Yesterday on Foreign Policy Christian Caryl published one of those "Russia-more-isolated-now-than-ever-thanks-to-their-own-policies-of-confrontation" type of articles.  We are beginning to see this topic come around and around ever since the Ukraine smackdown, but the trend has been building over the past number of years - I would say well before the war with Georgia.  What I like about Caryl's piece is that he points out that it certainly doesn't have to be this way, and that Russia's missteps with its neighbors could be easily corrected should the leadership ever get it right.

Russia's ability to get in its own way remains a cause for much head-scratching in the region. "When they tried to stop NATO enlargement, whom did they discuss it with? The United States and Germany," notes Kadri Liik, Director of the International Center for Defense Studies in Tallinn, Estonia. "But in fact

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Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa, and a long list of other former leaders of Eastern European states have penned an open letter to U.S. President Barack Obama expressing their fears over what kinds of sacrifices to their sovereignty might come along with Washington's effort to improve relations with Russia.  Full text of the letter below from Gazeta Wyborcza, news coverage from Associated Press and Reuters.

An Open Letter to the Obama Administration from Central and Eastern Europe

by Valdas Adamkus, Martin Butora, Emil Constantinescu, Pavol Demes, Lubos Dobrovsky, Matyas Eorsi, Istvan Gyarmati, Vaclav Havel, Rastislav Kacer, Sandra Kalniete, Karel Schwarzenberg, Michal Kovac, Ivan Krastev, Alexander Kwasniewski, Mart Laar, Kadri Liik, Janos Martonyi. Janusz Onyszkiewicz, Adam Rotfeld, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, Alexandr Vondra, Lech Walesa.

We have written this letter because, as Central and Eastern European (CEE) intellectuals and former policymakers,

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