NATO Expansion in Ukraine and Georgia is Dangerous.

David Davis, a former British Foreign Office minister and shadow home secretary, has some sensible things to say here about NATO in the Guardian today (incidentally, it ought to be written in capital letters because it is an acronym ).

....the starkest threat to Nato's future is the continual pressure for it to advance its borders to the east. When the Warsaw Pact dissolved, there was an understandable wish to bring the new states under the umbrella of Nato - a process I was heavily involved in as a Foreign Office minister. Even then, however, western nations were extremely cautious about countries that would be difficult to defend.

In addition, a standard guideline was not to import into Nato any active disputes or feuds: the focus has always been and should always be increasing the stability of countries within its limit and on its border, and not adding to, or reinforcing, disputes and instability.

Not all nations within Nato took the same view. There is little doubt that successive US governments saw Nato expansion as a way both of expanding their own sphere of influence and of actively reducing that of the former Soviet Union and, in particular, Russia.

This is most starkly obvious in the case of Georgia. During the last year the relationship between Georgia and Russia has gone from poor to disastrous. The same sort of argument applies to Ukraine, especially given the frequent disputes that occur over pipelines and other resources.

Expanding NATO eastwards is particulary a neoconservative project, supported by those who see that as part of a historical grudge match against Russia.

The Russians have used the accession of Obama to get off their unwisely belligerent stance on missiles in central Europe. They have suspended plans to deploy short-range missiles in Kaliningrad, following Obama's decision to review the proposed US missile defence shield.

This tends to contradict what Davies has hinted about the reckless behaviour of Saakashvili, something that amounted to a war crime when he rained down grad rockets on Tshinvali in August 2008. Likewise, the missile shield is an offensive action to which Russia is responding.

As Anatol Lieven writes in as essay in the American Conservative in July 2007, 'To Russia with Realism', bad history is one explanation for this,

Part of the reason is obviously the Cold War, in which the Soviet Union—not Russia, but too many people in the West never made the distinction—was the principal enemy. Out of the Cold War came the particular influence in Washington of Polish, Baltic, and West Ukrainian lobbies, with ethnic hatreds of Russia that long predate their countries’ subjection to Soviet Communism.

The geopolitical strategy of the USA, whether under Bush or Obama, is to extend NATO power into Eurasia via Eastern Europe i.e Ukraine and the Near East in Turkey and Georgia. The missile shield bolsters that plan to create an axis of influence stretching from the Baltic down to the Black Sea.

Looking at the maps helps. Brzezinski, Obama's foreign policy advisor, regards the 'Eurasian Balkans' as a key geopolitical pivot necessary to control in order to drive a wedge between Iran and Russia and contain it so that both Russia and China cannot exert influence over the Middle East.

Yet the danger is that this messianic strategy of creating something akin to Orwell's Oceania through NATO ignores the reality of the corruption and instability of states like Ukraine and Georgia simply because they are part of the master plan to dominate the world.

The real purpose is to try and diversify the supply of oil but as Michael T Klare maintains in Blood and Oil, this can only be done by geopolitical proxy conflicts with other great powers, the channelling of arms to irresponsible states where ethnic tensions are rife. Georgia shows that.

Expanding NATO against the wishes of the majority of the people in unstable democracies like Ukraine could trigger ethnic tension between the Russian speaking East and the Crimea and the Ukrainian nationalists in the West.

This is not least because NATO entry usually comes with the usual neoliberal market reforms that just would not work in Ukraine but impoverish large numbers of Russian speakers in the East where the economy is dominated by heavy industry and mining.

As Lieven states,

The case of Ukraine and NATO is worth considering as a prime example of the deep irrationality affecting U.S. policy in the former Soviet Union. For it is not just a question of Ukrainian NATO membership infuriating Russia, real though that threat is—and understandable. After all, the Russians have lost far more men fighting in Ukraine in various wars than have died in all of America’s wars put together, and the Russian flag was flying over the naval port of Sevastopol before the United States was even created.

Even more important are two more facts almost never mentioned in the American debate on this subject—if one can call it a debate. The first is that according to every reliable opinion poll, the great majority of Ukrainians do not even want NATO membership. They are convinced that far from bringing Ukraine greater security, inclusion in the alliance would lead to fierce internal divisions and potentially even split up their country, as well as vastly increase the threat from Russia.

Leaving aside the deep historical and cultural ties between much of Ukraine and Russia, Ukrainians are well aware of how economically dependent their country is on Russia and how little by comparison the West has done to help them. Until it was reduced at the start of 2006, Russia’s annual gas subsidy to Ukraine was worth more than four times as much (between $3 and $5 billion dollars) as the whole of U.S. aid to Ukraine in the five years since 2000 (less than $800 million).

