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 By Sergei Roy

Peter Lavelle's Question/Comment:  This upcoming week NATO will meet. At the last meeting there was the promise that Ukraine and Georgia would eventually be given a Membership Action Plan and would end up in the alliance at some point. This was promised. Is the position still firm? There has been talk of side-stepping MAP all together. This would be a major change in strategy. Is membership for Ukraine and Georgia turning into a pride issue? There appears to be great reluctance to backtrack on the earlier promise. Where does NATO go from here?

Sergei Roy's comment:

Condoleezza Rice, a sure candidate for the title of the worst secretary of state under the worst possible president of the United States, is nearing the end of her term in office in her usual unilateralist style. This steadfastness might earn her grudging respect - if it weren't for a sense of grotesque rupture with reality that informed her feverish activities this past week in the run-up to the meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Brussels on December 2-3.

 The International Herald Tribune thus described these activities:  "U.S. starts diplomatic offensive on NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine." Now, who are the targets of this (not very) diplomatic assault? Apparently, the "old European" countries like France, Italy, Germany and quite a few others, who refused to proffer Georgia and Ukraine what is known as the Membership Action Plan, or MAP, at the Bucharest NATO summit in April. Instead, "after much haggling," in the words of a senior NATO diplomat, a compromise was reached in Bucharest to postpone the decision until December, when the application of Georgia and Ukraine for membership would be reviewed, the decision to offer that membership plan contingent on the two countries' greater readiness to enter upon it.

In fact, Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel then raised the most serious objections to accepting these two new members on even more general grounds. As reported at the time, Merkel had not yet decided how far NATO should expand or whether NATO would be willing to defend these two countries if they were to come under attack - or, one must presume, if they were foolish enough to start a military adventure of their own.

These doubts of Frau Merkel and her French, Italian, and other European colleagues have only grown since April, particularly in the wake of Georgia's criminal assault on South Ossetia and its leaders' general tendency toward stupid provocations, while Ukraine has been sinking into an ever deeper political and economic crisis that steadily pushes it toward the unenviable position of a failed state.

Thus there is no question but that the two candidates are less ready than ever to enter upon a MAP and are not going to be offered any such thing in Brussels. So what has Condoleezza Rice come up with?

Putting it briefly, she now says: Scrap the MAP! At a news conference at the State Department she outlined a plan for circumventing this obstacle to the US desire to bring NATO military bases within a few kilometers of Russia's borders. She pointed out that Poland and the Czech Republic had not been required to follow any such scheme as MAP, and spoke of "different ways to fulfill the terms of the Bucharest declaration" reached in April. One way, she said, would be through the special Georgia-NATO and Ukraine-NATO commissions. In plain Anglo-Saxon, this means: by hook or by crook. Primarily the latter.

Forestalling possible criticism, she said that this procedure for involving Georgia and Ukraine in NATO "does not anticipate or suggest that there would be lower standards for entry into NATO. It does not suggest that there needs to be an accelerated timetable. It is the same open-door policy that we've had about meeting standards."

In situations like this, rude Russians are likely to ask the $64 question: "Why would a priest need a concertina?" If there is to be no lowering of standards and no accelerated timetable - why scrap MAP? What's the sense of such a weird procedure?

No sense in ordinary human logic, of course - but politics has a logic of its own. Politically, any decision along the lines suggested by Rice would (a) show the Europeans once again who is boss in NATO, and (b) leave the Obama administration less scope in disentangling itself from the Cold War-style mess into which the outgoing administration has plunged the US.

It is only to be hoped that the Europeans will correctly read these designs and react appropriately. It is hard to see how else they can react as they observe Condoleezza Rice perform her danse macabre  -- to the accompaniment of Obama's discrete silence.