Condi's NATO Farewell: An Orphan Named MAP

[In Georgia] citizens have come to identify MAP as synonymous with their future in NATO.  Georgian Prime Minister Grigol Mgaloblishvili said Monday that he had met a man in the mountains of his country who had named his newborn son, Map.

AFP/France 24, Lome Cook, 3 December 2008

I shouldn't exaggerate: little "Map" obviously has a loving father, though he may himself be a daddy by the time the real MAP leads to Georgian membership in NATO.  The same AFP article reminds us that Georgia (and Ukraine) "must complete political, democratic and military reforms, as well as have good relations with their neighbors."  Sounds like a task that could take generations when the principal neighbor is Russia, their former imperial master.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice must have really been in a hurry to fly on to India, since she cut short by a whole day her attendance at the NATO Foreign Ministers meeting (photo), even missing the meeting of the NATO-Georgia Commission, which she was so intent on pushing to her NATO colleagues.  Someone will have to stand in for her during the group photo.

While her parting comments tried to put a gloss on the compromise, today's Independent (London) calls it for what it is: "Setback for Georgia after NATO rejection."  Simply put, NATO allies were not convinced that Georgia merited NATO's Article V protections.  As Michael Ohanlon of the Brookings Institution points out

But in fact, Article V does not require a military response, and wily characters like Mr. Putin and Mr. Medvedev would likely figure that out. Even if they did not want to challenge us blatantly by overthrowing Mr. Saakashvili in the future, they could quite likely pick future fights with him over borders, or the treatment of minorities, or other such issues -- calculating that American and other alliance leaders would not risk nuclear war over small parts of central Eurasia that few Americans had ever heard of. And they would probably be right.

Ohanlon has a point.  Opening up NATO membership to countries for whom member states would be reluctant to fight would diminish the value of Article V ("The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all...").  Article V was only invoked once in the Alliance's history, by the United States on September 12, 2001.

So, a relatively bad day for Georgia, and a rather good one for Russia: not only did NATO re-activate the NATO-Russia Council, but the EU unfroze high level talks with Russia on the strategic relationship.

Back in the Georgian mountains, little Map and his father shouldn't take it too personally: the real orphan of the NATO ministerial meeting is the Bush Administration.  Memo to NATO: next time a foreign ministerial meeting is scheduled during the lame duck period of an American administration, just postpone it by a couple of months and save lots of airfare.