Russia Faces NATO Expansion: Bearing Gifts or Bearing Arms?

The immediate and long-term importance of Russian thinking about NATO expansion eastward has been badly underestimated in the West. Indeed, most Western analysis has striven to provide justification for the West's policy of enlarging the alliance rather than examining its potential drawbacks. Although the NATO issue has been articulated primarily by the Russian elite, it has manifested itself in a rising reservoir of ill-will toward the West that cannot be ignored. In this first comprehensive English-language assessment of the Russian position, J. L. Black seeks to remedy that oversight with a thorough examination of Russian official statements, expert analysis, political platforms, and media commentary. Taken together, they show the degree to which NATO expansion has brought a rare unity to the otherwise fragmented and volatile Russian political arena. The author first provides a detailed account of Russian reactions to NATO's plans since the early 1990s. He then analyzes how the NATO question shapes Russian strategic thinking, military reforms, and election campaigning, and how it affects Moscow's relationships with Ukraine, the Baltic States, China, and the CIS. Crises in Yugoslavia and Iraq are used as case studies. Based entirely on Russian-language sources, this timely study provides invaluable insights into current Russian thinking on NATO expansion and projects the significance of such thinking for the Western Alliance into the future. Detailed and definitive, Black's clearly written and balanced assessment of this overriding legacy of the Cold War will be the definitive history of the Russian perspective during a crucial period in Western security and essential reading for policymakers, scholars, and concerned general readers alike.

Author: J. L. Black
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 11/17/1999
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.11lbs
Size: 9.24h x 6.19w x 0.85d
ISBN: 9780847698660

About the Author
(SHORT BIO) J. L. Black is professor of Russian and Soviet history and director of the Centre for Research on Canadian-Russian Relations (CRCR), Carleton University, Ottawa. (LONG BIO) J. L. Black is professor of Russian and Soviet history and director of the Centre for Research on Canadian-Russian Relations (CRCR), Carleton University, Ottawa. He received a Ph.D. in history from McGill University in 1968 and went on to teach at Laurentian University. He moved to Carleton University in 1976. He is the author of Nicholas Karamzin and Nineteenth Century Russian Society: A Study in Russian Political and Historical Thought (1975), Citizens for the Fatherland: Education, Educators, and Pedagogical Ideals in Eighteenth-Century Russia (1979), G.-F. Müller and the Imperial Russian Academy, 1725-1783 (1986), Into the Dustbin of History: The USSR from August Coup to Commonwealth, 1991 (1993), and Canada in the Soviet Mirror: Ideology and Perception in Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917-1991 (1998).


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