The Georgian MAP to NATO: Sidetrack or Fast Track?

Georgia has a pretty flag.  Whether it should fly any time soon in front of NATO headquarters in Brussels will again be the hot topic during next week's meeting of the Alliance's foreign ministers.

Several European NATO members think that Georgia is not quite ready for prime time.  The Bush Administration has been eager to push Georgian membership, but European resistance - already made clear at NATO's Bucharest summit last April - has only intensified after the August 2008 war in South Ossetia.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Assistant Secretary Daniel Fried both spoke recently of a new US (or is it British?) initiative to deal with the Georgian membership question.  Their pre-Thanksgiving publicity blitz was in answer to news circulating in Europe that the US was pressuring its European allies to fast track Georgian (and Ukrainian) membership, both very sensitive issues with neighboring Russia.  Here's the New York Times on November 25:

“This is a real turnaround of the U.S. position,” said a senior NATO diplomat who requested anonymity because of the delicacy of the issue. “We reached a compromise in Bucharest after much haggling. Now, we are being asked to cancel it and effectively discard the MAP program. This is putting the unity and credibility of the alliance at stake.”

The anonymous diplomat was reflecting European concerns that NATO's Article V mutual defense pact means what it says: in the event of membership, NATO (that means also the United States, and primarily the US) would have to defend Georgia in the event of future hostilities with Russia.

So the US effort to sidetrack NATO's MAP (Membership Action Plan) in favor of "bilateral" Georgia-NATO and Ukraine-NATO Commissions has huge ramifications.  Unless it's just a smokescreen for inaction.

Which is how Russian President Dimitry Medvedev has chosen to greet it: “I don’t know what their position is based on, but I’m satisfied that reason has triumphed -- unfortunately, at the end of the current administration’s term." (Bloomberg, November 28).

Medvedev, presumably, interpreted Condoleezza Rice's explanation of the shift as a pull back.  Here's what she said:

Georgia and Ukraine are not ready for membership. That is very clear. The point of view of the United States was stated at Bucharest that we think – thought that MAP is a way to prepare countries for membership. But there are other ways to prepare countries for membership.

So, are the Russians right to take comfort in the new US approach, or are the European members of NATO correct in seeing this as another Bush Administration about-face to the rest of the alliance?  We'll know more next week.

Georgia has a pretty flag.  But it does not fly above significant portions of its own territory: breakaway South Ossetia, but also Abkhazia.  Another restive region, Ajaria, has hovered between insurrection and semi-autonomy.  Not very reassuring when the member states of NATO must decide whether to offer membership in an alliance that exists to guarantee stability, not provide life-support to unstable territories.

To paraphrase President-Elect Obama ("words mean something"), Article V means something.  Thankfully, he will have a Defense Secretary - Robert Gates - who shares those same European concerns about loose application of defense guarantees.  On a continent where blind adherence to mutual defense pacts turned a spark in Sarajevo into World War I, it's best to be prudent when widening the security safety net.