the russia-georgia conflict happens to raise two of my pet issues. the first is the issue of NATO. one cause of the conflict, at least part of the reason that russia reacted so forcefully, is georgia's efforts to join NATO and the bush administration's push to get other NATO allies to agree to georgia and ukraine's admission to the alliance. as i've said before, i think NATO has outlived its purpose. it was created as an alliance to deter the soviet union. when the soviet union ended, it could have dissolved (like its opposite, the warsaw pact, dissolved, but it stayed around. but without the soviet threat it wasn't clear what the alliance was for.
throughout the 1990s, when the adversary of the soviet union turned into a friendly russia, the u.s. repeatedly claimed that NATO was not an anti-russian alliance, it was a regional security alliance for europe. and yet every country in europe except russia was invited to join, even former soviet states outside of europe (who could not be said to be "north atlantic" countries by any stretch of the term) were offered special partnership deals with the alliance. NATO, for all its rhetoric, continued to act like an anti-russian alliance. plus, the whole reason that so many former soviet block nations were clamoring to join was precisely because they saw the group as protection against russian domination.
that being said, i don't think the americans, british or germans think of NATO as an anti-russian alliance. i think NATO stuck around out of simple inertia (or lack thereof). it's a lot easier to keep institutions like that around rather than scrap them and build something else from scratch. that's especially true when it comes to NATO, an organization that was seen as a success during the cold war. on top of that, NATO turned out to be a nice carrot to coax former soviet states into adopting political reform.
still, from the russian perspective it's hard to see how it could not be viewed as a hostile alliance. the alliance was formed to counter the predecessor state to modern russia. it's bases and armaments remain directed towards russia. while russia's neighbors were invited to join one by one, bringing the alliance right up to the country's borders, russia itself wasn't invited. any country in russia's position could not help to see NATO as a huge security risk. by pushing for NATO expansion so aggressively, the united states was antagonizing russia. while in the past NATO may have contributed to world security, in the post-cold war environment NATO was making the world less secure. meanwhile, in this instance at least, russia seems to have gotten what it wanted: it has successfully "burned Georgia's NATO card" and "all but obliterated Georgia's possibility of joining NATO."
so why was the bush administration pushing so hard to get georgia admitted to NATO in the first place? what interest does the u.s. have in that tiny distant unstable country? those questions raise my second pet issue: american relations with iran. georgia is important because it has oil pipelines passing through it. the pipelines bring oil from the oil and gas rich caspian sea region to international waters, from azerbaijan to georgia to turkey (bypassing armenia, a country that neither azerbaijan nor turkey get along with). routing a pipeline through the caucasus region is risky. the area is riven by ethnic divisions and governed by young countries with weak central governments. the only reason the west accepts that risk is because it wants to cut the iranians out of the deal. politics aside, iran is the most reasonable way to pipe caspian oil to international waters. it's the only country that borders both. (cutting iran out of caspian energy deals is also the reason for the ridiculous trans-afghanistan gas pipeline proposal, another proposed pipeline through a highly unstable area, avoiding the obvious alternative route through iran)
the long and short of this is that the unwillingness to deal with iran is distorting a lot of seemingly unrelated areas of american foreign policy. georgia is one of them. if not for its iran policy, i wonder if the u.s. would have pushed for georgia's entry into NATO over russia's strenous objections. and if georgian president mikheil saakashvili hasn't assured by bush that the u.s. would back his state, i wonder if he would have sent georgian forces into south ossetia and touched off the current crisis 11 days ago.
