NATO now

Earlier this month, one could almost hear the wind faintly whispering a disapproving refrain from the ghost of Clarence K. Streit: "I told you so." He would have been looking at us, and pointing to Georgia.

In 1938, Streit published "Union Now," his call for a union of democracies, which would act as one nation under the principles of federalism. The point, he wrote in "Union Now," was this: "The best way to prevent war is to make attack hopeless."

A simple alliance wasn't up to the task, he warned, because the nationalist desire to avoid commitments and confrontations would also prevent allied nations from coming to each other's aid in time to stop a war. An alliance could help a nation win a war that has already begun, he wrote. "But it cannot promise, as Union can, to prevent the war -- and that is the main thing."

Georgia is an ally of the powerful West, and as Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili's nation was invaded by the Russian army, the West powerfully wagged its collective finger at Vladimir Putin.

While Streit's proposal for a federal union of democracies is unrealistic, especially when one takes a gander at the European Union, there is one example of a league of democracies that could prevent war against its member nations that has come once again to the forefront of the foreign policy debate: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO.

Earlier this year, President George W. Bush's continued and consistent pursuit of multilateralism took the form of pushing for NATO membership (or at least provisional membership, known as a membership action plan -- MAP) of Georgia, making the argument that we should stand by our allies, especially those that take the Soviet-sized risks that Georgia took to join our side.

Our European friends found Bush's sense of loyalty charming, but chose instead to continue the always game-changing policy of paying lip service to these democratic ideals and morals they're always hearing so much about.

So, Georgia (along with Ukraine) was denied even a MAP, and as Streit predicted, the alliance would come stomping in -- well after war was declared and much of the damage done.

I asked Karla Beth Jones, the Europe director for the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), based in Washington, D.C., if this has presented a defining moment for NATO.

She said it has, and she pointed to the Cold War as an example, echoing Streit's thesis.

"I think NATO's greatest value is as a deterrent organization," Jones told me. "Basically, we managed to win the Cold War without ever going to war, because NATO acted as a deterrence. And I believe Russia may not have provoked the Georgian attack if we had offered a MAP to both Georgia and Ukraine at Bucharest. And that's why this is a defining moment for NATO, and for other coalitions."

Her point, essentially, is this: NATO works. Fredo Arias-King, the founder of Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization, told me that if there's one reason why Putin's aggression was a mistake, it's NATO.

"The sight of [German Chancellor] Angela Merkel by Saakashvili pledging to support Georgia's NATO bid is telling," Arias-King said.

He continued, "Probably Putin thought that he could conquer Tbilisi and carry out to the fullest the invasion, since then it would have made geostrategic sense. Regime change and installation of a quisling that would have forfeited Georgia's NATO aspirations, good government, and, most importantly, that Baku-Tbilisi-Çeyhan pipeline, which prevents Russia from monopolizing all the hydrocarbons from the area, was his semi-rational goal. However, this did not happen."

Arias-King said it reminded him of the failed August 1991 coup in Russia by the State Emergency Committee (GKChP). Invading a country without regime change, he said, was worse for Russia than if it had never intervened.

The conflict, Arias-King said, was "good for NATO."

"Several NATO countries had been echoing Moscow's argument that the alliance is out of date, anachronistic, and unnecessary in today's world," Arias-King explained. "But Russia's Soviet-like 19th-century tactics against a small neighbor have revived images of 1945, 1948, 1953, 1956, 1968, 1979, and 1980. It will be harder for Moscow's apologists inside NATO -- mainly Germany and France -- to make that case now."

Arias-King believes Moscow will fill any power vacuum in its neighborhood, and that Russia's actions hastened a standoff between Russia and the West that favors the West.

Why, I then asked Jones, would Russia lose such a standoff? Mainly economic factors, she said -- especially if Russia is expelled from the G8.

"Russia will have lost its standing in the world community," Jones said. "And it actually was building it back up again. People who weren't watching what Putin was doing internally were seeing Russia in a more positive light. But I think Russia is going to disintegrate internally and, just when it needs international help, it's not going to have it, because it will be an international pariah."

What's NATO's role in that scenario?

"NATO can protect Russia's near-abroad states until Russia disintegrates," Jones believes.

In other words, while the Bear starves, NATO will keep it from going fishing in Georgia and Ukraine.

Pardon my surprise, but this NATO stuff all sounds so... functional.

