| Experts gathering Thursday on the heels of three
major
international summits said the
West's leading policymaking institutions must include Russia
in a broad strategic
framework if they want to successfully tackle the top global
priority: terrorism.
Despite that general consensus, there was stark disagreement
on specifics at the
two-day conference on Euro-Atlantic integration, organized by
the Washington-based
Euro-Atlantic Institute of International Integration Studies.
Robert Hunter, former U.S. ambassador to NATO, said Russia had
made a "fundamentally important grand strategic decision"
to engage with Western institutions since Sept. 11. "That's
something we in the West must honor so that the differences of
the past will be erased," he said.
Hunter said the arms treaty signed by Presidents Vladimir Putin
and George W. Bush and the Rome treaty boosting Russia's cooperation
with NATO are steps in the right direction, "opening the
perspective on the 21st century."
Sergei Rogov, director of Moscow's Institute for U.S. and Canada
Studies, agreed. "Maybe one of the reasons why [integration]
failed in the 1990s was that we didn't have a common enemy,"
he said, speaking about the threat of terrorists. But the economic
agenda should get top priority, he said.
Strobe Talbott, head of Washington's Brookings Institution and
Russia policy chief in President Bill Clinton's administration,
said the progress made in recent weeks in the Russia-NATO relationship
was a continuation of a path established in the 1990s, before
the two sides fell out over NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999.
"I've been struck by the amnesia of commentators,"
he said in a video linkup from Washington. "But I understand
the need for the [U.S. and Russian] administrations to emphasize
what's new."
Most Russian participants conceded that Russia had no choice
but to integrate. Deputy State Duma Speaker Vladimir Lukin said
there were "endless debates and very big differences"
concerning integration, but that "a choice must be made.
My choice is that Russia should be part of a Euro-Atlantic civilization
no less than the United States."
Lukin said Russia's decade-long policy of trying to balance U.S.
power by advocating a multipolar world and seeking cooperation
with states like China and Iran had led nowhere. "What dividends
did we get? None that I can see."
But Lukin went on to question Western arguments for integration.
He said NATO will become increasingly useless in the future and
that Russia should strive to become an "organic 21st-century
power," as China is doing.
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