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Why are we pretending we would fight for Georgia?
Messrs Miliband and Cameron want Georgia to join Nato. Such
thinking is muddled, dangerous and defies the lessons of history
By
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
17/08/08 "The
Independent" -- - Hard on the heels of
Nicolas Sarkozy and Condoleezza Rice, and keen to share their
limelight, David Cameron arrived in Tbilisi yesterday. His visit
is a reward to the Leader of the Opposition for having expressed
even more bellicose views on the Georgian crisis than the
Americans, which should sound loud alarm bells for those of us
who may quite soon be living under a Tory government.
In the official view of Washington, the expansion of Nato up to
the borders of Russia was a benevolent spreading of democracy.
"It is the right of the Georgian people and Georgian government
to determine their own security orientation," says Kurt Volker,
principal deputy assistant secretary of state, and Matthew Bryza,
the American special envoy, adds that Russia would not have
attacked Georgia if she had already belonged to Nato.
While Gordon Brown and David Miliband merely mouthed empty
platitudes about the crisis (although Miliband has been
sympathetic to Georgia's Nato aspirations in the past), Cameron
went startlingly further when he said that its membership of
Nato should be accelerated. His words so excited the Georgians
that they asked him to meet their ambassador in London on
Wednesday, and then fly out for his Caucasian photo-op.
No doubt this crisis has illustrated Russian ruthlessness and
brutality, but then, as the Chechens might say, we knew that
already. It has also exposed the severe limits of US power.
Although George Bush, Dick Cheney and sabre-rattling pundits
have screeched defiance at Russia, they are bereft of any
practical response. Removing the Winter Olympics from Sochi
doesn't sound like the ultimate deterrent.
But above all, the crisis has highlighted the incoherence of
Western policy since the Cold War ended – and belatedly raised
the question of just what purpose Nato now serves. This is
something an intelligent opposition should be discussing.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation was created in 1949 as a
"one for all and all for one" mutual defence alliance between
west European countries, of which Great Britain was then
militarily much the most important, and the United States,
guarding Europe against Soviet aggression. By the terms of the
treaty, "an armed attack on any member in Europe or North
America shall be considered an attack against them all and ...
if such an armed attack occurs, each of them ... will assist the
party or parties so attacked by taking forthwith... such action
as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to
restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area."
That object met with total success. Forty years later, the
Berlin Wall fell, Soviet Russia began to implode, and its empire
soon fell apart. This left Nato without an obvious role, and it
might logically have been wound up. Instead, it evolved, almost
without anyone's noticing, into an arm of US policy – and an
outlet for Tony Blair's zealous "humanitarian interventionism".
In the spring of 1999, he mawkishly extolled Nato's bombing of
Serbia: "No one in the West who has seen what is happening in
Kosovo can doubt that Nato's military action is justified...
[You need only ask] anyone who has seen the tear-stained faces
of the hundreds of thousands of refugees streaming across the
border, heard their heart-rending tales of cruelty."
But even if Blair had been correct to say that misrule in
distant countries justified armed intervention – an alarmingly
open-ended principle which has since helped take us into the
Iraq disaster – what had it to do with Nato? How did those
tear-stained faces become "an armed attack on any member"? And
by what geographical conjuring trick did Afghanistan, more
recently, become part of "the North Atlantic area" to require a
Nato operation there?
Before then the acutely dangerous policy of enlarging Nato had
already begun, partly for the most frivolous of reasons. Bill
Clinton ingratiatingly promised a Polish-American audience in
Chicago that Poland would join, yet another example of the
baleful influence of "hyphenated" American domestic politics on
foreign policy.
And so, in this heedless way, Nato was expanded to include not
only the former Warsaw Pact countries Poland, Hungary and
Bulgaria, but the Baltic states that were part of the Soviet
Union only 20 years ago. One didn't have to be a Russian
nationalist to see this as deliberate provocation of an angry
and wounded country. With all its brutality, Russia has
legitimate security concerns and national interests. When
Georgian membership of Nato is flaunted, one wonders what the US
reaction would have been if Leonid Brezhnev had invited Mexico
to join the Warsaw Pact. Russian policy may sometimes have a
paranoid tinge but, as the saying goes, paranoiacs have enemies,
too.
No one stopped to point out that, if the fundamental Nato
principle applied, an irredentist border dispute between Latvia
and Russia should have become an armed conflict fought by Nato,
which was plainly absurd. Bryza's claim that Russia would have
been deterred if Georgia had already belonged to Nato is
mercifully theoretical but highly questionable. And does Cameron
really want what's left of our depleted army sent to the
Caucasus to fight Russia?
It remained for a former Tory foreign secretary to dash a little
cold water of sanity on these overheated effusions. On Friday
Sir Malcolm Rifkind chided the folly of making threats about the
use of force when these are obviously not going to be carried
out. And the day before he had said, "I think people in both the
United States and in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in western
Europe will have to ask very clearly how important is Georgia to
them.
"There was a lot of talk about how Georgia should join Nato and
if only Georgia was a member of Nato this wouldn't have
happened, and so forth. I think that is frankly totally
unconvincing." The truth is surely as Sir Malcolm says: "The
United States, Britain, France and Germany are not going to go
to war with Russia over South Ossetia, however sympathetic to
the people of Georgia we are.
"We are sympathetic to Tibet, we are sympathetic to Zimbabwe,
but we don't contemplate military solutions to these problems.
So Nato membership is not the answer." Is it too late for our
politicians to learn again that kind of plain speaking and
common sense?
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