Millions of Ukrainians work legally in Russia and send their families remittances, which contribute immensely to the Ukrainian economy. By contrast, only a handful of Ukrainians receive work visas for the U.S. and the European Union.

The second fact is that if Ukraine does become a member of NATO, the U.S. cannot defend it. Given American commitments in the Middle East, where is Washington to find another army with which to defend Ukraine? Would any American administration be prepared to re-introduce the draft in order to defend Ukraine? If it did, would any Congress agree? And even if one can imagine this happening in some parallel geopolitical universe, is there any chance that American troops would be used to shoot demonstrators in eastern and southern Ukraine calling for their regions to break away from Ukraine in order to remain allied with Russia?

This entire plan for Ukrainian NATO membership violates one of the most fundamental rules of strategy: never make an important, visible commitment that you already know you will not be able to keep in a crisis but from which you cannot withdraw without terrible humiliation. Above all, don’t do this if your move is actually going to increase the threat of crisis. To make false promises of this kind is not only deeply reckless, it is also deeply unethical.

The Bush administration knew that if it had offered to suspend the extension of NATO membership, Russia would in return have become much more helpful in stopping Iran’s nuclear program. Yet it was not opposition in Washington that led to the Ukrainian “Membership Action Plan” being shelved last year, for there was almost none.

Only the collapse of the pro-Western “Orange” coalition that took power in Ukraine in 2004, and the return to the premiership of the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych, led to this project being suspended. As a result, the U.S. has infuriated Russia while gaining precisely nothing from the whole business.

Anatol Lieven further pointed out how futile the neoconservative talk of a new Cold War with Russia is,

And from the Russian point of view, these statements are only responding to a series of bitterly anti-Russian statements and actions by the Bush administration over the past year, including plans to bring Ukraine into NATO; the speech by Vice President Cheney in Vilnius last July attacking Russia; backing for Georgia in its conflict with Russian-backed breakaway republics; and the latest move to extend American anti-missile defenses to Eastern Europe.

.....this tension could lead to Russia arming Iran, joining global energy cartels to put pressure on the West, and inflicting on Washington geopolitical humiliation on the territory of the former Soviet Union. This would occur if the U.S. agreed to defend Ukraine and Georgia as part of NATO and then proved unwilling or unable to defend them when Russia attacked.

Russia may no longer be a global superpower, but it is certainly a great power when it comes to Ukraine, Belarus, and the Caucasus.

Today’s Russia is like many U.S. allies past and present: a corrupt, state-influenced market economy with a partly democratic, partly authoritarian system. Russia has no global agenda of ideological or geopolitical domination but mainly wants to exert predominant influence (but not imperial control) within the territory of the former Soviet Union and the centuries-old Russian empire.

Moves by the state to dominate the oil and gas sector are unwelcome to Americans but entirely in line with world practice outside the U.S. and U.K. Russian corruption is extremely serious, but on the other hand, the fiscal restraint of the Putin administration holds lessons for the present U.S. administration, not the other way around.

The policy of expanding NATO eastwards is also seen by most Russian, including Solzhenitsyn, as part of a strategy to encircle and reduce Russia to some impotent backwater valued as it was under Boris Yeltsin as a place from which to get control of its resources.

The hypocrisy of prating about 'freedom' when it acts as some kind of code for freedom for Western investors and the super rich oligarchs like Berezovsky is also as odious to many Russians.

......when it comes to the main lines of its foreign and domestic policy, the Putin administration has the support of the vast majority of ordinary Russians, while the Russian pro-Western liberals we choose to call “democrats” are supported by a tiny minority—mostly because of their association with the disastrous “reforms” of the 1990s. Thus, far from rallying democratic support in Russia, American attacks on Putin in the name of democracy only foment the anger of ordinary Russians against the United States.

The reaction of Russian society against..... American ambition was.... fierce because radical free-market economic change in the 1990s proved utterly disastrous for ordinary Russians, plunging tens of millions into deep poverty and driving millions to an early death.

We should remember that as late as the summer of 1989, a Soviet leader who envisioned Russia as it now exists would have been received with incredulous joy by the West as representing a future beyond our most optimistic dreams. And at that time a Western policymaker who advocated such megalomaniacal, horribly dangerous projects as drawing Ukraine and Georgia into an anti-Russian military alliance, and taking responsibility for their security, would have been regarded as completely insane.

Then again, the clients the US has backed, such as Saakashvili give all the signs of actually being insane which is why in the light of the Georgia attack on Russian troops in South Ossetia in 2008, all plans to make Georgia part of NATO should be shelved indefinitely. The same is true with regards Ukraine.