NATO SECRETARY GENERAL VISITS GEORGIA
NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and North Atlantic Council (NAC) diplomats visited Georgia on November 9-10. The visit incited Tbilisi’s hopes that the next Alliance summit will bring Georgia closer to NATO. Although Rasmussen appraised the NATO-Georgia partnership as “very special” and “solid,” he could not specify when Georgia may expect membership in the organization.
NAC, the supreme political decision-making body of NATO, convened in Tbilisi in September 2008, soon after the end of the August war. Demonstrating the solidarity of the Euro-Atlantic community towards Georgia, NAC launched a NATO-Georgia Commission, the key partnership mechanism between the country and the alliance.
The Commission observes and reviews the implementation of reforms outlined in Georgia’s Annual National Program (ANP). “Our annual assessment clearly demonstrates that Georgia has carried through a number of reforms that are required for the future membership of NATO,” Rasmussen said in Tbilisi. Nevertheless, he also emphasized that Georgia’s membership perspective will depend on its performance in the 2012 parliamentary and 2013 presidential elections.
At a broader level, Rasmussen recapitulated the decisions taken at the 2008 and 2010 NATO summits in Bucharest and Lisbon on an open-door policy regarding Georgia and a non-recognition policy toward South Ossetia and Abkhazia. He explicitly reiterated that no third party can veto an enlargement of the Alliance and that NATO continues its effort to convince Russia to reverse its recognition of the breakaway regions.
The Secretary General praised Georgia’s “priceless” contributions to the operation in Afghanistan which, he stated, also improved the interoperability between Georgian and NATO armed forces. Rasmussen, however, clarified that there is no direct link between Georgian input to the operation and its potential membership in NATO.
“Georgia’s path to join NATO was not an easy one, but no one would ever be able to derail Georgia from this road,” Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili said at a meeting with the NATO ambassadors. However, Saakashvili acknowledged that efforts should be made to induce “further changes” and meet membership requirements. The president still expressed hopes that the next NATO Summit scheduled for May 2012 in Chicago, “will appreciate the progress made by Georgia in reforms.”
Whereas Georgia expects to move forward on its path of NATO integration, Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev recently made a notable statement on the causes of the August 2008 war. Medvedev said the war was a signal to Russia’s partners, including NATO, to think carefully about geopolitical stability prior to making decisions on enlargement, meaning that the Kremlin will never passively accept NATO expansion to its southern borders.
Georgia’s perspective to become a NATO member is thus dependent on a set of challenging domestic and international factors. Domestic factors which may potentially influence Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic integration include both military and political aspects. Tbilisi plans to send an additional battalion to Afghanistan next year, which would make it the largest non-NATO contributor to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and reinforce its standing as a NATO partner from a military viewpoint. Georgia’s fulfillment of political preconditions, however, seems to be more ambiguous. The judiciary system and media are not sufficiently independent in Georgia, which impedes the establishment of strong democratic institutions. Thereto, it is not yet clear what President Saakashvili plans to do after his second term in office ends. According to some European analysts, while Georgia scores much better in reform than some of its neighbors, it still runs the risk of becoming stuck in a hybrid system between an authoritarian state and a democracy and between a command economy and a free market.
This may be the reason for Rasmussen’s suggestion to the Georgian leadership to “keep building the pillars of a free and democratic state … In particular, keep the momentum in electoral reform. The elections … will be a litmus test of your democracy and we are looking forward to seeing the necessary reforms introduced.”
While a higher degree of democracy certainly matters, the Kremlin’s resistance to NATO enlargement, along with the reluctance of several NATO members to irritate Moscow by promoting Georgian NATO membership, remains serious predicaments for Georgia internationally. The interconnections between these domestic and international factors further complicate Georgia’s situation and may well be increasingly felt in the near future.
One important question is how efficiently Tbilisi will be able to resist the Kremlin’s probable attempts to destabilize the domestic situation in Georgia prior to the elections. Such developments could reduce the incumbent government’s ability to hold fairly democratic elections, convincing the alliance that Georgia deserves to reach a qualitatively new stage in its partnership with NATO. A final question is to what extent the tentative configuration of political forces will shift Georgia’s foreign policy priorities regarding NATO after the electoral cycle over the next two years. can also be expected south of Turkmenistan’s borders. While it is obvious that the future of TAPI is still far from guaranteed, given the need to sort out the remaining technical aspects of the project such as the price of the gas supplies to India or the terms of the gas transit, and, most importantly, the security of the pipeline in the turmoil-torn Afghani and Pakistani regions along the proposed route, the latest envisaged Islamabad gas sales purchase agreement is a major blow to Russia’s key ally in the Middle East, Iran, as well as to its attempts to establish a gas cartel controlling most Eurasia’s markets. The gas price that Islamabad was recently able to agree with Ashgabat (69 percent of the Brent crude parity price) is reportedly significantly lower than the price negotiated with Iran, which competes with Turkmenistan to secure access to the same gas markets on the Indian subcontinent. This gives Islamabad more leeway when negotiating the terms of gas purchases through the proposed Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline with Tehran, which is already weakened by tightening international sanctions.
CONCLUSIONS: Against this backdrop, the recent diplomatic activity of Turkmenistan with the aim of diversifying its energy exports must be seen in the context of an increasingly stiff international competition for Central Asia’s hydrocarbon resources, as manifested by the quest for control over the export transportation routes from this geographically landlocked region. Given its huge possession of gas reserves and its pivotal location, Turkmenistan is becoming the focal point of the emerging energy geopolitics in Central Asia. The continuing reorientation, which is already apparent and pushed further during Berdimuhammedov’s latest visits to Pakistan and China, of Turkmen gas exports away from Russia may thus be indicative of possible further shifts in the main energy flows in large parts of Eurasia.
AUTHOR’S BIO: Jan Šír is a Research Fellow with Institute of International Studies at Charles University in Prague. He is co-author of the Silk Road Paper Dismantling Totalitarianism? Turkmenistan under Berdimuhamedow (Washington, DC: Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program, 2009).
