Pushing the first domino

Over at the Corner, Rich Lowry reports that a friend of his wants immediate admission to NATO for Georgia and the Ukraine. He's not the first person I've seen make such an argument - but do these people not realize that accepting Georgia into NATO means that under Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, if Russia did something deemed to be an attack on Georgia, we would be de facto at war with Russia? I am at a loss to see how this can be sound foreign policy when, as recently as eight months ago, "Russian strategic forces included 682 strategic delivery platforms, which can carry up to 3100 nuclear warheads" to our shores.

Washinton warned in his farewell address, that we would do well "to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world; so far, I mean, as we are now at liberty to do it ...[L]et those [existing] engagements be observed in their genuine sense. But, in my opinion, it is unnecessary and would be unwise to extend them." I cannot help but think that there is much wisdom in that.

What makes Rich's posting particularly ironic is that his colleague Peter Robinson posted earlier in the day on the same blog, quoting Thomas Jefferson's harmonization with Washington: "Our first and fundamental maxim must be never to entangle ourselves in the broils of Europe." Robinson cuts the quote off too early, though. Jefferson went on to say - this is from an 1823 letter to James Monroe - that America "has a set of interests distinct from those of Europe and peculiarly her own. She should therefore have a system of her own, separate and apart from that of Europe. While the last is laboring to become the domicile of despotism, our endeavor should surely be to make our hemisphere that of freedom." This, too, remains vividly relevant today. Indeed, Robert Kagan once understood this, writing in Of Paradise and Power that "[i]t is time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world," or that we necessarily have common interests; that makes his seeming insistence earlier this week that we do all the more mystifying.

There's much to be said for telling Russia to back off, and generally aligning with Georgia. But in my view, there's nothing at all to be said for recreating the sort of domino chain that dragged all of Europe into war by the force of one attack in 1914.