WASHINGTON: Oct 3, 2001, may go down in history as the day the Cold War finally, once and for all - no ifs ands or buts - ended. Finito. Kaputt. No mas. Dos vidanye.
Oh sure, the destruction of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 were significant events in ending decades of ideological conflict between East and West.
But to hear the giddy pronouncements from Washington this week, it took a historic visit to NATO headquarters in Brussels by President Vladimir Putin and his pledge of support in the US-led war on terrorism to persuade leaders here that their old nemesis Russia was ready to join what used to be called “the free world”.
The foreign policy team assembled by US President George W. Bush has been described as a coterie of Cold Warriors reluctant to acknowledge that the world changed in the decade since they last worked in government. Those blinders, to the extent they existed, fell off at the sight of Putin speaking before a line of NATO-member flags.
Russia’s rapidly transformed relationship with the West might be the most striking sign of how global politics are changing in the wake of the Sept 11 terrorist attacks on the United States and Bush’s “You’re with us or you’re with the terrorists” definition of friendship.
And while there might be losers once the changes become clearer, the former KGB operative Putin stands tall among the early winners.
In the ensuing weeks, Putin said he would allow the use of Russian airspace for humanitarian or rescue flights, pledged aid to Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance in its fight against the Taliban and gave the go-ahead for the US to forge a military relationship with the former Soviet republics of Central Asia.
One apparent quid pro quo demanded by Moscow for its support: a softer Western line on its military crackdown in Chechnya. Washington complied by urging the Chechen rebels to sever their ties with “terrorists” such as Osama bin Laden.
Putin also expressed a willingness to modify Russia’s opposition to the eastward expansion of NATO and spoke tantalizingly of Russia eventually joining the alliance which was originally created to thwart it. —dpa