Word: westernness
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Corruption in Afghanistan's justice sector is often shrugged off by international donors who argue that security and development must take a higher priority. Some take it as the price of doing business, saying that rich countries can't expect Afghanistan to meet Western standards of transparency. Indeed, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has just endorsed a plan that would give $20 billion to build up Afghanistan's military and police forces. But what is the use of improving the police sector when the judicial system is unable to successfully prosecute criminals? A few countries are beginning to address...
...Russia's very purpose in its "punishment" of Georgia has been to warn neighbors inclined to challenge Moscow from under a Western security umbrella that if a storm is provoked, that umbrella offers precious little protection. The conflict was never simply about Georgia and its restive minority regions; it was always about NATO, as well as the regional balance of power between Russia...
...While many Western critics declared the Russian actions of the past week a reversion to Cold War tactics, Moscow sees NATO itself as a Cold War relic. The Russians complain that following the demise of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Treaty Organization, the U.S. reneged on promises to create a new global security order and instead moved to expand its own Cold War military alliance - NATO - into Moscow's own sphere of influence...
...just broken the back of Hitler's Wehrmacht and put Moscow in control of the Baltic states (annexed at the outset of the war), Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania. Having watched Central Europe transformed by Soviet military power into a patchwork of authoritarian vassal states, Western Europe was only too willing to join an all-for-one military alliance with the U.S. and Canada to even up the odds in the event of further Soviet expansionism. Nor was it surprising that decades later, those Europeans who had actually lived under the Soviet heel would race to join...
...Washington and in many former Soviet satellite states, the response to the Georgia debacle will be to continue NATO's eastward expansion and stiffen its resolve to contain a resurgent Russia. But in Western Europe, there will be growing doubts over the value of a security system built upon a structure designed to isolate and contain Russia. The problem, of course, is that NATO operates strictly by consensus, and in the absence of such consensus, paralysis may set in. Indeed, it may yet emerge that Putin's campaign in the Caucasus has succeeded not only in keeping Georgia...