The Cost of NATO's Good Intentions

The weekend war in Georgia at the beginning of August is leading, as it should, to a discussion about the future of the relationships between Russia, its neighbors, and the Western powers. More than any recent event in international affairs that I can recall, the war has also provoked an intense debate about the past. Russia's insistence that it has national interests to protect, and that it is willing to resort to the brutal use of force to protect them, has reopened old arguments about the way the West behaved in the years following the end of the Cold...