Be careful who you wish to be allies with

By BJ

Kevin Sullivan has a post up today arguing basically that Georgia and Ukraine should be allowed under NATO’s security umbrella so that they can have greater confidence in their sovereignty. His argument seems to be based on the fact that the Baltic states and other former Warsaw Pact members who have been most vocal in their criticisms of Russia are still pushing for diplomatic solutions, while Ukraine is apparently acting in a more aggressive fashion by offering to join the missile defence system. His update to the column:

Just to add to my point here, check out Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili's rhetoric in his respective WSJ and WaPo columns on the invasion. Rather than framing the conflict as a regional, niche problem for Georgia to deal with, he inflates it (rightly or wrongly) into a test of Western values. This rhetoric is perfectly consistent with the American hawk community.

I think it's safe to say that his rhetoric would be slightly different were Georgia a NATO member today.

Says who? How exactly do you think giving somebody an iron-clad security guarantee will make them less likely to be confrontational? If Ukraine’s offering of cooperation with the US missile defence system is a sign of the government there rushing into the arms of the American unilateralist community, what do you call Poland’s sudden signing on to that very same system?

A few days ago, the guys at Fistful of Euros wrote the following:

The Russian-Georgian war should remind everyone of a very important point regarding NATO and the European Union. Specifically, just as John Lewis Gaddis said about the Cold War, reassurance was as important as deterrence, and this made self-deterrence very important indeed.

NATO members benefited from a common deterrent towards the Soviet Union, . . . the balance of power was so stable because as well as the prospect of a formidable conventional defence and a devastating nuclear counteroffensive, NATO also offered the Soviet Union confidence that nobody would do anything stupid. Reassurance was as important as deterrence, and its most important form was self-deterrence.

Self-deterrence? Yes. It was a provocative way of saying it, but what was meant was that everyone agreed to observe a policy of non-provocation towards the other side. The results of actually triggering the common deterrent were, after all, so awful that nobody would take the risk. The upshot, in Europe, was that the European club’s entry requirement is as follows: you must hand in your historical baggage to be searched. If they find any irredenta in there, you’ll have to get rid of them before you’re coming in.

Look at that in the light of Saakashvili’s decision to take South Ossetia by force. What would have happened had Georgia been a part of NATO and the assurances of Western support Saakashvili thought he had been legally binding? Sullivan seems to believe that being in NATO would soften the Ukrainian and Georgian leaderships’ stances versus Russia, but how sure can you be that it wouldn’t just harden them?

In the days after the conflict began, a senior envoy from a European state opposed to Georgian NATO entry told Reuters: “Thank heavens we didn’t take them in… No one in NATO wants to be dragged into a war in the Caucasus because of (President Mikheil) Saakashvili’s miscalculations.”

They say chains are as strong as their weakest link. In the same vein, alliances are as safe as their most reckless member. I, for one, would be very cautious about the possibility of handing NATO’s future over to another Gavrilo Princip.

Comments

[Kevin]

There's nothing "iron-clad" about the joint security of NATO, that's actually an exaggeration often repeated in Western press. There is a right of first refusal and an internal process of debate over action. And the one power with an exception clause to that--namely the EU--depends rather heavily on Russia for its energy needs.

Furthermore, to fully comply with NATO your military and your public institutions must comply with certain criteria; criteria President Saakashvili couldn't simply ignore in any South Ossetian activity.

Point being, if Georgia were a NATO member, this incursion doesn't happen. Russia would've sat and waited for a pretext elsewhere, perhaps in Ukraine, maybe in Azerbaijan. What Saakashvili did was give them their best in show opportunity, and Putin is taking full advantage of that.

Thanks for the response and link. Cheers.