Authors: Angus Roxburgh
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From Kosovo to Bucharest
On Sunday 17 February 2008 Serbia’s breakaway Albanian-majority province of Kosovo declared itself independent. The next day the United States recognised it, and on
Tuesday a reporter asked President Bush, ‘Isn’t this a poke in the eye to Vladimir Putin and others who say you’re approving of secession movements everywhere
implicitly?’
Bush replied: ‘Actually we’ve been working very closely with the Russians ... You know, there’s a disagreement, but we believe, as do many other nations, that history will
prove this to be a correct move to bring peace to the Balkans.’
It was not the Balkans that Putin was worried about. Russia had good reasons to oppose the recognition of Kosovo – and its ‘brotherly ties’ with Serbia were the very least of
them. Pandora’s box was open. However forcefully the Americans and their allies insisted that the Kosovo case for independence was
sui generis
– a unique set of circumstances,
setting no precedent – there were a number of other secessionist nations around the world who were delighted. If the Kosovars could vote for independence and secede from Serbia, against the
‘parent state’s’ wishes, citing military attacks, ethnic cleansing and acts of brutality committed against them, then could not the Chechens say the same about their position
within Russia, or the Abkhaz and South Ossetians about theirs within Georgia?
Above all, Russia did not want to encourage Chechen separatism, but it was also wary of encouraging the South Ossetians and Abkhaz to secede – precisely because of the precedent it could
set for other tiny nations within the former Soviet Union, not least the chain of restive Muslim republics in Russia’s northern Caucasus region. At a summit meeting of leaders from the
Commonwealth of Independent States – the loose grouping of former Soviet republics – President Putin delivered an unambiguous warning of the consequences: ‘The Kosovo precedent is
a terrifying one,’ he said, shifting nervously in his seat and almost spitting out the words. ‘It in essence is breaking open the entire system of international relations that have
prevailed not just for decades but for centuries. And it will without a doubt bring on itself an entire chain of unforeseen consequences.’
Mikheil Saakashvili, re-elected as president of Georgia the previous month, was sitting in the audience, and gulped hard as he heard the Russian accuse Western governments of a grave
miscalculation: ‘This is a stick with two ends, and that other end will come back and knock them on the head one day.’ In a separate meeting on the margins of the summit, Putin tried to
reassure Saakashvili: ‘We’re not going to ape the Americans, and recognise the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia just because Kosovo was recognised.’ But Saakashvili did
not believe him, and in any case he was as aware as Putin was of the precedent set by Kosovo, and knew his own breakaway provinces might follow suit if he did not act quickly. His attempt to move
against South Ossetia in 2004 had failed. Since then, with American help, he had transformed his military into a much more capable force. But if he was going to use it to retake Abkhazia and South
Ossetia – risking confrontation with Russia – he would need much more than just logistical support from the Americans.
Speaking nine days after Kosovo’s declaration of independence, Saakashvili explained why Georgia was now keener than ever to join NATO. ‘Why do we need NATO membership?’ he
asked. ‘We need it because Georgia should be strategically protected in this very difficult and risky region, and receive its share of security guarantees.’ A crucial NATO summit was
approaching – in Bucharest in April – at which the alliance would consider whether to allow Georgia and Ukraine to embark on a Membership Action Plan or ‘MAP’, considered
the first concrete step on the road to membership. To garner support, Saakashvili flew to Washington in March to flash his democratic credentials around the corridors and committee rooms of
Congress and the White House.
He was not short on flattery, telling George Bush in front of the television cameras: ‘What we are up to now is to implement this freedom agenda to the end, for the sake of our people, for
the sake of our values, for the sake of what the United States means to all of us, because the US is exporting idealism to the rest of the world.’
Bush could not suppress a smirk of delight; no one in the world supported him like this guy did. Damon Wilson, the president’s adviser on European affairs, recalls: ‘He was terrific,
he was on message. He came into the president with a message about the importance of recognising that his legacy was building a democratic Georgia. This was music to our ears, this was the right
message.’
