Monday, August 18, 2008

Learning the Lessons

Considering the past is a worthwhile exercise and quite often intensely illustrative of mistakes we might be about to make. Take for example that unpleasantness that swept across Europe from 1914 to 1919.

The dominoes that fell to ignite that conflagration were stacked by a system of alliances created to achieve the nebulous goal of balancing international power. When you’ve got a continent full of relatively small nations and a couple of the larger ones tend to oppose each other there’s got to be a way to stabilize the system the great diplomats thought. If you get a couple of friends to join with you in a common defense pact, you get some negotiating clout. If your opponent musters some allies as well, so much the better because you don’t have a lot of little rogue nations scurrying about independently. You’ve got a couple of mature players composed of wise and contemplative leaders who will negotiate you out of conflict.

Then along comes some anarchist with a pistol. He offs an archduke in the backwaters of undeveloped Europe. The next thing you know, the alliances are invoked, the armies march and you’ve got a meat grinder across France and Belgium that extends all the way to Gallipoli. The mature and contemplative thing would have been to ignore the incident. Send a diplomatic note to the grieving nobles pointing out that the arch-duking business is inherently fraught with peril. You have to expect some losses if you want to enjoy being a member of the nobility.

What’s the point? The alliance we’ve got in question is NATO. And the problem I’m talking about that benefits from an historical review is Georgia.

NATO was established in 1949 as the linchpin of a network of alliances that Truman forged to implement the Truman Doctrine. The greatest foreign policy problem ever encountered was the question of how to deal with communism in a bi-polar world with nuclear weapons. Truman’s policy wonk, George F. Kennan, had analyzed post War Europe focusing on the economics of the competing systems. He advised Truman that communism was not sustainable without conquest and expansion. If contained and allowed to demonstrate the inability of central planning to manage an economy, the system would collapse. The solution to prevailing without launching global nuclear war was a policy of containment. Don’t confront, simply contain.

Truman and then Eisenhower with John Foster Dulles embraced the principle of building alliances stressing anti-communist governments and shared defense burdens. NATO was the premiere example, but CENTO, SEATO and other regional pacts performed the same function.

The core of NATO is Article 5, which simply stated says, “an attack against one member is considered an attack on all.” Kick my little brother and the whole family will beat up on you.

Many of the alliances have collapsed, but NATO has persisted. Because of that persistence, the Soviet Union and its mirror-image alliance, the Warsaw Pact, eventually did as Kennan predicted they would.

Which brings us to Georgia. The trend since the fall of the Berlin Wall is expansion of the NATO alliance. Bring former eastern European adversaries into the fold of western democracy and in the process create a larger buffer against a resurgent Russia. We’ve added states to the pact and it seems to work well. Article 5 has only been invoked once, following 9/11 and it hasn’t created a major rift as the member states contribute a handful of forces to symbolically fulfill their obligation.

Georgia has sought membership in NATO. Georgia, however, is not a European nation. Far from it. They are well into Asia and a long way from England, Norway, Spain and Denmark. They are just barely adjacent to Turkey. They are a very primitive, not even adolescent democracy. Like most “democracies” in the region they possess questionable legitimacy. Georgia is a step up from a Soviet Socialist Republic, but they don’t yet have a George Washington, or even a Kemal Ataturk.

We should look back at Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo and ponder the situation if Georgia had been a member of NATO these last two weeks.

Complying with the alliance would leave the US in a very undesirable situation. To fulfill Article 5, we would be seeking to oppose Russian aggression militarily in a ground combat situation. Something we are currently only marginally able to do. Or, we could renege on Article 5 and thereby demonstrate to the world that NATO is a hollow shell with no ability to defend its members.

Neither outcome is good. Until someone can show me a compelling benefit to the member states that would derive from Georgian membership in NATO, I will be unalterably opposed.

(And this item posted shortly after completing the above: Coincidentally

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