While we are waiting for Barack Obama to announce his vice-presidential pick, and while we are waiting for Russia to pull all its troops out of Georgia—what was it that Adlai Stevenson said to Russia’s Zorin at a Security Council meeting during the Cuban missile crisis? Something like “…until hell freezes over”?—I want to say just a few words on a good opinion piece by former Moscow correspondent for Time magazine, Andrew Meier, in Wednesday’s LA Times.
Discussing the Russian military intrusion into Georgia in his “Let Russia join NATO,” Meier laments both Russia’s aggressive behavior and the West’s ineffective response:
Let no one be deceived: Putin has drawn a dangerous new line. Russian troops have trespassed into a sovereign nation for the first time since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. But all such retributive Western campaigns are misguided and, like every attempt to twist Russian arms since the end of the U.S.S.R., sure to backfire.
He then suggests a surprising solution (as the title gives it away): “There’s really only one lever left: Invite Russia to join NATO.”
Some of Meier’s arguments:
In Putin’s Russia, muscle — be it tanks or banks — rules. Gazprom, the state giant that controls at least 25% of Europe’s natural gas supply, hungers to enter the U.S. market. So do a raft of Russian oil giants and those who control the country’s sovereign wealth funds, flush with at least $157 billion in oil money. What should the West do? Many in Washington and on Wall Street will whisper the obvious reply: Bring them in. “If our goal all these years, since the Soviet breakup, has been ‘Get them to play by our rules,’ ” one former high-ranking national security aide in the Bush and Clinton administrations told me recently, “what better way to do it?”
And,
So too on the diplomatic front. Now is the time, before the conflagration in the Caucasus spreads, to reverse course and embrace Russia more tightly than ever.
While I agree that we need to appeal to Russia’s economic interests and “bring them in” economically and in other ways, I don’t believe that letting Russia join NATO is the solution. If including Russia in NATO, as Andrew Meier suggests, could “twist Russia’s arm” to become less belligerent and expansionist, perhaps we should push for a Global Treaty Organization (GTO) that also includes China, North Korea, Iran, etc., and then we can all just sit back and sing Kum ba yah, knowing that we are all committed to everyone else’s mutual defense.
Sadly, as history has shown us, treaties, alliances and defensive compacts alone, a panacea do not make. Neither does a foreign policy—such as we have seen during the past seven years—that relies on bullying, retribution, cajolement, and even bribery. In my humble opinion, diligent and intelligent diplomatic, social and, yes, economic efforts and programs have a much better chance to “twist” nations’ arms.
The author is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a writer.