I guess I’m just having trouble understanding why both John McCain and Barack Obama are still calling for NATO membership for Georgia, which would then bind us to an agreement in which we would have to defend them if they were attacked. I could understand the appeal prior to Russia’s invasion last week, where NATO membership for Georgia could have been a deterrent, but at this point, I think the United States has sent a pretty clear message that defending Georgia from a Russian assault is not a big enough priority to risk military intervention.
Maybe I’m underestimating the deterrent effect of letting Georgia join NATO even after the fact. But it’s clear that Georgian forces got the impression that we were going to be supporting them militarily, even if we never had any intention of doing so. I can also see how it would be a bad idea to invite a country that has a habit of starting fights with bigger countries into an alliance where nations are sworn to defend each other could be a bad idea.
Some people think McCain’s statement yesterday that “today we are all Georgians” wasn’t meant to express anything more than empathy or solidarity, but I think there are definitely ways to do so without implying you’d have Georgia’s back in a fight. Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili took it quite literally.Why wouldn’t he? He seemed to believe America would intervene even though we hadn’t specifically committed to doing so. I also think it’s problematic to cast the conflict in stark moral terms–Georgia broke a detente with Russia and Russia responded disproportionately, but Georgia was trying to gain control of an area that doesn’t want to be part of their country. I also can’t imagine a discussion about “proportion” in the use of American military force occurring without the Right calling someone a traitor in the first five minutes.
I don’t think McCain deals much in abstracts with this kind of stuff. He seems to genuinely think military force is very often a solution to international dilemmas, regardless of the circumstances. I simply don’t think McCain would invoke 9/11 if it wasn’t serious, but the general pattern of overlooking what McCain is literally doing in favor of a more flattering interpretation of his actions is something that’s been happening in the press for a long time.
— A. Serwer
