Daniel may well be right that “The German and French governments need to reflect on how their veto of Georgia’s NATO membership at the Bucharest Summit in April encouraged Mikheil Saakashvili to take unilateral military action, believing nobody else would help him recover territory belonging to Georgia” – but it also leaves open the question, what if Georgia had become a NATO member?
This is undoubtedly the question that Georgians are asking themselves this weekend, as the NYT’s Andrew Kramer is discovering in Gori:
One soldier, his face a mask of exhaustion, cradled a Kalashnikov. “We killed as many of them as we could,” he said. “But where are our friends?” It was the question of the day. As Russian forces massed Sunday on two fronts, Georgians were heading south with whatever they could carry. When they met Western journalists, they all said the same thing: Where is the United States? When is NATO coming?
But if one scenario is that Georgia’s non-membership of NATO encouraged Saakashvili to take unilateral action, an alternative one is that membership itself might also have emboldened Georgia’s leader to go on the attack. As John Lewis Gaddis recounts in The Cold War, the history of the last 60 years is full of instances in which tails wagged dogs as a result of great powers’ alliances. One of the examples he offers is South Korea just prior to the outbreak of the Korean War, where
The South Korean president, Syngman Rhee, repeatedly sought support for his amibitions to liberate the north from officials in Washington as well as from General Douglas MacArthur … but he never got it. One of the reasons the Americans withdrew their troops from South Korea, indeed, was their fear that the unpredictable Rhee might “march north,” and thus drag them into a war they did not want.
Another case, he suggests, is the Chinese-Taiwanese dispute over offshore islands in 1954-55 and 1958, which looked at points as if it could drag the US and Russia towards a nuclear war.
No one in either Washington or Moscow had instigated these events … nor did any American or Soviet leader think the offshore islands were worth a war in which nuclear weapons might be used. They were, however, unable to avoid threatening each other with just such a result, because the lacked the means of controlling their own ‘allies’.
But the example par excellence, he continues, is Vietnam:
By the beginning of the 1960s [Ngo Dinh Diem’s] South Vietnamese government had become an embarrassment to the Americans … Aware that Washington’s credibility was on the line once again, Diem – following the example of Rhee and Chiang – warned that his regime might collapse if the Americans failed to increase their support for it. “We still have to find the technique,” Kennedy adviser Walt Rostow commented in 1961, “for bringing our great bargaining power to bear on leaders of client states to do things they ought to do but don’t want to do”.
In fairness, one can equally well argue that if Georgia were a member of NATO, then this would have caused Russia to reconsider its decision to surge beyond the South Ossetian border and into Georgia proper. It’s an imponderable that will doubtless be discussed for a long time to come – but I suspect that people who opposed NATO membership for Georgia may well feel vindicated by Saakashvili’s subsequent actions.
