On December 2 and 3 Brussels will be hosting yet another conference of NATO foreign ministers. Among the more important items on the agenda is to be the discussion of and voting on the Membership Action Plan, or MAP, for Ukraine and Georgia. The plan is nothing more nor less than a road map spelling out the necessary reforms to be undertaken by aspiring countries and the moves they will have to make to secure conclusive membership in the North Atlantic alliance.
The matter was already discussed in April this year, yet despite the powerful lobbying by the United States certain European states, above all Germany and France, blocked the idea. This new attempt to overcome their recalcitrance will be the Bush administration’s last chance to save face, as within weeks it will have to start packing to vacate the White House.
The United States will be glad to see the back of Bush and his team. The country is being rocked by the financial crisis. The situation in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and nuclear Pakistan could hardly be worse. Every opinion poll suggests unequivocally that the incumbent U.S. president is easily the least successful on record. Some fifty years from now this age may be seen differently, but this must be cold comfort for George Bush Jr.
What he sorely needs now is a victory, however token, so that he could exit with his head held high, or at least medium high. Many people expected Bush to actually venture a bombing of Iran’s nuclear installations, but it is already clear that this is not going to happen. So the only thing he might yet try to accomplish is to drag Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, by fair means or foul. A more inauspicious moment for the job would be hard to find. Ukraine is being rent apart by domestic political strife, and anyway the polls point to am absolute majority of its citizens being dead against accession to NATO.
As for Georgia, Saakashvili’s foolhardy act in South Ossetia in August ought to induce any sane politician to shun him like the plague. Few people now doubt that it was he who ordered the assault on South Ossetia, which left Russian peacekeepers and hundreds of civilians dead, and numerous residential blocks, schools and hospitals gutted. Even the Western media that until recently persisted in blaming the aggression on Russia have now had a change of heart and are citing almost daily irrefutable proof of the fact that it was Georgia that had started the war. Admitting the culprit to NATO now would be sheer madness, and most European countries are fully aware of that.
Last week some dozen European ambassadors to NATO, including those of France, Germany, Italy, Iceland, Norway and Luxemburg, hinted that they would vote against MAP for Ukraine and Georgia.
Once it had received this signal, Washington started feverishly working out alternative strategies. What sort of strategies exactly State Secretary Condoleezza Rice clearly gave us to understand as she expended superhuman efforts – to get MAP scrapped altogether!
The idea is that since MAP does not seem to work, it is best forgotten, and Ukraine and Georgia should be admitted to NATO immediately, skipping all preliminary preparatory steps. That vividly reminded me of a chapter in a Soviet school textbook insisting that Mongolia would go from feudalism straight to socialism, bypassing capitalism.
One can confidently predict that the initiative is doomed to failure. No one takes the Bush administration seriously any more, and the issue can hardly have been discussed with Obama. Some European diplomats believe that all Ms. Rice will achieve will be an even deeper split within NATO.
“This is a complete reversal of the U.S. position,” complained a high-ranking NATO official who wished to remain anonymous, in this the highly delicate situation. “We only just managed to reach compromise on MAP in Bucharest in April, and now we are asked to forget it and practically throw MAP away. This is bound to provoke a crisis of confidence in the decision-making process in our organization.”
Some diplomats assume that this is America’s way of taking revenge on Russia for the humiliation the U.S. suffered in Georgia. And in doing so it completely ignores the fact that scrapping MAP will create a dangerous precedent, for now the road to NATO will be increasingly slippery and devoid of well-considered rules.
Merkel and Sarkozy will probably do well to sound out Obama about his position on the matter, because it will be the new U.S. president who will have to sort out the mess left by Bush.
