So, Uzbekistan President Islam Karimov has finished his trip to Brussels, where the New York Times reported that he got the "red-carpet treatment." So what was discussed? We may never know what actually happened behind closed doors, but there are some interesting discrepancies between the official statements of the two sides, Tashkent and Brussels (in particular, NATO).
The NATO statement focuses on Uzbekistan's help in Afghanistan by being a key hub on the Northern Distribution Network:
“The transit through Uzbekistan in support of our ISAF operation is valuable,” the Secretary General stated. “We are grateful for the support of Uzbekistan and of all our other Central Asian Partners to our mission in Afghanistan.”
The second focus is on democratization:
Along with all the other NATO Partners, Uzbekistan has signed up to the principles that underpin Partnership for Peace with NATO. Within this framework, the Secretary General also discussed with President Karimov how NATO can assist Uzbekistan with important democratic reforms.
Rasmussen highlighted that “Uzbekistan has been a NATO Partner for 17 years” and that he “spoke with President Karimov about our common commitment to democratic principles and NATO's ongoing efforts to assist partners towards democratic reforms through various Partnership tools.”
What does NATO expansion have to do with the war in Afghanistan? Quite a bit, according to an article in the new issue of Foreign Affairs. In it C.J. Chivers discusses the "arms cascade," by which small arms make their way from richer countries to poorer ones, and rebel groups. The process is familiar to anyone who's pondered the history of a city bus in, say, Kazakhstan, that has stickers on the inside in Norwegian and Hungarian. As with public transportation, countries that upgrade their military equipment sell their secondhand equipment to countries lower down on the geoeconomic food chain. But the arms trade, of course, is a lot more secretive and carries a lot more potential for mayhem.
And in the case of the arms cascade, the causes are as much political as economic. In particular, ex-Soviet and Warsaw Pact countries that are joining NATO get rid of their Soviet/Russian equipment as they buy Western equipment. Those surplus arms have created a glut in the worldwide market:
Georgia's Deputy Prime Minister Giorgi Baramidze visited Washington this week and matters military- and NATO-related appeared to top his agenda. Georgia is apparently flush from its success at the recent NATO summit in Lisbon, and are now trying to push the issue of membership in the alliance. Baramidze did an interview with the Associated Press, in which he said he "wants the United States to outline the steps necessary for it to join NATO." Georgia "already behaves as if it were a member of NATO," Baramidze said, and said Tbilisi wants a "road map" for what it needs to do to gain membership.
To that end, he got some U.S. senators to sign on to a resolution supporting Georgia's territorial integrity. The resolution was introduced only yesterday and the full text hasn't yet been published, but the title is "A resolution expressing the sense of the Senate with respect to the territorial integrity of Georgia and the situation within Georgia's internationally recognized borders." It should be voted on within a few days, Baramidze told Rustavi 2:
"We should know the position of the United States how they see Georgia`s integration into the Alliance. We have heard the attitude of the Alliance members three times and it said that the NATO door was open for Georgia," Baramidze said.
And he got U.S. Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen to publicly support the U.S. providing Georgia with arms. According to a release from her office:
So what was behind Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan's decision to skip the NATO summit last weekend in Lisbon? The president's office said it was in protest of the language of the NATO joint communique, which emphasizes the principle of territorial integrity in resolving the conflicts of the South Caucasus, which would favor Azerbaijan's position in the disputed territory of Nagorno Karabakh.
But that language was the same as in the communique issued after the 2008 NATO summit. So why protest now?
I asked Emil Sanamyan, editor of the Armenian Reporter newspaper, and he pointed out that in May, Sargsyan went to NATO and asked them to follow the OSCE's three principles in Nagorno Karabakh, which include people's right to self-determination as well as territorial integrity and non-use of force. (Self-determination is the principle that favors the Armenian side, since Karabakh's population is Armenian, while nominally it remains part of Azerbaijani territory.) From Sargsyan's press conference at NATO:
During the meeting I also emphasized the need and importance for a balanced approach by NATO to the resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh process. I expressed hope that future statements about NATO and documents of NATO on the Nagorno-Karabakh will be in keeping with the ministerial statement of the OSCE issued in December 2009, which evenly represents all three of the key underlying principles.
In light of those remarks, Samanyan suggested several possible motives behind Sargsyan's refusal to go to the summit:
If you take reasons provided at face value it is possible that Armenia from now on will take a tougher line on any perceived endorsement of Azerbaijan's claims on Nagorno Karabakh.
Most of the discussion around Turkey and the NATO missile defense system agreed upon this weekend at the Lisbon summit centered around whether or not Iran would be explicitly named as a threat, and the drama over whether Turkey would have to choose between East and West, as it was most simplistically framed.
But there are intriguing commercial angles, as well, as a good piece in Hurriyet today points out. For some time, Turkey has been shopping for a new air defense system of its own. And among the four top candidates are Russian and Chinese companies. As Hurriyet points out, the NATO system should be integrated with Turkey's own system, but that would make the Russian or Chinese systems a hard sell:
The United States and some of its Western partners are staunchly opposed to the integration of any Russian or Chinese system into the NATO missile shield. “American officials already have said that non-NATO elements would cause serious interoperability problems,” said one Turkish official.
One Ankara-based defense analyst said Western worries are related to both defense and commercial concerns: “They simply don’t want Turkey to select Russian or Chinese options, and part of their concern is commercial.”
