Poking A Georgian Stick in Russia’s Eye

While most of us were busy admiring the work that Aunt Bea’s hairdresser did on Sarah Palin’s hair in St. Paul this week, Vice President Cheney was skulking around Georgia and other parts of the former Soviet Union. Some of the things he said and promises he suggested were alarming, to put it mildly.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani hinted at the mischief in decribing a quote he ascribed to GOP nominee John McCain: “We are all Georgians.” We are? Clearly the attempt was to suggest a solidarity between the United States and Georgia akin to that between Americans and Berliners, but does the analogy hold? And if it is accepted, what are the implications of this newfound brotherhood and synergy?

Amongst the nuggets that Cheney held out to the people of Georgia was the prospect of NATO membership (he suggested that Ukraine fell in the same category). As noted in an earlier entry, discussion of adding these republics to NATO has been under discussion in Brussels but has been shelved for the time being. There are at least two good reasons that this initiative should remain where it is: buried in NATO’s in-box.

The first reason is suggested in the title of this entry. Cheney suggested in Georgia that the Russians should not fear the inclusion of former parts of the Soviet Union along is border into the military alliance that faced it throughout the Cold War, because “NATO is a defensive alliance. It is a threat to no one.” The Russians, of course, do not see it quite that way. When combined with the recent agreement to install missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic (missiles in one, radars in the other), the suggestion of adding Georgia and Ukraine to NATO seems ominously like hostile encirclement to Russia, a possibility that no significant power could possibly embrace. Given the disagreement about who was actually the provocateur in the recent Georgian-Russian confrontation, taking up the cudgel so aggressively at this point can only seem very antagonistic, boredering on aggressive, to the Russians. Indeed, it is akin to poklng the bear in the eye.

The other reason to wonder about this proposed commitment is the question of whether it is in the interests of the United States to commit itself to the defense of Georgia through NATO membership. As also noted in an earlier entry, NATO members agree that a threat (or aggression) against one is a threat (or aggression) against all that obligates members to come to one another’s aid. Article 5 of the treaty (the operative article) does not specify that such a response will be military, but that is the normal expectation.

Does the United States really want to make that kind of commitment to Georgia? When the question of NATO expansion was first raised in the 1990s, the question of commitment to places where there were no previous important interests was lively, and many people argued it was not in the best interests of the United States to become committed to such places. High among the counries where this question was raised were the sucessor states to the Soviet Union. The United States does, of course, have an affinity for struggling democracies like Georgia, but does this translate into a mandate to defend them with military force against their traditional adversaries (the Russians)? In the spirit of no-conservatism idealism, such a case can be made, Through the lens of traditional realism, the case is by no means obvious.

Russia has already responded, grumbling about cutting oil production and the flow of natural gas to Europe, and these threats may well dampen what little enthusiasm there is for Cheney’s initiatives among the other members of the alliance. In the meantime, Cheney skulks around the world, carefully being excluded from St. Paul, looking and acting like Burgess Meredith playing the Penguin in the old Batman television series. In the wings, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has added her two-cents-worth, intoning “The free world cannot allow the destiny of a small independent country to be determined by the aggression of a larger neighbor.” Of course it can, and of course it has and will in the future. Let’s hope the election campaign does not get infected with this sappily sentimental thinking.

Georgia on Our Minds

The Russian invasion of Georgia has opened a sore point in the foreign policy of the United States, and the presidential election campaign threatens to magnify the problem to the point of exaggeration and even distortion. The Russians have left (sort of), and the crisis may fade. It may also fester if it becomes a foreign policy cause celebre as we move toward November.

Georgia is, on the face of it, an unlikely flash point for U.S. foreign policy. It is a small country not quite the size of South Carolina with a population of 4.6 million (July 2008 estimate courtesy of CIA Factbook). It has a population that is about 84 percent Georgian ethnically and an equal percentage of Christians. Other than the pipeline that carries Caspian Sea oil to the Black Sea, it has little geopolitical significance (its proven oil reserves are 35 million barrels, less than half a days consumption worldwide). It has been enmeshed in civil strife with South Ossetia and Abkhazia, both a of which are pro-Russian, since the breakup of the Soviet Union, so the current crisis is hardly shocking. The only thing that has been shocking is the brutality and illegality of the Russian invasion. Still, it is hardly much more controversial than the U.S. invasion of Iraq five years ago.

Does Georgia warrant the level of rhetoric that rings from Washington and the campaign trail? The response on the political right is to punish the Russians; the Bush administration warns of international isolation; McCain calls for kicking the Russians out of G-8 and admitting Georgia to NATO. Obama threatens to ostracize the Russians, and Biden reminds us he visited the noble Georgians only weeks ago. Where does all this go?

There are two ways to look at the issue. One is through the eyes of the “democracy promoters” of the Bush administration. Led by the idealistic neo-conservatives, they argue that pushing for political democracies should be priority business for the United States and that Georgia, as a democracy, must be supported and its oppressors punished. Moreover, the Georgians are pro-American and both want and expect our help, which should be forthcoming. At the bottom line, the conclusion is that Russian behavior is unacceptable and that something must be done about it. The parallels between this position and Jimmy Carter’s advocacy of human rights as the foundation of US foreign policy are obvious.

The other way to look at this is geopolitically. This argument begins from the unacceptability of Russia invading a sovereign state. Although Georgia is not of particular importance to the United States otherwise, the precedent set by the invasion is important and must be opposed on that ground. The difference between the two positions is the level of moral righteousness and indignation that underlies them.