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And Saakashvili got exactly the answer he was hoping for. ‘I believe Georgia benefits from being a part of NATO,’ Bush told reporters. ‘And I told the president it’s a
message I’ll be taking to Bucharest.’
Not all the allies were so convinced, however, especially the French and the Germans. When Saakashvili arrived in Washington – before he even reached the Oval Office – he received a
call from the German chancellor, Angela Merkel. Saakashvili says the first thing he told Bush was, ‘I just had a call from our common friend, Angela Merkel, and she said, “I know you
are going to meet with Bush to discuss the pending NATO summit, and I wanted you to know from me that our German position is that you are not ready for membership, and we will not support
it.” ’
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According to eyewitnesses, Bush smiled and told Saakashvili there were big players and small players in the alliance: ‘You take care of Luxembourg and leave Angela to me. I’ll take
care of her.’
That was easier said than done, however. Both the French and the Germans had two reasons to doubt Georgia’s fitness for NATO membership, and neither had to do with ‘appeasing
Russia’. Firstly, they felt it was dangerous to admit a country with ‘frozen’ internal conflicts, such as South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Secondly, they were worried by
Saakashvili’s personality and recent signs that he was far from the democrat George Bush saw in him.
In November 2007 police had violently broken up huge anti-government demonstrations in Tbilisi. Saakashvili closed down an opposition television station, Imedi, which had extensively covered the
violence, and declared a nationwide state of emergency, accusing Russia of plotting a coup d’état against him. Even the White House had been appalled, and Condoleezza Rice dispatched
her assistant, Matthew Bryza, to Tbilisi to read Saakashvili the riot act.
But Washington and Berlin had a tacit agreement not to air their doubts in public, and the Americans were furious when Merkel went to Moscow, just days before Saakashvili’s meeting with
Bush in March, and stood side by side with Vladimir Putin to denounce Georgia’s (and Ukraine’s) NATO aspirations.
Merkel was hardly a member of the Putin fan-club. A year earlier, during talks in Sochi, she had been horrified when Putin brought out his dog, Koni, and allowed her to sniff around the
chancellor’s legs, knowing she was terrified of dogs. (One of Merkel’s senior aides told me they regarded this as ‘typical KGB intimidation’.) Having grown up in communist
East Germany, she knew at first hand what totalitarianism meant and what Putin’s background, working hand in hand with the Stasi secret police, said about him.
But Merkel did agree with Putin that if Georgia and Ukraine began the process of joining NATO, it would steeply raise tensions with Russia. At a joint press conference in Moscow, Putin pointed
out that a majority of Ukrainian citizens did not want to join NATO, and added: ‘Ultimately, each country decides for itself how best to ensure its security, and we will most certainly accept
whatever the Ukrainian and Georgian peoples decide, but this has to be the decision of the people and not the political elite.’ Merkel concurred that ‘it is important that the public in
all future NATO members support their country’s membership’, and added: ‘One of the obligations of NATO member states is that they be free from conflicts. This is something we
must reflect upon in our discussions, and it is also something we will be discussing at the upcoming summit in Bucharest.’
Two days later, in Berlin, addressing a meeting of Germany’s military top brass, Merkel again went public with her doubts: ‘I mean this seriously – countries ensnared in
regional or internal conflicts cannot in my view be part of NATO. We are an alliance for collective security and not an alliance where individual members are still looking after their own
security.’
According to Bush’s Georgia adviser, Damon Wilson, the president realised he would have to work ‘personally and privately’ on Merkel to bring her round. ‘He decided the
pivot point was the chancellor herself and that if he could help get her on board that he could help close the deal across the alliance.’ Bush and Merkel held a series of video conferences in
the run-up to the Bucharest summit. ‘And the remarkable thing is,’ says Wilson, ‘that when you listened to her articulate her concerns, they actually weren’t very different
from President Bush’s concerns. In Ukraine, we were concerned about the lack of coherence in governance, the lack of popular support for NATO among the population. In Georgia we both shared
concerns about the durability, the depth of democratic institutions.’ The big difference lay in how to move forward. Bush argued that giving Georgia a MAP for NATO membership would encourage
them to ‘do their homework’, but Merkel was sceptical about even beginning the process. ‘She wasn’t convinced that Saakashvili was a democrat,’ says Wilson.
