beijing during the Kosovo war in 1999, and it wasn't just the notorious bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade that year that outraged top officials; it was the very idea of NATO's rearranging what was left of Yugoslavia. Wasn't the cause a good one? That didn't matter...
...ahead and find a way to end its independence. That fear may itself be fueled by Russian paranoia about national security, which is never far from the surface. While recent threats to the Russian state have come from Islamist radicals, Moscow's military elite still harbors apprehensions about NATO. An attack by the Western alliance and the U.S. always plays a part in defense planning. And how is Belarus involved in Russia's fear of NATO? For about 10 years, in order to monitor the West, the Russians have maintained an electronic warning station in Baranovichi, Belarus, staffed with...
...becoming a familiar story. In Afghanistan, the U.S. has handed over much of the anti-Taliban fight to NATO. On North Korea, America works largely through China. On Darfur, we have banked on peacekeepers from the African Union. This past summer the Bush Administration briefly put Israel in charge of our Iran policy, supporting Jerusalem's war against Hizballah in hopes of crippling Tehran's powerful Lebanese ally. And in Iraq the U.S. is relying more and more on Nouri al-Maliki to defeat the insurgents, disarm the militias and give...
Outsourcing has created problems elsewhere as well. Some of America's NATO partners won't send their troops to Afghanistan's dangerous south. On North Korea, China has put enough pressure on Pyongyang to make it resume talks on its nuclear program but not nearly enough to make those talks go anywhere. Finally, while the Bush Administration cheered on Israel last summer as it destroyed Hizballah encampments from the air, the bombing campaign virtually destroyed Lebanon's pro-Western government as well--wrecking what was once a crown jewel in Bush's campaign for Middle East democracy...