What a History

There is a reconstruction of recent History that identifies the April 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest as one of the main roots of the ongoing war in Ukraine. It is no mystery that FdR also identifies it.

At that time, at the suggestion of the US and the Bush Jr. administration, it was decided that Georgia and Ukraine would be put on a waiting list for future NATO membership. Germany (Angela Merkel) and France (Nicolas Sarkozy) objected, fearing Russia's reaction: the step was considered by Moscow a violation of a red line.

On the inside pages, the Spiegel scales down its headline quite a bit: the current war started in 2008 not because of the intention of the US (and many of its European allies) to consider Georgia and Ukraine as future NATO partners, but rather from a mistake made by then Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The latter, bending over the draft of the summit's final communiqué, corrected this sentence in the original English text:

'Georgia and Ukraine will one day become NATO members'.

She would have done this listening to the misgivings of the Eastern European states, which interpreted 'one day' as a synonym for 'never'.

Thus, Angela Merkel would have deleted 'one day', letting the phrase suggest a membership of Georgia and Ukraine in NATO deprived of its indefinite and remote temporal dimension.

As much as the Spiegel's reconstruction reminds us that the great tragedies of History are often born out of small and petty misunderstandings, eleven pages to convince us that it was Angie with her red pencil who triggered the fury of the Russians in Georgia in August 2008 and later the devastating invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 is too much.

However, if the Spiegel article retains anything good, it is in recognising historically in the NATO summit in Bucharest (2008) one of the diseased roots of this war that no one thereafter has ever really wanted to avoid.

(gianluca grossi)