Word: membership
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...think twice about attacking any nation able to trigger the Atlantic Alliance's Article 5, which obliges all member states to respond militarily to an attack on any one of them. President Bush, in fact, toured Europe last spring to stump aggressively for Georgia and Ukraine to be granted Membership Action Plans, the first step toward joining the Alliance. But despite Bush's high-profile campaigning, the proposal was rebuffed at NATO's April summit by 10 member states, led by key U.S. allies Germany and France. That rejection, said Republican presidential nominee Senator John McCain, "might have been viewed...
...many of the Europeans draw the opposite conclusion. They see last week's events in Georgia as vindicating their caution over granting Georgia NATO membership. Indeed, many in Europe see the Bush Administration's military support for Georgia and its trumpeting of Tbilisi's cause in NATO as having emboldened President Mikheil Saakashvili to launch his reckless attack on South Ossetia...
...allies can avoid humiliating Russia by acknowledging that Georgia is not blameless and that the rights of Russian minorities must be protected. But Western countries must refuse to accept Russia's cease-fire assurances without independent monitoring, and they must state that Russia's continued membership in the G-8 and future entry into the WTO will turn on its peaceful resolution of regional disputes. The upside of Russia's preoccupation with lost status is that its exclusion from such élite organizations would sting. Russia has flexed its resurgent muscles at great human cost. Now it must be convinced...
...Russia's litany of indignities dates to the early 1990s when the Soviet empire collapsed. A bipolar universe gave way to a world in which the "sole superpower" boasted about how it had "won" the Cold War. Russia was forced to swallow the news that NATO would grant membership to former client states in Eastern Europe, along with former Soviet republics. Russia, the fallen empire, would have to content itself with membership in the largely symbolic Partnership for Peace...
...predictable: A frustrated Russian government feeling increasingly encircled as NATO's membership expanded steadily eastward, its coffers engorged by $110-a-barrel oil, facing a pesky neighbor - and former Russian imperial territory - cozying up to the United States and inviting U.S. troops in to train its soldiers. Whether or not Washington or Tbilisi could have avoided the Russian invasion, the very fact that the U.S. has no desire for war with Russia should have acted as a brake on Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili's annual (since 2004) August skirmishes with pro-Moscow separatists in South Ossetia, which triggered last week...