Russia was warmly received into Nato’s embrace this week as the Cold War enemies finally buried the hatchet and began working together in a world transformed by terrorism.
Watched by United States President George W Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and their host, President Silvio Berlusconi, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin heaped praise on the Nato-Russia Council, on which he will have equal status with the 19 leaders of an alliance originally created to contain the Soviet Union.
”We have come a long way from confrontation to dialogue and from confrontation to cooperation,” he said from his place in alphabetical order between the prime ministers of Portugal and Spain.
”Two former foes are now joined as partners, overcoming 50 years of division and a decade of insecurity,” Bush said.
Nato leaders and their Russian guest of honour were guarded by missile batteries, a naval exclusion zone and thousands of soldiers and police officers. Fighter planes patrolled the skies.
It was an eye-catching finale to Bush’s six-day European tour, the centrepiece of which was the dramatic nuclear arms-reduction accord with Russia.
But he has signally failed to resolve transatlantic disputes ranging from steel tariffs to the Kyoto global warming protocol.
Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, told the summit that Washington was not ”unilateralist”, as its critics claim.
”We will continue to consult allies, to talk and meet,” he said, ”but we will continue to stick to those positions that we think are the right positions”.
The council will discuss such issues as terrorism, peacekeeping, crisis management, arms control and weapons proliferation.
But Moscow will have no role in core alliance defence functions and no veto over the council’s decisions, including the invitation to seven former communist countries, among them the three Baltic states, to join at its Prague summit in November.
The rhetoric level was high, although some speeches were less corny than others. Vaclav Havel, President of the Czech Republic — one of the first three former Warsaw Pact members to join Nato in 1999 — recalled that the alliance came into existence after Josef Stalin crushed his country’s freedom.
Blair urged the alliance to adopt a new mindset to make sure that the new council actually worked. ”There is a lot to do to give substance to the vision,” he warned.
No one has forgotten a similar fanfare at the Elysee Palace in Paris exactly five years ago, establishing a ”permanent joint council” that remained a sterile story of Nato versus Russia until it got bogged down in bitter disagreement over the Kosovo crisis.
Tuesday’s launch, the Nato secretary general, Lord George Robertson, said, was not ”another glitzy protocol event” but a ”real breakthrough”.
The key this time was the way the September 11 attacks had transformed terrorism into the common enemy.
”Politics, however visionary, would not have moved so far so fast without that horrific catalyst,” he said.
”This new mechanism, this new council that has been created is designed to facilitate joint decisions on joint problems.” It would be a ”genuine and equal partnership”.
Putin refrained from repeating his opposition to Nato’s eastwards enlargement, but struck one sour note, reminding his fellow leaders that even a Russia honeymooning with the West still believed in the rule of law: suggesting that there would be no automatic support for a US-led attack on Iraq.