In the middle of the last decade, shortly after the spectacular break-up of the Soviet giant, a group of scientists from the American University of Yale tried to sketch the indent of a hypothetical strategic isolation of Russia. It was, at first glance, a bizarre policy fiction project based on the premise that the old empire, weakened by the loss of much of its Asian territory and the tiny Baltic States, would end fenced off by a coalition of like-minded countries to the ideology of the other great Empire: the United States. Americans University proposed the creation of a safety belt in the European and Caucasian confines of the Russian Federation, also considering the possibility of a strategic alliance with China. Thus it could watch the subjugation of the former great nuclear power which, according to American scientists, should not return to lift head. Recent events in the Caucasus armed intervention of Georgia on South Ossetia, forceful response from Russian troops, rupture of diplomatic relations between the Russian Federation and the Western pro Georgia, permanence of contingent of Russian peacekeepers in Ossetia and Abkhazia indicate that the aberrant script of American scientists is materializing.
Old continent politicians condemn military intervention from the Kremlin, but remain very cautious when it comes to contemplate the imposition of political or economic sanctions against Moscow. Who there are estimates that the 27, which depend on the supplies of black gold and natural gas from Russia, prefer not to tighten the rope: the winter is in doors. But while it is true that the majority of the countries of Western Europe fears possible energy retaliation by the Kremlin, the cast of confrontations is not limited solely to the perception by NATO of the separatist conflicts in the former USSR. For its part, Russia forgave not the successive enlargements of the Atlantic Alliance carried out from 1997, when NATO chose to integrate into its ranks of former allies of the Soviet Union in the Warsaw Pact.