A Baltic anxiety attack

THE CHAIRMAN of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, was in Latvia and Lithuania on Wednesday, meeting with leaders who were asking for increased NATO military exercises. The Baltic states want to deter Russia from doing in their region what it did this August in Georgia. But there are no longer any real grounds for this sort of East-West tension.

The Bush administration and the government of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin have both taken unnecessary actions that made the situation much more precarious than it needs to be.

These actions include Bush's insistence on deploying in Poland and the Czech Republic a flawed but provocative missile defense system; Bush's equally unnecessary and provocative recognition of Kosovo's independence from Serbia; the administration's push for Georgia and Ukraine to be fast-tracked toward NATO membership; Georgia's August attack on Russian peacekeepers in the breakaway region of South Ossetia; and Putin's subsequent invasion of Georgia.

Given the need to undo the damage done by those actions, Mullen's sit-down outside Helsinki on Tuesday with his Russian counterpart, General Nikolai Makarov, was a healthy remedial step. Their discussions, described by a Navy spokesman as "honest and open," touched on sensitive points such as Georgia, where there is a danger of Russian-US confrontation, and Afghanistan, where the former Cold War rivals now have congruent interests.

There are no longer unavoidable causes of East-West conflict. To prevent misunderstandings or worse, the next US president ought regularly to conduct with his counterpart the sort of dialogue Mullen held with General Makarov.