The Foreign Service Journal, April 2009

A P R I L 2 0 0 9 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 17 ship), should be wary of going down a similar “talking shop” path. NATO membership means something, as last summer’s South Ossetia conflict powerfully re- minded the world. In discussions throughout 2008 over Georgian ac- cession hopes, both before and after Russia moved troops in Au- gust, NATO countries emphasized the Article 5 mutual defense clause. Peter Savodnik, writing in the Janu- ary Harper ’s, posited the dilemma in an article titled “Georgian Roulette”: “The question is whether NATO believes Georgia ... is worth defending.” He cites Charles Elbinger of the Brookings Institution: “Let’s assume that they had been admitted to NATO. Do we really believe that NATO would have come to their defense? I personally do not believe there’s any stomach for a military confrontation with Russia.” Savodnik be- lieves that should NATO welcome Mikheil Saakashvili’s Georgia, the Alliance “may not survive a second attack.” What Europeans Want In the hierarchy of Europe’s multilateral organizations, neither NATO, OSCE nor OECD attracts the most attention and funding. The European Union does. And the E.U. has its own alphabet soup of security-related processes (most can’t be called institutions yet). Foremost among them is the Common Foreign and Security Policy, which is to dovetail with the European Security and Defense Iden- tity within NATO. How? That’s what is rather confusing, especially to Europeans on the street. Wags point out that there is no common policy, nor individuals to lead it, as long as the F O C U S Underlying disagreements regularly pit Washington against the Europeans, but are almost always patched up to allow the alliance to carry on.