Atlantic Council

In 2009, an Eastern European should fill the top spot of a major international organization, a recent Economist editorial argues.  From power players like the EU Commission and NATO to "lesser posts" like OSCE, the Council of Europe, and the EBRD, Eastern Europeans have been noticeably underrepresented at the leadership level. 

Hakimullah Mehsud makes an eloquent practical argument for development of the East-West Corridor that runs from the Black Sea to the Caspian, across Georgia and Azerbaijan.  His Taliban guerillas are attacking NATO supply convoys traveling from Pakistan to Afghanistan and they recently struck a major logistics depot in the Pakistani town of Peshawar. 

Will the U.S. extend security guarantees to Georgia and Ukraine on a bilateral basis?  With NATO MAPs not on the table for the foreseeable future, pacts with the U.S. are emerging in both countries.  However, Ukraine's is nonbinding, and as my colleague James Joyner points out, Georgia's seems largely symbolic.  RFE/RL ran two articles about the deals late last week. 

The United States and Georgia will sign a "strategic partnership treaty" in the New Year, AFP reports. "Georgian Minister of Foreign Affairs Grigol Vashadze and the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will sign a strategic partnership treaty on January 4 in Washington," foreign ministry spokeswoman Khatuna Iosava told AFP. 

Hopes are high that a new Afghanistan strategy and 30,000 extra U.S. troops will prove to be a turning point in the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, much as similar measures changed the nature of the counterinsurgency in Iraq. 

When members of a strained Alliance convene in Strasbourg, France and Kehl, Germany for the 60th Anniversary of NATO it will have been a decade since they last agreed upon a strategic vision for the alliance. 

NATO and Russia are talking again for the first time since the August invasion of Georgia, AP reports. NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer and Dmitry Rogozin, Moscow's ambassador to the alliance, met over lunch Friday in the first high-level meeting after a four-month hiatus caused by the war.

NATO must "find a political voice or collapse," says Times of London defense editor Michael Evans.  "It has become so multi-tasked, so desperate to get involved in everything from cyber warfare to anti-piracy and missile defence, let alone a hugely draining and complex campaign in Afghanistan, that it has lost its way."

"Robust" is the word now being used to describe the EU's mandate for its new anti-piracy mission, Operation Atalanta, in Somalia's treacherous waters.  With NATO's Operation Allied Provider officially ending last Friday, news is beginning to leak about Atalanta's rules of engagement. 

"What About NATO?" asks an unsigned Economist editorial, with the ambitious subhead "How the alliance should move forward." Its premise is that the Georgia crisis demonstrated NATO's lack of will to stand up to Russian aggression and created serious doubts among the Alliance's new members, especially "Poles, Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians" and that therefore "NATO’s credibility could do with a boost."