The End of NATO?
Recriminations continue to fly over the Russian invasion of Georgia. Many cite Georgia's attempt to recapture the capital of the separatist South Ossetia region as the match held to the fuse, while others highlight the resurgence of Russian colonialism and its role in giving Russian passports to separtists in Georgia as having provided the fuse in the first place.
And while many have criticized the United States for its failure to dissuade its earnest ally Georgia from embarking on a path of self-destruction upon which the U.S. would be powerless to provide meaningful assistance even if it wanted to, relatively few have reached the broader question of what the Georgian Crisis means for the future of U.S. foreign policy. Specifically, I would argue that regardless of whether Russian forces content themselves with their seizure of Georgia's breakaway areas or proceed to Tblisi to overthrow Georgia's government entirely, the invasion burns away an important leg of U.S. post-Cold War strategy, that being the continual expansion of NATO.
In the aftermath of U.S. impotence in the face of an outright invasion of an ally, it is likely that existing moves to expand NATO membership to Georgia and the Ukraine are as dead as U.S. dreams of Olympic gold in table tennis. The Georgian crisis reveals NATO's security guarantees to be a mirage, at least for countries within what Russians call the "near abroad" and think of as their continuing zone of influence. Russia has now put the West on notice that it will use both its substantial remaining military force and its growing energy resources to impose its will within that sphere. Putin, who once lamented the fall of the Soviet Union as one of the greatest tragedies of modern history, appears determined to reverse that historical injustice.
The trouble is that Russia's new embrace of old techniques reintroduces a logic that could not only limit the future of NATO, but could reverse previous gains and even undermine the core of what NRO's Victor Davis Hanson has called the "Potemkin alliance". It is all but certain that the Baltic republics at the northern end of Russia's western frontiers have been watching closely events on its southern end. And the read from Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia must appear grim. In the not-unforeseeable event that Russia might renew its claims to dominance in the Baltics, does NATO membership in hand really offer a meaningful security guarantee? Put starkly, will German and British and American soldiers die to defend Vilnius? Would the Western great powers risk nuclear confrontation over Latvian independence? Unlikely.
Such a logical conclusion might proliferate through the alliance more broadly, undermining NATO's entire raison d'etre. If an alliance predicated upon the claim that an attack on one is an attack on all cannot credibly maintain that guarantee in the face of the only likely scenarios that might invoke it, what is the point of that alliance's continued existence? NATO might become a dead letter or, more likely, a marginal institution-of-convenience, used only as an occasional fig leaf for Bosnia-type interventions where only secondary national interests are implicated.
Senator Barack Obama has proposed strengthening U.S. involvement in multilateral institutions and Senator John McCain has suggested the creation of a league of democracies as an alternative to the United Nations for multilateral foreign policies. Perhaps both presidential candidates should ponder the growing cracks in the core alliance we already have.
