After Georgia, what future for NATO?

Despite being on a fast-track to NATO membership and the deployment of Georgian troops to Iraq, the Georgian military needs better resources if it is to hold the line against its massive neighbor.

Some would like to see it brought into NATO faster, while others say the recent events call for more circumspection to see if a country such as Georgia is worthy.

Meanwhile, experts such as Mr. Rumer and others believe the US and NATO must strengthen the military capabilities of not only Georgia, but of countries like Estonia and the Ukraine – places where Russia could again flex its resentments toward Western influence.

Poland last week agreed to allow the US to base a missile defense system there over the long objections of Russia, which sees it as a threat to its own security.

Antiair and antiarmor weaponry could go along way to helping those border nations and former republics of the Soviet Union defend themselves, agrees Zbigniew Brzezinski, the hawkish former national security adviser under President Carter who tangled with the Russians often.

"NATO needs to provide these guys weaponry," he says. At the same time as Western allies help NATO build its capacities there, it must push to isolate Russia, says Dr. Brzezinski, now affiliated with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

"That will send the Russian political elite a message that they will have to think about it," he says.

NATO, now tied down by the flagging mission in Afghanistan, must have a new discussion about building up its conventional forces, say other analysts as this apparently new, competitive relationship between NATO and Russia reemerges.

"NATO has delayed its own reassessment of strategic concepts," says Ian Lesser, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a think tank in Washington.

Meanwhile, in the reaction that followed last week's events, some believe the world could be overinterpreting whatever strategic ambitions the Russians may or may not have beyond Georgia.

The US and its allies must be careful not to overreact. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, for example, who cut his teeth as a US policymaker as a Sovietologist, was careful not to put a "military option" on the table when it came to responding to Russia's move into South Ossetia.

On ABC News's "This Week" Sunday, Mr. Gates dismissed Russia's vows to target Poland with military strikes over the missile defense agreement.

Meanwhile, some analysts believe the world needs more time before it can properly assess what Russia is thinking.

"We are now in a mood to generalize it into something larger and more strategic," says Mr. Lesser, who adds that this poses a risk if the world community overreacts to what may be nothing more than settling an old, regional score. "There is a certain danger that if you get this wrong, that it can indeed become something bigger."

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