The flashpoint in this debate,which threatens to whirl out of control on the campaign trail, is over Georgia and NATO. As noted in an earlier entry, Georgia has applied for membership in NATO, but no action has been taken on their application. Were Georgia a member of NATO, McCain argues, the Russians would not have dared invade for fear of the consequences. The other side of this argument is that the fact that Georgia is not a member of NATO meant the alliance was able to avoid a military action in defense of that country which none of them truly wanted nor were prepared to mount.

What does this mean for the future? Should Georgia now be admitted to NATO? From a democracy promotion viewpoint, a case can be made it should, if promoting and protecting democracies everywhere is the heart of US policy. Such an advocacy, of course, would have put us chin-to-chin with Russia over a place most Americans would be unwilling personally to defend, and probably opens the door for a lot of worldwide interventions in the future. Will a post-Iraq America embrace such a path? My own analysis in What After Iraq? suggests not.

Keeping Georgia out of NATO does not have the same high-sounding ring as protecting the defenseless, but it makes more traditional geopolitical sense. Other than sharing democracy (in the Georgian case, a limited form), there are essentially few American vital interests in Georgia, and thus Georgia is not a place to which we should be militarily obligated. That leaves the Georgians in a vulnerable position, but it also results in a security policy the United States is likely to be willing to support in actuality.

And the Russian position is not irrelevant here. The United States did not, to put it mildly, act magnanimously when the then Soviet Union tried to erect missile systems in Cuba, and they would likely see a NATO Georgia in the same light as the U.S. saw Cuba; the installation of missile defenses in Poland of which the Bush administration is so proud is only another extension of the one-finger salute to Russia. The Russians have acted badly (which Russians tend to do). Does that justify the Americans acting equally badly (or stuoidly, as the case may be)?

One hopes Georgia fades as an election issue, because if it stays alive, it will likely escalate to increasingly untenuous levels of support for the Georgians. McCain may have revealed what a presidency bearing his name would be like in these situations: tending toward military solutions to arguably non-military problems. If the national security issue comes down to a contest over who can seem tougher, will Obama and Biden be forced to follow suit and dumb down their own positions to match McCain’s? The prospectsare not very pleasant to contemplate.

The Burr Under Putin’s Saddle

Why the Russians chose to invade Georgia remains a matter of considerable conversation and controversy. If one discounts (or at least views skeptically) the self-proclaimed reason of saving the beleaguered South Ossetians and Abkhazians from their Georgian oppressors (although that may have been a valid concern), what is one left with as an explanation for an action that has clearly inflamed relations between Russia and the West, and especially the United States?

Part of the explanation that is gaining some traction is that the action was Vladimir Putin’s way of demonstrating unequivocally that Russia was back and was no longer to be taken lightly. The Russians have made the “near abroad” (their designation of the former Soviet republics) a little closer to the breast of the Russian bear; their pointed ignoring of entreaties to leave and apparent violation of their agreements to cease their invasion sends a clear message that old-fashioned spheres of influence have not disappeared from world politics. They laugh, appropriately, at the pious, hypocritical plea of George Bush that countries don’t invade other countries in the Twenty-first century.

Admitting that all of this is part of the calculus, there is another explanation–the burr under Mr. Putin’s saddle. That is the missile defense system the United States just finished negotiating with Poland. The Russians have been objecting to missile defense schemes for 40 years and to this one since Bush proposed it. When Russian General Anatoly Nogovitsyn of the Russian General Staff said the final decision to deploy the system in Poland (with supportive radars in the Czech Republic) and to defend the complex with Patriot missiles was a provocation that “cannot go unpunished,” hie words were dismissed as Cold War-era bombast. But what if they had more meaning?

I must make a confession on this subject. I have thought missile defenses were a bad idea for over a quarter-century. My first objections–basically that they are hyper-expensive boondoggles–was made in 1983 in a book, The Nuclear Future (University of Alabama Press), and in reviewing what I said then, not much has changed. The current scheme, which has been a Bush hobby horse since he was elected, proposes a “thin” screen against an attack by a “rogue state” (read Iran). Like all such schemes, it probably won’t work, but fortunately, the threat against which it is proposed is so unlikely that that doesn’t matter much. It does, however, exercise the Russians in ways reminiscent of their opposition to Ronald Reagan’s Rube Goldberg scheme, the Strategic Defense Intitiative, in the 1980s.

New York Times writer Steven Lee Myers captures the Russian objection well in an August 15, 2008 article (“No Cold War But Big Chill over Georgia”): “No matter how much the Americans argue that NATO is now focused on other threats, for Russia, it remains an enemy force. And no matter how often the Americans say missile defense is aimed at Iran and other so-called rogue nations, it remains an existential threat to Russia’s aging and shrinking nuclear capability.”

NATO has increasingly encircled Russia, and proposals to extend the alliance to Ukraine and Georgia (which John McCain supports) would only tighten the knot, part of Putin’s burr. The Russians have always been paranoid about missile defenses, and completing the deal with Poland–which the Bush administration presumably sees as part of its permanent legacy–may have been the final burr under the saddle that caused Mr. Putin and his colleague Mr. Medvedev to say, enough is enough. And so they struck back and let us all know that we mess with Russia at our own risk.

I wonder how Mr. Bush missed that kind of determination when he looked in Mr. Putin’s eyes seven years ago. And while Mr. Putin certainly does reflect his KGB past, did Mr. McCain see this concern when he lashed out and said he wants to kick the Russians out of G-8 and, in essence, potentially start a new Cold War? Not trying to justify what the Russians have done in Georgia, it may help to put the whole thing into perspective.