It somehow became conventional wisdom in Washington political circles that pushing NATO membership for Ukraine would be a good idea. There are, however, all kinds of problems with this idea including the fact that Ukrainian people don’t seem to want to be NATO members:

Yanukovich’s bid to end the pursuit of military alliances such as NATO may represent an abrupt departure from his predecessor Viktor Yushchenko’s pro-Western policies, but Gallup surveys suggest it may be more in line with what Ukrainians may have wanted for some time. Even if the law is passed, NATO will not completely be out of the picture in Ukraine. With this U-turn from pro-NATO policies, however, it is possible that more Ukrainians’ opinions about NATO will shift to the “threat” category.

It seems to me that before the US enters into an unconditional security partnership with a new country we should be looking, at a minimum, for a fairly firm cross-party consensus in favor of such an alliance. What they had in Ukraine was the reverse—it’s a subject of partisan controversy in which the pro-NATO side of the controversy was on the wrong side of public opinion.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen

Spencer Ackerman has more on NATO chief and former Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s surprisingly definitive statements on Afghanistan policy:

Krasnik has been doing some reporting into Rasmussen’s already-controversial tenure as NATO secretary general, which is barely a year old. “He has bypassed NATO ambassadors on several occasions, discussing budget and Afghanistan strategy with defense ministers and not diplomats,” Krasnik said. “NATO ambassadors accuse him of being ‘out of control’ and ‘over confident’ — that is: not an empty suit looking for the middle ground between the members. ‘He will last 1 to 1.5 years tops,’ as one NATO diplomat told me the other day.”

Interestingly, one of the only NATO ambassadors to support Rasmussen is Ivo Daalder, Obama’s man in Brussels and a Hillary Rodham Clinton ally. “‘Fogh does what he is supposed to do. He is leading the alliance,” Dalder told a Danish newspaper this Saturday,” Krasnik said. That has led to speculation in Copenhagen that Rasmussen’s position comes with at least the tacit approval of the Obama administration. “My feeling is that he wouldn’t take a public stand like this just before the Bratislava meeting without clearing it with the U.S.,” Krasnik said. “One argument here is that Obama needs others than the GOP and army generals to ask for more troops, so why not the NATO-chief?”

Of course if this is kabuki, it’s hard to know what the point would be. It’s not as if Rasmussen is going to move the dial on American public opinion. This may just be a case of a hard-charging, confrontational, ambitious guy who happened to land in what’s normally a very low-key post.

There have been a number of indications of this, but this video NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen posted on his blog seems like the clearest instance yet of the former Danish Prime Minister publicly pressuring Barack Obama to accede to General McChrystal’s troop request:

It’s not clear that this really matters; Rasmussen doesn’t have any relevant formal authority and I’d be surprised if U.S. public opinion turned out to hinge on the views of a Danish politician nobody’s heard of but me. That said, as Spencer Ackerman says it’s a interesting development anyway simply because there doesn’t seem to be any real precedent for this. The way NATO works is that the General or Admiral in charge of U.S. European Command also serves as Supreme Allied Commander, and then a European politician gets the top civilian post. His job is primarily to do cat-herding on the continent and serve as a spokesman for NATO policy, not to weigh-in on live political controversies.

Spencer Ackerman writes:

From a White House press release:

Vice President Biden will travel to Brussels, Belgium next week to meet with the North Atlantic Council, the principal forum for NATO’s 26 member states. The purpose of his trip is to consult with allies on Afghanistan and Pakistan and to ensure that their views help inform the strategic review ordered by President Obama. The Vice President also will meet with NATO’s Secretary General, with senior leaders of the European Union and with officials of the Belgian government.

Whether NATO countries believe, like Canadian PM Stephen Harper, that Afghanistan is an American preoccupation and not a core NATO interest is something Joe Biden will literally find out.

I think this misconstrues the nature of NATO skepticism about recent U.S. requests. The skepticism from the NATO allies is, like the skepticism from the progressive community in the United States, driven not be a lack of belief that “Afghanistan” is a core interest but by a lack of clarity over what “Afghanistan” is. For reasons that are 100 percent the fault of George Bush and 0 percent the fault of Barack Obama, the new administration finds itself taking over a situation in Afghanistan that bears little resemblance to the one prevailing when our initial war aims were framed. Consequently, it’s become unclear what the American and NATO missions in Afghanistan really are. Hence the ongoing strategy review process. But unfortunately, in some respects Obama seems to be putting the cart before the horse in terms of making commitments of American resources and requests for NATO resources before getting clear about what we’re trying to do. What I think Biden will find it, is that insofar as the Obama administration wants to get substantial cooperation from allied nations he’s going to need to persuade them that he has achievable goals and not just a domestic political imperative.

Iceland Review reports that “Former Minister of Justice Björn Bjarnason described the Iceland Defense Agency as ‘remnants of times past’ and said it might even complicate defense relationships with other nations. The Coast Guard should be focused on instead.” Doug Bandow responds:

It may well be true that Iceland doesn’t have many enemies. But if the Europeans don’t believe they need defending, then isn’t this another good reason to bring home America’s troops? Certainly there’s no reason for the U.S. to defend countries which don’t bother to field militaries themselves!

