Georgetown University

Washington, D.C. – In Brussels, foreign ministers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) are re-visiting the question of whether Ukraine and Georgia should be offered a roadmap to prepare for NATO membership. Regardless of their decisions, the next U.S. administration also faces the question of what to do about Ukraine, Georgia and the future of NATO expansion.

However, the question stands: Should the United States seek to persuade nervous European Allies that Ukraine and Georgia develop a closer relationship with NATO, even at the expense of deteriorating relations with Russia? Georgetown professor Jim DeHart explores this question and more in “The Burden of Strategy: Transatlantic Relations and the Future of NATO Enlargement,” the latest report by Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy (ISD).

DeHart, who teaches a graduate-level course on U.S. policy toward European enlargement in Georgetown University’s Masters in German and European Studies Program (MAGES), says the recent war in Georgia leaves little doubt that the United States and its NATO allies have reached a historic turning point on NATO enlargement. “The trans-Atlantic consensus that sustained NATO expansion for more than a decade has begun to unravel,” he says. “The next U.S. administration faces difficult choices that will have a profound impact on the future map of Europe.”

The ISD study details the modern history of NATO enlargement since the fall of the Berlin Wall in the late 1980s and early 1990s and addresses the evolution of NATO’s enlargement tools and processes – such as the membership action plan – that are crucial to understanding the policy options available to the next U.S. administration.

The author suggests that President-elect Barack Obama’s administration essentially faces three choices – accelerate NATO’s eastward expansion to bring in Georgia and Ukraine; sustain NATO expansion, but slow it down for Georgia and Ukraine; and suspend NATO’s eastward expansion in order to achieve other foreign policy goals.

“Presidential leadership is about making choices,” says Casimir Yost, visiting professor at Georgetown’s master of science in foreign service program and former director of ISD. “The NATO enlargement choice will be consequential and should be taken with the benefit of a sound understanding of what three earlier administrations have done on this issue…Jim has given us such an understanding and framed the choices available to the next U.S. president,” he says.

Copies of the ISD report can be downloaded from the Institute’s Web site at http://isd.georgetown.edu.

About the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy

The Institute for the Study of Diplomacy (ISD), founded in 1978, is a program of Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and is the School’s primary window on the world of the foreign affairs practitioner. ISD studies the practitioner’s craft: how diplomats and other foreign affairs professionals succeed and the lessons to be learned from their successes and failures. For more information about ISD please visit: http://isd.georgetown.edu.

About Georgetown University

Georgetown University is the oldest and largest Catholic and Jesuit university in America, founded in 1789 by Archbishop John Carroll. Georgetown today is a major student-centered, international, research university offering respected undergraduate, graduate and professional programs in Washington, DC, Doha, Qatar and around the world. For more information about Georgetown University, visit www.georgetown.edu.