Business Insider quotes Eurasia Center Nonresident Research Fellow Laura Linderman on Vice President Biden’s support for Georgia’s aspirations to become a NATO member:

“The logic is to give Georgia a Membership Action Plan and put them on this path that still changes the situation on the ground and Moscow’s calculation,” Laura Linderman, a research fellow at the Atlantic Council and expert on the Caucasus region, told Business Insider.

By even talking about Georgian accession to NATO, the U.S. is telegraphing its intentions to Putin without throwing its weight behind anything more than a vague policy. “Putin operates in a way that forces a black and white view of countries on Russia’s periphery — they have to choose the West or choose us,” Linderman says, “and Putin tends to take any kind of equivocating statement as a sign of weakness.”

[…]

“The Ukraine crisis an opening for Georgia to push for a closer relationship with NATO in some ways,” Linderman says. “It also leaves them much more vulnerable. They’re in a tough spot.”

Read the full article here.

Related Experts: Laura Linderman