Last week, we all witnessed, with or without our will, one of the strangest moments of the unprofessional external affairs strategy. While in Libya, President Traian Basescu seriously accused the Romanian external affairs strategies after 1990, which, in his opinion, regarded mostly occidental partners and left behind a series of traditional relations like the one led by Colonel Gaddafi.
Many of the readers of this article might say this is rather a personal reaction because I was more than involved in the Romanian external affairs strategies after 1990. Actually, this is partly true. There is no man in this world that would stand and do nothing when other people are talking nonsense about the thinks he had worked on for several years. However, this case is a little different. Romaniaâs strategic orientations after 1990 havenât been the result of any exotic "Nastase doctrine" or of the opinions of the former External Affairs Ministers, PMs or Presidents, but the result of careful analyses of new realities, which imposed a series of trenchant and responsible options, even if these caused certain mistakes along the way.
In time, Ceausescuâs Romania gathered a series of traditional external partners that took part in the general picture of the Romanian communist dictatorship. They were generally people and regimes in conflict with the free world and its beliefs. This is nor the time, nor the place for an analysis of the profit Romania obtained from these relations. However, there is a question that arises by itself: what is it that we should have done after 1989 to get away from communism and Ceausescu? Should we have tried to reacquire the Clause of the most favored nation, to get into the Partnership for Peace, to develop relations with the European organizations, or to continue the visits of the former presidential couple? Who would have believed we
