Status Updates From Summer Meditations

The schools must also lead young people to become self-confident, participating citizens; if everyone doesn't take an interest in politics, it will become the domain of those least suited to it.

In fact, you don't apply for membership in NATO at all; NATO has to invite you to join. And at the moment they are not about to invite anyone else to join, let alone former members of the Warsaw Pact. They have their own excellent reasons for this; one of them is that they know only too well how the alliance is still viewed by many former Soviet officials, and what reactions it might cause if NATO started moving . .