Bucharest, Romania: The final fronteer.
It was the first NATO summit where the US failed to get what it publicly asked for - granting Ukraine and Georgia a next step in the NATO-accession process, the so-called "Membership Action Plan" or MAP. MAP does not mean automatic NATO membership and can take 5-10 years to complete because the requirements laid out in MAP are dependent on the reformist drive of the respective governments. In the battle over whether to grant MAP to Ukraine & Georgia, French President Sarkozy, whom Bush qualified as "the last reincarnation of Elvis", suddenly switched sides and joined the opposition led by German chancellor Angela Merkel, who was against MAP from the very beginning.
After bitter quarrels at a working dinner hosted by the Romanian president Traian Basescu, the leaders of Old Europe prevailed. Bush and Brown got a measly compromise - a second chance in December, when NATO foreign ministers could decide to give MAP to the two former Soviet countries. But German Foreign Minister Frank Walter Steinmeier already qualified as "unconceivable" the prospects of changing his mind by December, when, in his view, there will only be a "first assessment". Followed by a second, third, etc. until Ukrainians and Georgians give up hope of ever joining NATO.
The real winner of the NATO summit in Bucharest was none other than Vladimir Putin. It was he who delivered the final speech on the last day of the summit, it was he whom Germany and France were thinking of as these two stalwarts of "Old Europe" fought to keep Georgia and Ukraine out of NATO. Self-confident and pleased that "our concerns were heard", Putin gave the audience at the Summit a condescending discourse which seemed as if the West was already at his disposal and he, the "Tsar of the Kremlin" didn’t feel the need to bully his loyal servants. If the result of the NATO Summit are any indication, Putin was right.
During the closed-door NATO-Russia Council in Bucharest, Putin threatened the statehood of Ukraine in the event that it would become a NATO member. Putin noted that "there are 17 millions Russians there" and that "Ukraine is a patchwork of territories from other states". But in the following press conference he refrained himself form directly attacking Ukraine or Georgia. The argument against NATO enlargement, in Putin’s public speech, was that "NATO is not a democratizer", but "a powerful military block whose appearance on our borders will be considered by Russia as a direct threat to our country’s security.
He also stressed that no threat - from terrorism to proliferation of WMD, from cyber attacks to energy - can be tackled without Russia. NATO was set up during the Cold War against an "evil empire" - the USSR - "but it remains to be seen who was right then", Putin said. That statement alone should set off alarm bells among military strategists and historians throughout the West.
Putin also mentioned Iran and that, although Russia opposes a military nuclear program, it is "fully committed to honor its contractual obligations in terms of civilian technology and fuel for the civilian Iranian nuclear program". No comment.
So what will be the future of NATO after Bucharest, after Russia got a veto right through its advocates in the NATO Alliance, especially Germany?
Hopefully Russia will make another mistake, the way it cut off gas to Ukraine in 2006 and let German consumers shiver. And hopefully we’ll have a strong leader in the White House next year. One who knows Russia from the Cold War and sees the new threat it has become. One who doesn’t look Putin or Medvedev in the eyes and thinks he has "seen into their soul", as George W. Bush famously stated after meeting with Putin. That would be the only hope for the transatlantic community. It cannot rely on a reincarnation of Elvis in France and a jello-like chancellor in Germany, too weak to break the will of her half-socialist, pro-Russian government.
It is a sad indication of where the power truly lies in Europe when Bush and Sarkozy, both hawkish on foreign policy in general, are not able to secure the nomination of two former Soviet satellites to one of the most important military blocs in the world. Perhaps, in the end, Putin smiles because he knows the truth: Putin has also looked into the West’s eyes to see its soul and has found that the West is lacking both a soul and a backbone.
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Apr 5th, 2008
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