The 8th Circle

Flag of Germany

By now hardly a surprise, German Chancellor Angela Merkel drew the line on where NATO will or will not expand (via Wall Street Journal).  After blocking the application for an Action Plan by Ukraine and Georgia at the Bucharest summit in April, Merkel has remained committed in her steadfast opposition to further integration between NATO and the two countries.  In effect, she has done the same thing with NATO as France’s Nicholas Sarkozy has done with the EU - made it very clear where Brussels stands toward its Eastern neighborhood, which is nowhere.

The European Union’s policy seems to be to defer utterly and completely to Russia.  In effect, this means accepting the Medvedev doctrine.

The question is how will Moscow see this action?  I think it would not be unreasonable to say that Merkel’s premature announcement (after all the decision - which is ostensibly based on NATO’s reports on each state’s progress toward meeting the alliance’s criteria for MAP - was supposed to be made at the December’s meeting after examining the documents) will confirm to Moscow that it has indirect veto power in NATO.

What we have here is a political decision by Germany that recognizes for the first time distinctly that there exists a Russian sphere of influence and that it stops at current NATO’s borders.

The Wall Street Journal’s Marc Champion writes:

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization won’t give Georgia and Ukraine a road map to membership at a meeting later this year, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Thursday.

Meanwhile, Kiev took a step away from the West and closer to Moscow, as Ukraine’s Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko announced gas deals with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and voiced support for Russian accession to the World Trade Organization.

I can’t agree with the second paragraph.  Most of the West is not opposed to Ukraine-Russia gas agreements nor is it opposed to Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization.  Thus Ukraine’s position on these two issues is actually in line with the West’s own positions.  Portraying it as a “step away” is an illusion conceived to add a little drama to the storyline.

THE HYPOCRISY

Membership in NATO can come as long as a decade after the start of MAP. But Mrs. Merkel argued ahead of the April summit that the move would provoke Russia unnecessarily, and that so long as Georgia had two open territorial disputes it wasn’t a suitable NATO member. NATO guarantees it will defend members of the alliance when necessary.

It is an irony of historical proportions that the country which was admitted to the North Atlantic Alliance when its own territory was divided in half and which had hundreds of miles of “territorial disputes” is now the prime opponent of admitting another country with the similar circumstances.

Flag of NATO

Of course, the analogy between West Germany and Georgia is not perfect (can any analogy be?), but it remains a fact that the two countries’ scenarios have undeniable parallels.  It prompts the question:  should the West have adopted the same reasoning against West Germany back in 1950s, which Merkel uses today against Georgia?

But then, maybe Merkel knows only too well what the majority of Germans think about NATO and its new members (e.g. the Baltics)?  In Germany, Italy and Spain, majorities would oppose, than would support, sending their national troops to defend the Baltic states.

Since this is what so many western Europeans think about the Baltics, three small countries that are already in NATO, then perhaps Merkel is being simply realistic in vetoing Ukraine’s and Georgia’s applications to receive a Membership Action Plan (MAP).

Of course, this could still have been done better, at the right time and venue, not at a press-conference over a month before the official meeting of NATO.  More importantly, Merkel and her anti-MAP faction have done Georgia and Ukraine a big disservice when they announced in Bucharest and later in August (after the war between Russia and Georgia) that “one day” Georgia and Ukraine will become NATO members.

Why give false hope if this is not something that is viable in the near- to mid-term?  If NATO is not an option, then Brussels should be blunt and say so upfront.  Instead, it chose to opt for the same approach it has used with Ankara and its EU membership application - stalling.