Fight scrambles strategic map of Europe

New conflict raises an old question

BERLIN - The Russian tanks rumbling across parts of Georgia are forcing a fundamental reassessment of strategic interests across Europe in a way not considered since the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the subsequent collapse of communism.

Washington and European capitals had encouraged liberalization in lands once firmly under the Soviet aegis. Now, they find themselves asking a question barely posed in the past two decades: How far will or can Russia go, and what should the response be?

The answer will play out not just in the European Union, but along its new eastern frontier, in once-obscure places like Moldova and Azerbaijan.

Already, the United States has changed tack toward Moscow. There will be no US military action in the Caucasus, but by dispatching Condoleezza Rice to Georgia and insisting that Russia withdraw, Washington underlined that the Russians should not move on the capital, Tbilisi.

French leaders, acting on behalf of Europe, had already firmly told the Russians they could not insist on the ouster of Georgia's president, Mikhail Saakashvili, as precondition for a cease-fire.

Farther west in Poland, American negotiators Thursday dropped resistance to giving the Poles advanced Patriot missiles in exchange for stationing parts of a missile defense system there. That system, the Americans insist, is intended to deflect attack from Iran.

The Russian ambassador to NATO, Dmitri Rogozin, was not the only member of the Russian military and political leadership who saw things differently. "The fact that this was signed in a period of a very difficult crisis in the relationship between Russia and the United States over the situation in Georgia shows that of course the missile defense system will not be deployed against Iran but against the strategic potential of Russia," he told Reuters.

The Poles, indeed, had their own security in mind. "Poland wants to be in alliances where assistance comes in the very first hours of - knock on wood - any possible conflict," Prime Minister Donald Tusk said.

"The reality is that international relations are changing," said Pawel Swieboda, director of DemosEUROPA, an independent research organization based in Warsaw. "For the first time since 1991, Russia has used military force against a sovereign state in the post-Soviet area. The world will not be the same."

At stake 20 years ago was whether the Kremlin, then under Mikhail Gorbachev, would intervene militarily to stop the collapse of communism. But Gorbachev chose to cut Eastern Europe free as he focused - in vain - on preventing the collapse of the Soviet Union itself.

Communist bloc lands from the Baltic States in the north to Bulgaria in the south have since joined the European Union and NATO - a feat, despite flaws, that in the Western view has made the continent more secure and democratic.

But Russia never liked the expansion of NATO. In the 1990s, it was too weak to resist; today, in the Caucasus, Russia is showing off its power and sending an unmistakable message: Georgia, or much larger Ukraine, will never be allowed to join NATO.

The implications of Russia's action reverberate well beyond that, from the European Union's muddled relations with its key energy supplier, Russia, through Armenia and Azerbaijan in the south, to Ukraine and Moldova.

This region has everything the West and Russia both covet and abhor: immense reserves of oil and gas, innumerable ethnic splits and tensions, corrupt and authoritarian regimes, pockets of territory which have become breeding grounds or safe havens for Islamic fundamentalists. As a result, the region has become the arena for competition between the Americans and Europeans on the one hand, and Russia on the other, over how to bring these countries into their respective spheres of influence.

The EU - as ever, slow and divided - has offered few concrete proposals in order to bring the countries of what Russia calls its "near abroad" - Belarus, Ukraine, the Caucasus, and the Caspian - closer to Europe. Russia insists that it should protect ethnic Russians and Russian citizens in those countries - a point that President Nicolas Sarkozy of France seemed to concede this week in a Kremlin appearance alongside President Dmitri Medvedev.

"The Georgia crisis shows that Russia is in the process of testing how far it can go," said Niklas Nilsson of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute in Stockholm. "This is part of a much bigger geopolitical game. It is time for the Europeans to decide what kind of influence it wants in the former Soviet states. That is the biggest strategic challenge the EU now faces."

NATO, led by the United States and several East European countries, has reached out more actively. At a summit meeting in Bucharest in April, Georgia and Ukraine failed to get on a concrete path to membership as they had sought, but did secure a promise of joining eventually.

Tomas Valasek, the Slovak-born director of foreign policy and defense at the Center for European Reform in London, says Russia has used the ethnic and territorial card in order to persuade some NATO countries that admitting Ukraine or Georgia would prove more dangerous and unstable than keeping them out.