Buying the Russian or Chinese systems seemed like a long shot from the beginning. Turkey buys most of its imported equipment from the U.S. or European companies, and the other top two candidates for the air defense system are U.S. and Italian. Hurriyet suggests that Turkey may be trying to dangle the threat of a Russian or Chinese option to get NATO financial subsidies to buy the Western systems, instead:
President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan arrives in Lisbon for the NATO summit; his Armenian counterpart stayed home
While most of the headlines from the just-concluded NATO summit in Lisbon have focused on the news that the alliance would remain in Afghanistan through 2014, and probably longer, behind the scenes there was plenty of action on the Eurasia front, as well.
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili went to the summit, and got a much-coveted meeting with his U.S. counterpart, Barack Obama, and afterwards he took great pains to emphasize how special and unique the meeting was (via Civil.ge):
“I am very satisfied with this meeting,” Saakashvili told a group of Georgian journalists in Lisbon after meeting with President Obama late on November 19 evening. “As you know this was President Obama’s only meeting here at NATO summit, apart his meetings with [Afghan] President Karzai and with the hosts [referring to Portuguese leaders] – and you know that Afghanistan tops the agenda of this summit; actually he had no other meetings here except of these ones. Of course this is already in itself an important message.”
The White House also notes that Obama met with Turkish President Abdullah Gul. And the Kazakhstan state news agency Kazinform says that its president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, also met with Obama, but no one else, including the White House, seems to be reporting that.
As more of the agenda emerges for NATO summit that will take place two weeks from now in Lisbon, it's highlighting how much, two decades after the end of the Cold War, NATO is still focused on its eastern flank.
NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen was in Moscow yesterday and met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Few details of their talks have been released, but they did of course discuss the proposed NATO missile defense plan and what role Russia might play in it. Before the talks, Russia's ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, was skeptical:
"If it is simply a US system built on European soil with European money and without any guarantees that will not be targeted against Russia, that is unacceptable to us," he said. "We hope that some cards will be opened before the document is officially made public."
But Lavrov, after the meeting, was somewhat more optimistic:
"We are willing to take part in such a joint system and a joint analysis... Of course, on an equal basis and aimed against joint threats," Lavrov said.
While in Moscow, Rasmussen told the BBC that Russian participation in counterdrug raids in Afghanistan would continue, despite protests by the Afghanistan government.
And the Wall Street Journal reports that coalition commanders in Afghanistan are hoping to use the NATO summit to firm up European support for, and participation in, the war in Afghanistan, in particular trying to keep countries like Italy and France from pulling out altogether:
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, in March 2010
Georgia's prospects for NATO membership in the near or medium term are pretty much zero, and public support for membership has dropped precipitously -- over the last two years, the percentage of Georgians who "fully" support membership has fallen a whopping 50 points.
So why does Georgia's government persist on making it a top priority? Michael Cecire of the blog Evolutsia.net suggests that Tbilisi is wasting its time wooing NATO, and instead should be focused on cleaning up its own house:
So what, exactly, is the point of Georgia’s insistence on being a NATO member? While there is certainly an intellectual case to be made that Tbilisi’s desire to join NATO is a case in itself, that argument does not hold up against more practical scrutiny. It’s not a question of whether or not Georgia wants to be in NATO, but of why the government continues to pursue this goal against what are realistically insurmountable odds.
The most obvious answer is that Georgia’s NATO bid was never entirely about defense, but served as a symbol for Georgia’s Western orientation. As long as Georgia is prevented from being a NATO member, there is a perception that its transformation into a truly ‘Western’ state will have been incomplete. Rightly or not, NATO membership has become a stand-in for concrete values and institutions that make the West what they are.
No one questions whether or not countries like Switzerland, Japan, Australia, or Israel are sufficiently ‘Western,’ despite not being member states of NATO. And that is because those countries’ institutions, while not perfect, are not incompatible with the standards to which most Western countries hold themselves.
Are the days of NATO as we know it doomed? Will Europe, instead of looking to the United states as a partner for its security, need to start looking towards Russia and Turkey, "the maverick guardians of the EU's eastern flank," as the Guardian's Simon Tisdall recently put it?
That seems to be the case put forward by a new report by the European Council on Foreign Relations. From the report's summary:
The report argues that Europe is becoming increasingly multipolar, and in danger of lapsing into separate spheres of influence. It argues that the US is no longer willing to engage in Europe's internal security, and instead, the main actors - the EU, Russia and Turkey - must come together in a trialogue to build a new European security architecture. Turkey's EU accession process must also be strengthened alongside recognition of its recent emergence as a credible regional power.
When Georgia lost its first soldier in Afghanistan about a month ago, the question arose as to whether Georgian public support for the deployment in Afghanistan would suffer as a result. Now, as EurasiaNet's Giorgi Lomsadze notes, Georgia just lost four more soldiers to a mine explosion in Helmand province.
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili held a press conference with NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasumussen, who happened to be visiting at the time, and spoke extensively about how the soldiers' deaths were in the service of Georgia's national interest:
Yesterday night we have received very unfortunate news about the tragic death of Colonel Ramaz Gogiashvili, Sergeant Dato Tsetskhladze, Corporal George Kolkhitashvili and Corporal Nugzar Kalandadze.
Being Soldier is a very honorable but at the same time very dangerous profession.
This is the profession that requires great devotion and self-sacrifice.
Georgian warriors traditionally, fought in many countries, during all our history.
Our warriors commanded the armies of old Persia, Ottoman Empire, Egypt and Russia...
It would be a big mistake to determine state's interests in the Georgia's borders, while a global political struggle Is conducted against us.
We have international interests and have allies and friends. The fact that our five-crossed flag is raised above this building, also the fact that Georgia successfully proceeds development, as independent country, although 20 percent of its territory is occupied, is the big deserve of our international links, our friends, our communion.
Later, Saakashvili said that NATO accession is Georgia's top strategic priority.
