This author reports on a suggestion from the Brookings Institution to solve the confrontation with Russia by creating a neutral zone of countries near Russia that NATO will never protect:
“The big idea proposed here is this: NATO should not expand further into Eastern Europe,” O’Hanlon argues in a new Brookings paper titled “Beyond NATO.” ...
That does not mean the United States should abandon friends like Ukraine and Georgia. “However, there is likely a better way to help them,” he says. Creating a buffer zone in Eastern Europe would require that both Russia and NATO commit to uphold the security of Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, and other states in the region, suggests O’Hanlon. Russia would have to withdraw its troops from those countries, and corresponding sanctions would be lifted.
WTF? The Russians must be smiling with glee at the idea that a simple pledge not to interfere in the "near abroad" of former Soviet territories will get NATO to walk away from offering these free states any protection at all.
No, those states unlucky enough to border Russia will be left to fend for themselves. Oh wait, they can count on Russia being a pillar of their security! Seriously, stop laughing. This idea will be way better than Russia's commitment to the security and territorial integrity of Ukraine that it pledged to uphold in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum!
Ruling out NATO membership removes a stick that can moderate Russian territorial ambitions and just leaves the states left outside the walls when NATO pulls up the drawbridge with the choice of fighting Russia on their own or succumbing to Russian pressure and meekly accepting their vassal status to keep the Russian dogs at bay.
Russia denies invading Ukraine, remember. Why wouldn't they pledge not to invade any number os states?
In a few years after the grand deal is signed and the self congratulations of Western diplomats dies down and the Nobel Peace Prizes are passed out, Russia will send in their agents and little green men to support AstroTurf "rebels" who will destabilize the now-abandoned countries to prepare them for coups or invasions that lead them back to the warm, ever-tightening, and endless embrace of Holy Mother Russia.
This Brookings plan sounds like an inferior--because it counts on Russian cooperation--version of the French "cordon sanitaire" prior to World War II:
The seminal use of "cordon sanitaire" as a metaphor for ideological containment referred to "the system of alliances instituted by France in post-World War I Europe that stretched from Finland to the Balkans" and which "completely ringed Germany and sealed off Russia from Western Europe, thereby isolating the two politically 'diseased' nations of Europe."[32]
French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau is credited with coining the usage, when in March 1919 he urged the newly independent border states (also called limitrophe states) that had seceded from the Russian Empire and its successor the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to form a defensive union and thus quarantine the spread of communism to Western Europe; he called such an alliance a cordon sanitaire. This is still probably the most famous use of the phrase, though it is sometimes used more generally to describe a set of buffer states that form a barrier against a larger, ideologically hostile state.
The small states ended up being crushed between the two rising powers of Nazi Germany and the USSR, split up between them. Maybe a new Ottoman Empire under Erdogan stands in for 1930s Germany to divide up with Putin's Russia the former Soviet imperial lands of Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan.
Small states left on their own cannot stand up against aggressive and powerful states. Perhaps the states beyond NATO can resist Russia for a while. But if Russia regains strength that melted away after 1991, Russia will conquer them all. That is not a better way to help them.
I"m not saying that we should rush to offer every post-Soviet state NATO membership. But "solving" the stand off between Russia and NATO shouldn't be done by essentially retreating and leaving states vulnerable to Russian aggression.
NATO should hold membership options open and use that lure to strengthen those ex-Soviet states to resist Russia and enable closer ties with the West by promoting rule of law and democracy in those states.
