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Big Payoff Expected
// The price of the question
Who is going to win from the U.S. Congress's decision to support Georgia's accession to NATO with $10 million in U.S. funding for that purpose? The answer is seemingly obvious – Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. It is no secret that Tbilisi sees cooperation with NATO and eventual membership in it as practically the only way to create a democratic state in the former Soviet Union, which Russia is trying to subjugate. That is why Georgian officials take every accusation of pro-NATO militarism as a chance to say that Moscow doesn't understand what Georgia needs from NATO. It doesn't need the military component of that organization, but the political component.
The U.S. Congress's decision looks not only like the intention to support it in Brussels on the eve of the NATO summit in Riga, but also like the intention to give the poor Transcaucasian country a little money. In a wider sense, the decision can be seen as the latest act of approval for Saakashvili's reforms. That gives him a new argument against his domestic opponents and new strength in his standoff with Moscow.
But it would be erroneous to think that the Americans are the donors in this story. They are the recipients. The United States will obtain much more than Saakashvili will. The Congressional decision will not change the pace of Georgia's integration into NATO. There are steps and procedures for that, which cannot be skipped, and the amount of aid is hardly enough to make the Georgian Army mighty. The U.S. Congress has given Saakashvili nothing but moral support.
The gesture has incomparably more significance for Washington than for Tbilisi. The more active progress expected across the ocean for Georgia's accession to NATO solves a number of problems. One of them is the final withdrawal of Russian forces from Georgia. That is invaluable to the U.S. And the serious, if not insurmountable, difficulties that have arisen with Ukraine's integration into NATO have forced the U.S. to turn its attention to the Transcaucasus. Tiny Georgia does not hold much strategic value for the U.S. by itself. But the rest of the CIS will follow Georgia's lead, with the other Transcaucasian countries, Armenia and Azerbaijan – going first.
The task of winning geopolitical points from Moscow after its loss in Ukraine is not just a matter of honor and prestige for the U.S. Washington does not intend to give up its strategic initiative in the fight for the former Soviet republics, and al the more so since that fight does not require great financial output or serious political sacrifices.
Sergey Strokan
All the Article in Russian as of Nov. 20, 2006
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