Apropos Robert Kagan’s Georgia on his mind. We’ve come a long way from the time when George Bush the First promised Michael Gorbachev that the reunification of Germany would never take NATO closer to the Soviet border to the time that George Bush the Second wants to extend NATO to Georgia. As Gorbachev put it recently:

“The Americans promised that Nato wouldn’t move beyond the boundaries of Germany after the Cold War but now half of central and eastern Europe are members, so what happened to their promises? It shows they cannot be trusted.”

Indeed. Could you imagine the U.S.reaction if the the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) invited Mexico, Ecuador and Venezuela — not to mention Cuba — to join it as members?

The problem is that the idea of bringing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO has become a bipartisan issue. The Foreign Policy Establishment — Democrats and Republicans, liberal and conservatives — supports the idea. It is gradually becoming the conventional wisdom. The question now is not “If?” but “When?” How about “Why?”