Hat Trick for NYT Today -- The Third Goal Being Roger Cohen on Georgia-Russia

Op-Ed Columnist
NATO’s Disastrous Georgian Fudge
new_york_times:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/01/opinion/01cohen.html
By ROGER COHEN
Published: September 1, 2008
DENVER
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In retrospect the NATO summit declaration of April 3 about Georgia and Ukraine seems almost criminal in its irresponsibility: “We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.”
That lofty commitment emerged from a Bucharest meeting so split over the two countries’ aspirations to enter the Atlantic alliance that it could not even agree to offer the first step toward joining, the Membership Action Plan that prepares nations for NATO.
It is unconscionable to declare objectives for which the means do not exist, and to paper over European-American division through statements of ringing but empty principle. The history of the so-called “safe areas” in Bosnia, Srebrenica among them, is sufficient testimony to the bloodshed lurking in loose commitments.
The great Bucharest fudge succeeded only in infuriating the Russians without providing the deterrence value of concrete steps for Georgia and Ukraine. Vladimir Putin, then Russian president and now prime minister, made Moscow’s fury plain to President Bush afterward in Sochi, but Bush, no surprise, was asleep at the wheel.
Blood has since been shed, Georgia’s borders trampled, and its breakaway provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia recognized by Russia resurgent.
That’s a cautionary tale for Monday’s European Union summit on the Georgian crisis: no empty commitments, please, and no feel-good doling-out of threats or sanctions against Russia for which the will and means are lacking. Grandstanding has had its day.
I’m appalled by what Russia has wrought in Georgia. The gulag and the enslavement of wide swaths of Europe by the Soviet empire burden Moscow with a historical responsibility for the freedom of its neighbors. Viktor Yuschenko, the Ukrainian president, put these neighbors’ fears bluntly: “What has happened is a threat to everyone.”
It is, but Putin, or at least Putin II, the angry man of the second half of his rule, thinks all that’s bunk.
In 2005, the ex-K.G.B. man, his veneer of St. Petersburg liberalism already buried, called the demise of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century. So perhaps we should not be surprised by the Georgian grab. Yet shock is palpable in Europe and the United States.
At the Democratic national convention here, a Georgian delegation wandered around garnering sympathy. Public relations are a weak state’s best 21st-century weapon.
David Bakradze, the chairman of the Georgian Parliament, told me: “Russia’s aim is to weaken Georgia to the point that NATO allies are scared, instability brings regime change, and the map of Europe is changed by military force.”
I can’t argue with that and I don’t like it any more than Bakradze. But before we get to what to do about it, a few points of history bear examination.
No, the West was not wrong to extend NATO to the former vassal states of the Soviet empire in central Europe and the Baltic. The debt incurred at Yalta and the indivisibility of a free Europe demanded no less.
Could more have been done to bring Russia into this new European “architecture?” I think not. Ron Asmus, who dealt with these questions as a senior Clinton administration State Department official, told me “It’s become a Weimar-like legend that we humiliated them.”
Hundreds of man hours and countless trips went into nudging the Russians westward. The NATO-Russia Council was established; cooperation on nuclear weapons disarmament and non-proliferation was put in place. Boris Yeltsin tried to break Russia’s imperial tradition; Putin did not immediately reverse that course.
The full story of what turned Putin cannot yet be written. Georgia’s “Rose Revolution” of 2003 and Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution” of 2004 were critical. Iraq played a part. I’m sure the huge amounts of money accruing to the managers, Putin chief among them, of a controlled one-pipeline Russian state did, too. And here we are.
Russia will pay a price for what it’s done. It’s angered China, opened a Pandora’s box for a state with its own breakaway candidates, and lost its international law card.
Rather than a new cold war, we’re in a new broad war with several players, headed by China, and Putin’s Russia has placed short-term gain before long-term interests.
So the West should not overplay its hand. Breaking off arms reduction and missile defense talks with Russia is in nobody’s interest. Nor are cheap shots like throwing Russia out of an (ever less relevant) G-8.
But nor can the West be cowed. It must shore up the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, with financial and other support. It must keep the trans-Caspian, Russia-circumventing energy corridor open. It must bolster Ukraine’s independence. And, at the NATO foreign ministers’ meeting in December, it should replace Bucharest blather with basics: a Membership Action Plan for Georgia and Ukraine.
Resolve tempered by engagement won the cold war. It can help in the broad war.