Déjà vu

By: Gerardo Enrique Garibay Camarena

February 5, 2009

On February fourth, Kremlin authorities announced (with undeniable satisfaction) that they’ve achieved an agreement with several former-Soviet Union nations to create a new military force of rapid reaction, with the presumptive goal of fighting terrorism and take action in the case of national emergencies.

This new organization will be formed, besides Russia, by Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kirgizstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. This means that, by all practical porpoises, a big chunk of what used to be de Red Army of the Soviet Union, dispersed after the fall of the “iron curtain”, will be again under Moscow’s command.

This information may not attract headlines, but is indeed a new and worrying step in the rebuilding of Kremlin’s influence. This process threatens to alter not only the fragile balance of modern Europe, but even the global political counterweights. The scenario gets worse, besides, with the announcement made by Kirgizstan (one of the members of the new military alliance) that it’ll close an American base that operated in its territory as part of the war against the Taliban in neighbor Afghanistan.

This is not an isolated case, because barely a few months ago, while the world celebrated the Olympic Games in Beijing, the Russian army invaded the Republic of Georgia, under western´s surprised eyes. At the sight of it, the governments of former soviet countries like Poland, Ukraine, Estonia, Leetonia and Lithuania, launched a common call for help to the American government and the NATO.

They´re right to be scared, because Russia is rebuilding its former empire, and, for that, counts on its favor with Barack Obama’s Democrats traditional incompetence in matters of foreign policy and with the global financial crisis, which keeps the developed countries’ public opinion too self compassionate to care for anyone (or anything) else.

This new armed force, under Kremlin´s control, constitutes the embryo of a direct challenge to the NATO and, by consequence, Europe’s unity, reached through so many sacrifices during de decades that followed WWII. Which is now at stake is not a minor achievement, but the very survival of the equilibrium that has let Europe enjoy its longest period of peace in centuries.

Even though the tense days of the cold war may seem far away by now, Russia remains a global superpower and so, if the United Sates fail to defend, with strength and intelligence, the positions that they’ve secured in the region since the fall of communism, in a few years notice we´ll face a renewed, resented, dangerous Russian empire.

Right now, we’re stepping into one of those discreet thresholds, one of those key moments in human history, to define the road of the XXI century. In our hands, as western civilization is the duty to stop Kremlin’s ambitions before it’s too late, or pass, once again, through the tensions, the fear and the tragedies of the cold war, which are now approaching, silently, like a shadow, like a ghost, like a déjà vu.

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