The 60th anniversary of NATO is nearly upon us, and next week’s much ballyhooed meetings in France and Germany are expected to produce the first revision to NATO’s Strategic Concept in over a decade. Russia will be high on the agenda. Today, in a fascinating interview with the Council on Foreign Relations, the Rand Corporation’s F. Stephen Larrabee breaks down why.

Q: What are the other problems facing NATO right now?

We touched upon the question of [NATO] enlargement. Here I would say that there’s a very different situation today than was the case with admission of central and eastern European members, because the two countries that now are being considered for membership, or at least who have applied for membership, Georgia and Ukraine, are part of the post-Soviet space. And here, Russia is very sensitive, much more sensitive than it was about central Europe and eastern Europe. The invasion of Georgia last August only underscored the sensitivity that Russia feels about any further expansion of NATO; indeed in the way it was designed not simply to punish President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia for his pro-Western orientation and desire to join NATO, but to send a broader message to the West. That message was that Russia considers itself to have vital interests in the post-Soviet space, and is prepared, if necessary, to defend those issues with force.

That puts the situation in a very different context, because it does mean that before any further expansion of NATO, the alliance needs to undertake a really serious examination of how it can carry out an Article 5 security commitment [to defend any member state] to Ukraine and Georgia. I’m not saying they shouldn’t become members, but before they do, the alliance has to undertake that type of study. It has not.