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Yet, appearances aside, it does not signal a fundamental shift in Russian policy or worldview. Russia could not resist the temptation of playing once more the Leninist game of "inter-imperialist contradictions". It has long masterfully exploited chinks in NATO's armor to further its own economic, if not geopolitical, goals.
The Czechs like other central and east European countries mistook a transatlantic tiff for a geopolitical divorce and tried to implausibly capitalize on the yawning rift that opened between the erstwhile allies. Yet, Germany is one of the largest trading partners of the United States. American firms sell $24 billion worth of goods annually there compared to $600 million in Poland.
That it will remain inert unhindered by externalities like government intervention, geopolitical upheavals, crises, abrupt changes in accounting policies and tax laws, hyperinflation, institutional and structural reform and other market-deflecting events and processes.
Enlargement has been the centerpiece of European thinking ever since the meltdown of the eastern bloc. Shifting geopolitical and geo-strategic realities in the wake of the September 11 atrocities have rendered this project all the more urgent. NATO an erstwhile anti-Soviet military alliance is search of purpose is gradually acquiring more political hues.
In the wake of the implosion of the USSR in 1989-91, the newly independent countries of the Baltic and central Europe, traumatized by decades of brutal Soviet imperialism, sought to fend off future Russian encroachment. Entering NATO and the EU was perceived by them as the equivalent of obtaining geopolitical insurance policies against a repeat performance of their tortured histories.
When the latter died and the USSR evaporated, the region imploded. Countries from the USSR to Italy to Belgium to Canada to Yugoslavia were gradually reduced to geopolitical atoms: provinces, districts, regions, resurrected political units. Faced with the Yugoslav wars of succession, the Big Powers again chose wrongly.
Moral hazard infringes upon both transparency and accountability. It is never explicit or known in advance. It is always arbitrary, or subject to political and geopolitical considerations. Thus, it serves to increase uncertainty rather than decrease it. And by protecting private investors and creditors from the outcomes of their errors and misjudgments it undermines the concept of liability.
Governments are willing to act imprudently, safe in the knowledge that the IMF is a lender of last resort, which is often steered by geopolitical considerations, rather than merely economic ones. Creditors are more willing to lend and at lower rates, reassured by the IMF's default-staving safety net.
The West's artificial arrangements, served on the bayonets of SFOR and KFOR are unlikely to outlast SFOR and KFOR. Moreover, humanitarian military interventions have proven to be the most pernicious kind of humanitarian disasters. More people Kosovars included died in Operation Allied Force than in all the years of Serb repression combined. The Balkan is simply frozen in geopolitical time.
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