In their final video conference there was deadlock. For Bush it was a matter of principle to be supporting fragile democracies, and he told Merkel he would go to Bucharest to achieve that.
‘OK,’ Bush told his aides afterwards, ‘we’re headed for the OK Corral – guns drawn.’
Bush also put in calls to other allies. The British prime minister, Gordon Brown, indicated support for the American position. But the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, was another matter. The
feedback the Americans were getting from Sarkozy’s advisers had put them on guard. A member of Bush’s National Security Council recalls: ‘Many of them had argued to us that they
were sceptical that Georgia was even a European country, much less that we should be willing to begin this conversation about them moving towards alliance membership eventually.’
When Bush got through to Sarkozy personally, he felt the Frenchman was ‘gettable’: he talked of Ukraine and Georgia having a ‘European and Atlantic vocation’. But Sarkozy
also wanted Bush to think about Russia. According to the French president’s diplomatic adviser, Jean-David Levitte, Sarkozy ‘tried to get him to understand that in this situation, we
were side by side with the Germans, in an approach which aimed to give Russia time to understand that its future was actually bound with that of Europe and its security should not be something that
separates us, but rather something that brings us together, and that this vision meant that we shouldn’t try and push too quickly to obtain a MAP, though we should give a positive signal in
Bucharest to our partners in Ukraine and Georgia.’
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And Sarkozy made a forceful new point to the American president about what exactly NATO membership would mean for Ukraine and Georgia. MAP was a ‘foot in the door’, an irreversible
step that would lead to full membership of NATO – and then you had to think about Article Five, the alliance’s mutual defence clause. ‘How many troops,’ Sarkozy asked,
‘would we be willing to send to assist our new members in the case of an attack?’ That was why France preferred to make a partnership with Russia the real priority, ‘so that
everybody within the continent had the same vision of security’.
Even within the US administration, there were doubts. Defence Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice shared some of the Europeans’ concerns about democracy in
Georgia and Ukraine. Gates recalls: ‘It seemed to me that in terms of the progress of the reform effort, there was still a distance to be covered by both countries.’
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But it was the ‘freedom agenda’ advocates that won the day. ‘If the United States were to back down in the face of Russian pressure and not give them
MAP,’ national security adviser Stephen Hadley remembers, ‘then actually that in itself could be provocative, by suggesting to the Russians that they could permanently keep Georgia and
Ukraine out of NATO. And that was not a prescription for stability in Europe, that was a prescription for continued tension.’
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The Bucharest summit, held on 2–4 April in the bombastic palace built by the former Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, turned out to be as dramatic as any in the alliance’s
history, with a good deal of undiplomatic mud-slinging passing between the Americans and East Europeans who broadly supported Ukraine and Georgia, and the French and Germans who found themselves
cast as ‘appeasers’ of the Russians. On the first evening, foreign ministers had discussions over dinner and failed even to come close to a wording that the summit would be able to
approve. The Polish foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, said he had the impression that ‘some allies’ (meaning the Germans) had made commitments to the Russians that MAP would not be
granted to Georgia and Ukraine.
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Condoleezza Rice says she had the feeling that some of the East Europeans were coming rather close to saying to the Germans that ‘you of all people should not be standing in the way of
countries that suffered under tyranny thanks to what the Germans did in the 1930s and 1940s’.
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The German foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, was simply insulted. He had tried to argue that there was a conflict situation in the Caucasus region and NATO risked getting drawn into it.
But, he says, ‘things were said that I never want to hear again, where people who were against NATO enlargement were compared to [the appeasers of] Munich in 1938. Absolutely
inappropriate.’
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