And he was right. The recent press speculations to the effect that the former Soviet foreign minister, working in tandem with Soviet president Gorbachev, had been negotiating NATO's possible advance to the Bug is nothing but idle talk of people who do not remember the most recent history. Still, it was the Shevardnadze foreign policy that paved NATO's way to the east which the alliance hopes to make without a single shot fired. Today, even the uninitiated can appreciate that Shevardnadze was acting more in the interests of Germany and NATO than of the state whose successor is Russia. This is the reference point from which to judge the recent Shevardnadze-Solana talks.
Every state is free to enter whatever organisation it wills.
Such stance would not win the ex-minister even a doorman's post in the Russian foreign ministry these days. Before coming to Tbilisi, Solana had visited Moldova. He plans to make trips to Yerevan, Armenia, and Baku, Azerbaijan. The lover of veiled expressions, the secretary general could not find a better rationale for his voyages than the old rhetoric of developing cooperation under the Partnership For Peace programme. But the slack bilateral relations with Moldova and the Transcaucasian states is in no way NATO's main headache now that its relations with Moscow are at stake.