Georgian Crisis Roundup

August 12th, 2008 Posted in Politics

More analysis of what’s going on between Russia and Georgia:

What remains is an absolute determination not to be defeated by Georgia and not to suffer the humiliation of having to abandon Russia’s South Ossete client state, with everything that this would mean for Russian prestige in other areas. Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin made it clear again and again that if Georgia attacked South Ossetia, Russia would fight. Georgian advocates in the West claimed that Moscow was only bluffing. It wasn’t.

But the United States was bluffing. Russia was antagonized by the mulling over of a Georgian Nato membership, and remained unimpressed by American commitments to Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, especially in light of its current military over-extension:

Saakashvili, an apparently quite idealistic 40 year-old former NY lawyer, seems to have erred too much in thinking that giddy summitry with Western big-wigs might pay dividends (or too his far too excited involvement in the Iraq adventure which, incidentally, looks to be coming to a quite precipitous end) but unfortunately, insufficiently appreciated the disastrous waning in U.S. power these past years, despite his constant hankering for NATO membership (which a resurgent Russia will never accept

In a phone conversation with him concerning South Ossetia, Putin told Saakashvili that he stick American reassurances about their dispute up his ass (really). A sad indication of the waning of American power under Bush — this reassurances were worth precisely what Putin thought they were. Sadder yet, McCain suggests that we heighten the crisis by reconsidering Nato membership for Georgia and engaging in more posturing unlikely to backed by war with Russia. Meanwhile, we have Bill Kristol suggesting that we threaten to de-normalize relations with Russia and Cheney promoting the vague idea that “Russian aggression must not go unanswered” without “serious consequences for its relations with the United States….” It’s the Bush administration’s foreign policy one-two punch:

• First, help create a crisis through a failure at diplomacy
• Second, make this crisis worse through belligerent “diplomacy”

Fred Kaplan wonders, “Is there some third way, involving a level of diplomatic shrewdness that the Bush administration has rarely mustered and, in this case, might not have the legitimacy to pursue?” And:

it is worth asking what the Bush people were thinking when they egged on Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s young, Western-educated president, to apply for NATO membership, send 2,000 of his troops to Iraq as a full-fledged U.S. ally, and receive tactical training and weapons from our military. Did they really think Putin would sit by and see another border state (and former province of the Russian empire) slip away to the West? If they thought that Putin might not, what did they plan to do about it, and how firmly did they warn Saakashvili not to get too brash or provoke an outburst?

It’s heartbreaking, but even more infuriating, to read so many Georgians quoted in the New York Times—officials, soldiers, and citizens—wondering when the United States is coming to their rescue. It’s infuriating because it’s clear that Bush did everything to encourage them to believe that he would.

Gorbachev agrees. It’s part of a long history of failed policy in the region:

But the seeds of Russia’s aggression lie in the sense of humiliation that Moscow’s proud power elites have felt at the hands of the West going back to the Clinton administration’s unceasing efforts to bring what used to be the Soviet bloc—and post-Soviet Russia itself—into the West’s sphere of influence. The policy started with the high-handed (and mostly failed) economic advice we gave to Moscow on free-market economics in the early ’90s—the era of “privatization” (the Russians called it “grabitization”), which led directly to the reign of the hated oligarchs.

Since then we’ve seen the obliteration of Chechnya, the poisoning of Viktor Yuschenko, and Russia’s backslide to authoritarianism.

Meanwhile, Georgians continue to suffer the consequences.

A template for how not to deal with Iran, despite its relative weakness.