While I was working on a piece now out in the latest issue of The American Conservative about the relevance to US policy on the Russia-Georgia conflict of the epochally disastrous mistake of the Asquith-Grey government of Britain of choosing war with Germany officially in order to defend Belgium, I asked myself several times, “Since even the hawkiest of hawks in John McCain’s foreign policy shop understand that war with Russia means a thermonuclear exchange and billions of deaths, isn’t it a bit of a stretch to suggest their aggressive posturing towards Russia really tokens a willingness to fight such a war?” And in moments of doubt, I found myself answering, “perhaps so.” But then events would allay my skepticism. Like the time John McCain’s vice-presidential nominee casually told Charlie Gibson that the policy her running-mate has favored at least since his debonair pal Misha first charmed him and that she has favored since at least last Tuesday of extending membership in NATO to Georgia, Ukraine, and other former Soviet satellites locked in territorial disputes with the Russian Federation might in fact obligate the United States to go to war with Russia.
She’s even more correct than her attempt to recite the definition of “alliance” suggests; Article V of the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty on which the NATO alliance is founded obligates member states to regard attacks on any of them as attacks on all them, so if Georgia had been a NATO member at the beginning of August, the Russian invasion would have triggered a de lege state of war between the US and the Russian Federation. Of course, this fact means that NATO and its leading power have to be extremely conservative and judicious in any potential extension of membership in the alliance, and in particular, must not take steps to bring peripheral states involved in territorial conflicts with nuclear superpowers into NATO and thereby endanger billions of lives. And that’s just a minimal conclusion. The insanity of what the Russia hawks have been up to since August 9 warrants some serious reconsideration among those who had been bullish about the idea of the wisdom of extending NATO membership anywhere, if not of the wisdom of retaining the alliance in a post-Soviet world at all. (more…)