From In Europe’s Shadow (Robert D. Kaplan, 2016) pp 47-8
Yet as a close friend told me over my two-hour espresso at Nicu Ceausescu’s former villa, “our geography is still a nightmare.”
Indeed, when Romania had joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 2004 and the European Union (EU) in 2007, Romanians thought that they would be absorbed into the West in a straightforward and mechanical fashion. They would therefore replace their historical tragedy with some version of utopia — that history itself would lie wholly in the past, and would not any longer be a drumroll of violent catastrophes that happened to them. But a military alliance is only as strong as its member states’ defense budgets, and with some exceptions those had been steadily declining in Europe, throwing NATO’s future into question. And no sooner had Romania joined the European Union than the European Union itself fell into the greatest crisis of its existence: a mountain of debt spiraling out of control that put the future of the welfare state — the political and moral response to centuries of war and suffering on the Continent in doubt. Instead of one Europe into whose bosom Romania could escape history, several Europes began to emerge: those states inside the Eurozone and the Schengen border agreement; those outside; and those outside the EU altogether. More troubling, there was geographic logic to Europe’s fracturing: those states constituting the medieval Carolingian core and the early modern Prussian Empire were in general the most prosperous, or moving in the direction of prosperity; those of former Habsburg Central Europe were somewhat less prosperous; and those in Catholic Southern Europe or in the former Byzantine-Ottoman Balkans were the worst off. Thus Romania found itself once more exposed and well inside its own vivid history, just at the time when Russia, under Vladimir Putin’s authoritarianism (reminiscent of the bad czars rather than of the progressive ones), was once again a threatening geopolitical factor to Romania’s northeast. Russia had evolved from Boris Yeltsin’s weak and chaotic rule of the 1990s, something that had been actually very convenient to Romania.
Making all this worse was Romania’s dependence on Russian natural gas for 25 percent of its energy needs. Russia was now trying to incorporate the Balkans in Pharaonic-style energy pipeline networks. Nor would Russia ever willingly cede influence in the strategic PontoBaltic Isthmus, meaning Moscow would keep the national conflict in Moldova simmering on Romania’s northeastern border. Meanwhile, the United States was half a world away and distracted by events in the Middle East and the Pacific Basin. The United States did have two military bases in Romania, with troops rotating through them. But Romanians were increasingly worried that this was insufficient as a trip wire. The Bucharest University political scientist Radu Dudau told me that “all serious foreign policy discussions in Romania begin and end with geography.” Again, by 2014 because of the Ukraine crisis, all my earlier discussions in this regard would seem that much more meaningful.
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