Formalizing the international deployments of the past eleven years - in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Arabian Sea - NATO's new Strategic Concept compels all member states and scores of partners to "develop and maintain robust, mobile and deployable conventional forces to carry out both our Article 5 responsibilities and the Alliance's expeditionary operations, including with the NATO Response Force," and "ensure the broadest possible participation of Allies in collective defence planning on nuclear roles, in peacetime basing of nuclear forces."
Invoking the little-noted catch phrase that since 1989 has been employed in anticipation and later fulfilment of plans to subordinate all of Europe under NATO's military command [4], Alliance heads of state in Lisbon last week also endorsed the completion of expansion plans affecting the Balkans and the former Soviet Union:
"Our goal of a Europe whole and free, and sharing common values, would be best served by the eventual integration of all European countries that so desire into Euro-Atlantic structures.
"The door to NATO membership remains fully open to all European democracies which share the values of our Alliance, which are willing and able to assume the responsibilities and obligations of membership, and whose inclusion can contribute to common security and stability."
In particular, NATO will "continue and develop the partnerships with Ukraine and Georgia within the NATO-Ukraine and NATO-Georgia Commissions, based on the NATO decision at the Bucharest summit [in] 2008" and "facilitate the Euro-Atlantic integration of the Western Balkans." Specific mention was made of Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia.
The NATO-Georgia Commission was established in September of 2008, the month after the five-day war between Georgia and Russia, which itself was launched by the Mikheil Saakashvili government in Tbilisi a week after 1,000 U.S. troops completed the Immediate Response 2008 NATO Partnership for Peace war games and while American troops and equipment were still in Georgia.
The Bucharest summit decision on Georgia and Ukraine's eventual full membership in NATO and the creation of the NATO-Georgia Commission gave rise to an Annual National Program to expedite Georgia's NATO integration. The traditional route to accession, a Membership Action Plan (MAP), was not presented to Georgia in 2008 because of two NATO provisions: That member states cannot be involved in lingering territorial disputes (which is why, for example, Cyprus would not be given a MAP if it were to join the Partnership for Peace) and there cannot be foreign - which is to say non-NATO - military forces on a prospective member's soil.
The Georgian government claims the now independent nations of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as its own and two years ago there were small contingents of Russian peacekeepers in both countries. The NATO-Georgia Commission and NATO's Annual National Program - a unique vehicle to integrate Georgia (and Ukraine) into NATO through bypassing the above-mentioned constraints of a Membership Action Plan - is complemented by the United States-Georgia Charter on Strategic Partnership which was announced shortly after the 2008 war and signed on January 9, 2009. (The comparable United States-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership was signed between Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Ukrainian Foreign Minister Volodymyr Ohryzko on December 19, 2008.)
It is the contention of several observers, including the present one, that the Georgian attack on South Ossetia on August 7, 2008 was, if successful, to be immediately followed by one on Abkhazia, thereby eliminating both the aforementioned obstacles to NATO's full expansion into the South Caucasus.
The NATO Parliamentary Assembly autumn session in Poland on November 12-16 passed a resolution calling Abkhazia and South Ossetia "occupied territories," which led the Abkhazian Foreign Ministry to respond:
"NATO is an organization that has been contributing to the intensive militarization of Georgia for many years, stirring up the revanchist mindset of the Georgian leadership, which led to the August 2008 bloodshed in South Ossetia." [5]
President Barack Obama held a one-on-one meeting with Georgia's Saakashvili on the sidelines on the Lisbon summit on November 19.
NATO's plans for a further drive east and south of what most people understand to be Europe are not limited to the Caucasus.
The Lisbon summit, in approving the bloc's new doctrine, also for the first time bluntly stated that NATO's reach is as broad as the world itself:
"The promotion of Euro-Atlantic security is best assured through a wide network of partner relationships with countries and organisations around the globe."
President Obama and the other 27 NATO heads of state endorsed the new Strategic Concept which also states:
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