• Military Menu                       

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Industry
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

Interview: NATO Foreign Ministers Unlikely to Push Georgia, Ukraine Membership

Council on Foreign Relations

Interviewee: Robert E. Hunter, Senior Adviser, RAND Corporation
Interviewer: Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor

November 25, 2008

Robert E. Hunter, who was U.S. ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) during the Clinton administration, says he does not expect NATO foreign ministers to enlarge the alliance to include Georgia or Ukraine at the next meeting in December. Given the strong Russian objections to the enlargement, "I don't think anybody wants to run the risk of giving the Russians a pretext to do what they did against Georgia. Nor do people want to pretend that Ukraine is anywhere near ready to join NATO. Nor are NATO countries ready to give a security commitment to Ukraine." He expects efforts will be made to enlarge ties short of NATO membership, however.

The NATO defense ministers recently concluded a meeting on Ukraine. The regular NATO foreign ministers meeting will take place December 2-3 in Brussels. Since we've just had a new U.S. president elected, will anything get done at this foreign ministers meeting?

They have an agenda, which starts off with Afghanistan, where both the outgoing and incoming U.S. administration have put a very high priority on increasing the number of effective troops on the ground. The Europeans understand that President-elect Barack Obama, at least in terms of what he's said so far, will be putting pressure on them to increase the number of forces they have in Afghanistan, and to reduce the number of what we call "caveats," that is, limitations on where forces can actually be deployed. This will come, of course, at the same time that Obama will try to build a new and more positive relationship with the Europeans. But the meeting in Brussels will deal first and foremost with Afghanistan. The other issue will be the relationship to NATO of Ukraine and Georgia.

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2008 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.