(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
[22. August] Wednesday 20. August 2008, almost on the day 40 years after the Warsaw Pact Czechoslovakia invasion, may prove to be an important date for next year's geopolitical power struggle. On Wednesday, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was just in Warsaw, where she now signed a new rocket shield agreement with Poland.
One factor is that this missile shield is generally perceived as a provocation against the Russians – and Ny Tid has previously had interviews with the US military that confirm that the missile shield can also shoot down Russian missiles, not just Iranian ones. Something else is precisely the time of the signing. The Russian accusations that Poland and the United States have accelerated the plan after the last two weeks of war between Russia and Georgia may well be true.
Nato approved the plan at its meeting in April this year. The government and Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre were long openly critical of the plans, but Norway eventually fell into the fold as a faithful NATO member. The question that arises now is whether the government should have gone further. The question is also whether or not Norway should be a NATO member. These are important questions for the 21. century, from both ethical and geopolitical terms. It is not a given that there are no simple answers, neither for one point or another.
NATO violations
The questions are being updated now with the growing war of words between "East and West", as was said in the 1950s. And in such a context, it is also important as a world citizen to discuss where to stand, both in principle and in practice, in the great geopolitical power struggle that the world is now apparently facing. For example, it is worth noting that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Wednesday broke all cooperation agreements with NATO, which comes just after the NATO summit came with quite strong criticism of the Russian invasion of Georgia.
Now it is worth noting several reservations one can and should make in this debate. First, time will tell who is most to blame for the outbreak of war in South Ossetia, where new information emerges almost daily. This week it has also emerged that the media's reports of more than 2000 deaths in South Ossetia were probably not real. In the war, as is well known, truth is the first victim. Another reservation is to take for granted the many political books that are now being published about a new cold war situation. Both Edward Lucas' The New Cold War and Robert Kagan's The Return of History and the End of Dreams feed on such an early understanding of the world situation.
Kagan's fault
This is not to say that they can be right, since their prophecies can become self-fulfilling if they sell enough books and enough people believe in them. But when the neoconservative Kagan is now also the adviser to the Republican John McCain, who is now trying to win power in the White House by playing on Russia's fears, and may have helped influence the current Bush administration to embrace Georgia's dubious Democrat Mikhail Saakashvili so powerful, and thus perhaps just provoking Russians and Ossetians further, then there are good reasons to warn against Kagan's worldview taking hold.
Kagan is not just an observer, but just as much an actor. And it is worth noting that it is the same Greek-born Kagan who in 2003 wrote Of Paradise and Power, where he claimed that Americans are from Mars and Western Europeans from Venus. Now suddenly that enemy image is gone in favor of a new one, Russia. So fast you can forget your mistakes.
With the major political world developments of recent days, it is crucial that the debate in Norway also becomes more open. Norway also needs to reconsider or confirm its alliances, be it with NATO or the at least equally controversial economic oil cooperation with Putin's Russia. It could be a debate that the Foreign Ministry's radar couple, Jonas Gahr Støre and Erik Solheim, could initiate. It is not dangerous to air demanding ideas if one believes in the weight of one's own arguments.