NATO's Paper Tiger
Frank Fukuyama asks all the right questions about our foolish Georgia policy over at The American Interest‘s blog. (Full disclosure: my other job is at AI.)
If Cheney and McCain were really serious about protecting Georgia’s territorial integrity, why wait for NATO? We protect plenty of countries like Korea and Japan through bilateral arrangements, and could decide to deploy a battalion or two of American ground forces, or some squadrons of F-16s, to Georgia tomorrow.
The Bush administration has not moved forthrightly to do this, and indeed has denied that it is contemplating such a move, because everyone knows that we cannot militarily protect a small, landlocked country on Russia’s borders many thousands of miles away from the United States. Quite apart from the political repercussions direct intervention would have with Moscow, we face insuperable operational constraints. During the Cold War we stationed a whole brigade in West Berlin, knowing full well that it would be overwhelmed in a war. We used that brigade as a tripwire that would trigger nuclear escalation, and in any event had much larger conventional forces deployed not far away along the inter-German border. In Georgia, no such supporting structures exist.
Indeed, we wouldn’t even get to first base if we tried to do such a thing. The moment it was announced that US or other foreign forces were to be deployed to Georgia, the Russians would simply occupy the whole of the country to forestall our move. Or at least, that’s what I would do if I were a leader with a tenth of Putin’s ruthlessness. (Indeed, I would expect nothing less of an American president if the Russians were to deploy forces to a country bordering the United States.)
The same considerations would apply should Georgia by some miracle be admitted to NATO next week. The protection that alliance membership would afford Georgia would be symbolic and not military—that is, we would hope that the Russians would blink when confronted with the prospect of violating the territorial integrity of a country under NATO Article V security guarantees. But supposing they called our bluff? NATO would stamp its feet in protest, but would be left with the same range of diplomatic, economic, and political sanctions that are available to us today.
Excellent stuff—a brutal critique of the blinkered establishment views on how to handle the situation. I hate to post-and-run, but my cup runneth over this morning. Do read the whole thing.