This seems wrong on a number of levels. For one thing, it’s odd to leap from an observation about Iceland—population 320,000—to broad conclusions about “the Europeans.” Iceland is not only tiny, it’s not really located on the European continent, and it’s definitely not a member of the European Union. In fact, overall European defense spending is quite robust:

I don’t think anyone would characterize China or Russia as countries that “don’t believe they need defending” and Europe commits substantially more funds. Meanwhile, much as you could use Europe’s alleged unwillingness to defend itself as a reason to withdraw from our NATO commitments, the reasoning works equally well the other way around—if Europe is as well-defended as I say, then why do we need to help defend them? But if the argument works equally well either way, then it also works equally poorly. At the end of the day, the issue of the advisability of our multilateral defense relationships doesn’t hinge on this issue. I would say that the partnerships are valuable, well-worth maintaining, and that ultimately it makes more sense to see the existence of the partnerships as a reason that we could afford to be more restrained in our defense spending rather than as something that we ought to eliminate in the name of restraint.

Specifically with regard to Iceland, I think the main thing that a large country (the United States) ought to ask of a small country (Iceland) with which we have a defense relationship is precisely not to try to field a full-scale military. A full-spectrum Icelandic military would necessarily be far too small to ever be useful to the United States. And given the existence of the U.S. defense commitment, it’s also unnecessary. Far better for us to have Iceland specialize in the hopes of developing some useful capabilities. A small island nation of 320,000 people, for example, really might be able to raise a reasonably robust Coast Guard capable of performing services in a portion of the North Atlantic that are useful to a variety of nations—Ireland, the United Kingdom, Norway, Canada, the United States—whose shipping lanes pass through the area.

Indeed, in general this is the kind of thing we would do well to see more of from our European allies. More specialization, especially among the smallest NATO members.

Rising tensions with India are prompting Pakistan to shift forces away from fighting the Taliban near the Afghan border and toward preparations for a subcontinental standoff. And of course they are — Pakistan has no choice but to make its situation vis-a-vis India its primary security concern. This is the sort of thing people really need to think harder about before talking about bringing India into NATO.

Meanwhile, it’s a reminder that all the clever counterinsurgency tactics in the world aren’t going to work as a substitute for a regional diplomatic strategy.

I’ve spent a huge amount of time trying and failing to compose a long, detailed counterargument to Will Marshall’s case for expanding NATO membership, but I can’t quite get the job done. Instead, here’s a brief issue that Marshall left remarkably unaddressed. First the proposal:

This alliance would be stronger still if expanded to include free nations in other, more volatile parts of the world. Likely candidates include Japan and South Korea, which have entrenched market democracy in East Asia; India, which is modernizing rapidly and dominates South Asia; Australia and New Zealand, liberal bastions in the South Pacific; and Chile and Brazil, which have stood against a rising tide of authoritarianism in South America. More controversially, some Italian leaders have even broached the idea of offering NATO membership to Israel.

Anyone putting this forward really ought to think about the consequences for the NATO mission in Afghanistan. If I were a Pakistani official, I would look on India joining NATO — or even any vague took thereof — as indicating that NATO success in Afghanistan constitutes an existential threat to Pakistan. And if I were a soldier serving in Afghanistan, I really wouldn’t want Pakistan to view me succeeding in Afghanistan as posing an existential threat to Pakistan. In general, the consequences of a move like this for stability on the sub-continent strike me as incredibly frightening.

I appreciate Tom Friedman’s effort to eschew simplistic Russia-bashing and try to put the Georgia crisis in some sort of larger context. I don’t, however, think that Friedman’s monomaniacal focus on the initial decision to expand NATO really makes a ton of sense. The first wave of Central European states — Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic — came on board back in 1997 and tons of additional stuff went down in the intervening years. What’s more, the NATO expansion process actually accomplished something useful in terms of helping to consolidate democratic norms (especially in the field of civil-military relations) in a swathe of countries that’s now pretty big and prosperous and somewhat important.

Contrast that with alienating Russia over, say, the Bush administration’s abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and subsequent determination to plow ahead with a national missile defense system. That angered Russia and accomplished nothing. Similarly with the Bush administration slow-and-steady moves toward the militarization of space. Then we recognized Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence even though Russia specifically said that would lead to consequences for South Ossetia and Abkhazia, then we helped Georgia upgrade its military at a time when Georgia’s political leadership wanted to re-assert control over those territories by force while simultaneously pushing for Georgian (and Ukrainian) membership in NATO.

That’s a whole lot of stuff and suggests to me that we could have given more consideration to Russian interests without conceding nearly as much as Friedman seems to think we should have. Suppose Russia agreed to recognize Kosovo independence and to allow a genuine independent peacekeeping force in South Ossetia and Abkhazia and in exchange we agreed to drop the missile shield, leave Ukraine and Georgia out of NATO, and sharply reduce military assistance to Georgia with the understanding that that assistance would be stepped up if Russia tried to coerce Georgia — who would that have left worse off? That deal would address Russia’s strategic concerns much better than a tenuous occupation of Gori does. It would have saved the United States money and allowed us to focus our bilateral relationship with Russia on Iran and terrorism issues. It would have saved Georgia from devastating Russian attack. It would have put Kosovo independence on a firm footing, and as best one can tell (which, admittedly, isn’t that far) it would have reflected the desires of the Ossetians and the Abkhaz. Georgian nationalist sentiment wouldn’t have liked it, of course, but look where nationalism has gotten the Georgians.

But the contours of that specific proposal aside, the point is simply that you can’t draw a straight line from the initial NATO enlargement decision to war in the summer of 2008. There were any number of points at which wiser leadership could have prevented the situation from deteriorating to the current point, and any number of bargains that could have been struck that would have better-served everyone’s interests.