Russia, Georgia, and NATO: Go Slow

Anne Applebaum, too, emphasizes how the Georgia-Russia story is complicated, certainly more complicated than "good" versus "evil" (regardless of whom you'd call good, or justified in his conduct here). She doesn't directly discuss the issue of possible NATO membership of Georgia, but there seems little doubt as to where she stands on that, given her conclusion:

In the long term, the Georgians need to choose a leader who can promote true political and economic stability. Until then, Western leaders should support Georgian democracy—not particular Georgian democrats—and prepare a unified response to the Russian military escapades to come. And while the propaganda battle rages, they must stay on the sidelines.
Premature, at best. And it raises the question: if there may be other ways for the West ("unified"--good luck with that) to respond to Russian military escapades, where does this leave NATO as the central security framework for an expanding transatlantic community? Forecasting eventual Georgian membership in the alliance, as most Western leaders did last summer, does not seem to be helpful here. It's nothing new to say this, but it appears that the further East NATO goes, the more it becomes a cause for trouble, instead of the stabilizing factor it is designed to be. This is ironic, because from an East European perspective, the main benefit of NATO membership is to deter Russia from trying to impose its will on what used to be its sphere of influence. Paradoxically, both could hold: Russia is probably more circumspect (though not without means of applying pressure) in its dealings with the Baltic states because of their membership in the alliance, but the expansion of NATO into the Baltic region has also made Russia more difficult to deal with on a range of issues. Meanwhile, the other reason for NATO expansion (encourage the development of open societies in formerly communist countries, or, expanding the democratic transatlantic community) can be seen as having worked fairly well. Of course, there are plenty of people who would argue that this latter goal can also be achieved through the EU's eastward expansion alone; although I'm not sure if a majority among them can be found in Eastern Europe, or whether Russia doesn't view EU expansion as a hostile act also. So it keeps coming back to relations with Russia. And I'm afraid there are no clear answers. Obviously we don't want to give Russia veto power over everything the West (EU/NATO) tries to do in Eastern Europe, in part because Russia's objections to the region's westernization derive from the fact that Russia's rulers see westernization as a threat to their power base at home (there's your Cold War parallel for the day). On the other hand, Russia is there, it's important (it's getting colder now in Europe, and we need their natural gas), and we're not going to go to war with it over places like Georgia, no matter how admirable parts of its democratization have been. Still, it really does appear that further NATO expansion (also into Ukraine) had better be kept on the back burner for the foreseeable future.