--- Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> It is indeed symbolic. NATO is pretty much useless,
> and the benefit to taking in a country like Georgia,
> perched as it is constantly on the edge of civil
> war,
> or Ukraine, which could easily perch on the edge of
> civil war and the population of which is against
> NATO
> membership, is not obvious.
>
[WS:] True. Georgia or Ukraine may have some use value in providing cannon fodder to the Amerikan adventures in Iraq or Afghanistan - but that is a minor benefit, I suppose, mostly in the form of savings on hiring mercenaries elsewhere.
I think that NATO expansion is more of a liablity than benefit. It carries the danger of involving major miliary powers in skirmishes on the outskirts of Europe, which they ceratinly do not want. What is more, however, it is a conduit for a transfer of miliary know how to countries whose interests are not at all aligned with those of the major powers. In a way, this smacks of the Sepoy Rebellion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Rebellion_of_1857 in the making. The idea here is that British military know how transmitted to colonised peoples provided the latter with new weapons to fight the Brits when an opportunity emerged. If not anything else, the Ukrainian or Romanian military are far easier to penetrate for the Russian intelligence than, say, the French or the British military.
Wojtek
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