I was wondering why I seemed reflexively dubious of the efficacy of international coalitions, when the Jerusalem Post helped me out. "UNIFIL commander: Israel violating 1701" was the headline, with a story detailing how the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, via its commander Maj.-Gen. Claudio Graziano, was claiming that Israel had been unlawfully flying over southern Lebanon in violation of the resolution that ended the Second Lebanon War two years ago.

What Graziano was doing is called protecting your own interests. The U.N., as we have previously reported, has been assisting the terrorist organization Hezbollah in the latter's quest to embed its fighters and smuggle its weapons into south Lebanon. Israeli flyovers run the risk of exposing the fact that UNIFIL troops are merely Shiite militants in blue helmets.

I particularly liked this line from the Post story: "In contrast, [Graziano] said that the U.N. enjoyed excellent cooperation with Hezbollah and with the local Lebanese people."

I'll bet. In any event, Graziano tipped his hand eventually. "He conceded," the Post reported, "that his soldiers were not trying to prevent weapons smuggling from Syria as demanded by the U.N. [Security Council] because the Lebanese government had not requested such action." The Lebanese government, by the way, includes Hezbollah.

So, if the United Nations is a model for how not to behave unless you're on the payroll of the world's most dangerous and ruthless terrorist organization, is NATO the polar opposite?

"I believe it's the optimal model," Jones told me. "I believe that NATO is the most functional of all the multilateral organizations. And I would welcome more multilateral organizations like NATO."

I asked Jones how likely it is that Georgia and Ukraine will now be admitted to NATO, Ukraine being scheduled for such a vote in December.

"I am cautiously optimistic," she said.

Arias-King, whose journal predicted Putin's invasion of Georgia, agrees.

"At the December summit, there is a bigger chance that they will be offered either a MAP or some new invention that falls just short of a MAP," Arias-King said. "However, that process will take a while. But it's a better chance now than was the case before the invasion of Georgia."

Perhaps it's helpful to look at this through the prism so eloquently described by historian and political science professor David C. Hendrickson. In the winter 1997 issue of The National Interest, Hendrickson criticized the limited scope of the debate on interventionism. It is not, he said, a choice between isolationism and universalism; instead, the idea behind the federal union inhabits a middle ground.

"It enables us to distinguish between the construction of a security community in Europe -- part of the civic union to which we belong -- and the commitment to a universalistic doctrine of collective security that would oblige us to intervene anywhere and everywhere," Hendrickson wrote. "It lights up a path equidistant from the isolationist and the imperial temptations, rejecting the simple-minded notion that we must choose between these equally disagreeable alternatives."

But aren't we so different from the ethnic South Ossetians with which we claim to sympathize? So what, Hendrickson says.

"If we recall that one of the purposes associated with federative systems is not to submerge everything in a bland homogeneity but rather to affirm both individuality and commonality -- to come together in order to stay apart -- the civilizational differences that separate a Turkey or Japan from the West should not constitute insuperable obstacles to effective cooperation," he wrote.

Hendrickson's point about belonging to a "civic union" with the democratic European states is just as true and possibly more significant today than when he wrote those words 11 years ago. With our membership to that civic union comes civic responsibilities, and we owe Georgia and Ukraine their reward for turning their backs on totalitarian communism and joining our league of democracies.

In fact, just ask the Georgian people. Journalist Michael Totten, working on a piece for City Journal, interviewed a woman in Tbilisi named Lia, who said that her husband had recently arrived to join them in a school classroom -- their new temporary home, along with six other families. As her husband passed the Russian soldiers outside the city and headed toward Georgian territory, the Russians asked him, "Are you going to the American side?"

Totten's Georgian translator credited the U.S. with the fact that the Georgian capital was kept out of Russian hands. "The night they came close to Tbilisi," she told Totten, "Bush and McCain made their strongest speeches yet. The Russians seemed to back down. Bush and McCain have been very good for us."

As for the Bear, Arias-King says it's good for Russia to know her limits. Is it good for Russians, I asked him, or just good for Russia?

He clarified that it sends a much-needed (and hopefully heeded) signal to Putin and his buddies.

"The Russian people, as usual, are passive objects in this game of his," he said. "They suffer the consequences of the faux grandeur emanating from their elites."

Let's make sure the Georgian people don't suffer anymore from Putin's adventures. They belong in NATO, now.

Seth Mandel is the managing editor of The Jewish State, where this column first appeared.