Russia’s Plan to Sideline NATO

Sally McNamara / May 15, 2009

Standing next to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev in November 2008, then-president of the European Union, Nicolas Sarkozy called for a temporary moratorium on the planned U.S. missile defense deployments in Poland and the Czech Republic as well as an EU-Russian summit to discuss European security arrangements. This summit will take place in Eastern Russia next Friday and Saturday.

When Russians talk about changing Europe’s security architecture, what they really mean is sidelining NATO. However, in the Obama Administration’s haste to reset relations with Russia, and its nonsensical enthusiasm for EU-integration, it has sent neither Moscow nor Brussels the message that NATO’s primacy is non-negotiable. In fact, it has seemingly gone out of its way to send precisely the opposite message, embracing an EU-only defense identity and craftily avoiding seeing through U.S. commitments on missile defense and NATO enlargement. (more…)