Postmodern Conservative.

NATO: Revision and Remorse?

Friedman is right today in the main of his latest op-ed. But one needn't have been against NATO expansion in 1999 in order to have been against another round meant to include Georgia and Ukraine. Wisdom present in that first round is conspicuously absent in the second. When it comes down to it, 'cramming' expansion 'down Russia's throat' made for far less of a humiliation and inflicted far less damage than throwing Russia open to unfettered Western capitalism. 

The blame for the failure to integrate Russia smoothly and successfully into the West -- if such a thing could ever have been done, it was then -- belongs at the feet of Clinton's international-economic team, not his foreign-policy team. Including Poland, Czeschoslovakia, and Hungary in NATO completed the poem of the Alliance, put the pupils in its eyes, choose your own metaphor; the enlistment of those nations in the triumphant Pact formalized and accomplished the West's longest-term geopolitical objectives -- taking central Europe off the table of conquest in any direction. 

Pulling in the Baltics is another matter, weighted heavily by the fact that they were simply gobbled up by the Soviets in an act of plain annexation. Contrast, say, Ukraine. And Georgia, which is just too far away from continental Europe to make for much of a geostrategic link. If Georgia falls, NATO is safe. If Lithuania falls...

But the whole point is that these kinds of spasmodic fears are muted BOTH by the integration of central Europe into NATO and by the exclusion of Georgia and Ukraine. On the other hand, Russia, as I've speculated before, may be much more willing to 'lose' Georgia to NATO after leaving Georgia in whatever condition it pleases. Though surely this is extremely unlikely to happen in the Ukrainian case. 

Yet More Georgitprop

Another day, another calculated oversimplification festooned in highfalutin trash talk:

The European Union took the lead in diplomacy, with results approaching Neville Chamberlain’s moment in the spotlight at Munich: a ceasefire that failed to mention Georgia’s territorial integrity, and that all but gave Russia permission to continue its military operations as a “peacekeeping” force anywhere in Georgia. More troubling, over the long term, was that the EU saw its task as being mediator – its favourite role in the world – between Georgia and Russia, rather than an advocate for the victim of aggression.

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. John Bolton. 

No surprise there. What is a surprise, or at least beggars the imagination, is that no one in the anti-Russia lobby seems to care (though I am sure they secretly understand) that the status of the Sudetenland and the status of Abkhazia and South Ossetia bore absolutely no resemblance that would merit a comparison of this long week's events to Munich. 

Imagine that the independence of Czechoslovakia from Austria had been accompanied by brutal wars of secession along the Sudeten fringe which resulted in military and political autonomy -- sovereignty in all but name -- for the Germanic Sudetens, who then received German passports and one day received a snap Czech invasion for their trouble more than a decade after wresting away their autonomy. Then imagine that Munich happened. Different story, eh, Mr. Bolton? But Mr. Bolton does not want reckonings like these to Obscure Moral Clarity. That would be cowardly.

But wait. There's more. As it happens, the Germans who wound up under Czech domination in the wake of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire actually did try to join Germany in 1918. And they actually were denied this opportunity, and here, as has so often been the case in Europe, fundamental instability was hardwired into the 'territorial integrity' of the sovereign state system for no better reason than to punish the Germans. Once again, in Europe, the efforts of ethnonationalists and counterethnonationalists to climb the greasy pole of advantage and protection wound up proving viciously counterproductive and inimical to any sane concept of sovereignty and independence. 

Throwing the Czechs to Hitler was obviously bad; pretending that Europe has not been perpetually hamstrung by deep structural problems within almost every nation-state on the Continent is bad in a different but no lighter way, and the bottom line narrative in European history is that often only wars of ethnic sorting and suppression have been able, until very recently, and perhaps even not then, to close the chapter on unsolved questions of sovereign borders. 

Yes, for a time some multiethnic nations have been able to live quite at internal peace, and often it's bad leaders who engineer wars that are ginned up to seem like the products of 'age-old hatreds.' But there is simply no denying that the most likely claim Georgia has to being a part of Europe is in fact its preponderance of intractable ethnonationalist fracture lines. This sort of recognition militates conclusively against the kind of rhetoric of denial practiced above by Bolton and all over the mainstream press by other charter members of the anti-Russia lobby, hung up as they are on a series of convenient phantoms -- the 'integrity' of a Georgian state that never corresponded to reality; the 'innocence' of a Georgian regime that flagrantly flouted the plainest warnings our own government deigned to provide. Enough!

In Praise of the Administration

Reading this it occurs to me that I believe the Bush administration has handled the Russo-Georgian War and its aftermath about as well as could have possibly been asked for. 

This is an extraordinarily delicate and complex situation that would bedevil anyone at State or the White House. After so many cheap episodes of bungling and recrimination, which will tarnish this administration with the funk of 40,000 years, getting from Friday last to this Friday in the condition we appear to be in seems like almost a miracle. And it seems that Condi Rice bears most of the responsibility for it.

The humanitarian intervention, to me, seems like exactly the right thing to do -- complete without any guarantees of defense or protection. Georgia must understand that war with Russia is so unacceptably catastrophic that it will not be risked, especially after the fact of the main combat...and Russia must understand, as I suspect it does, that the US is bending over backwards to give them a big pass on an ugly business, because at bottom this is a structural problem with Georgian sovereignty that couldn't be resolved by peaceful means. 

In the main, then, I hew pretty closely to Ross's position, though -- and I really don't mean this just to be idiosyncratic -- I think the downside of having Georgia in NATO diminishes vastly if that Georgia is pruned of its rebel provinces and at permanent peace with Russia. That doesn't mean I'm going to be a booster and advocate of Georgian NATO membership at some future date, but it won't appall me on principle like it wound up doing this past time around. It may be inevitable now that, long term, the security guarantee will drop out of the NATO equation. That's unattractive in some fundamental way, yet it may be necessary to plugging the weird and destabilizing gaps between the Western alliance and Russia...and an intimation of a certainty, which I keep in a cool, dark place, that Russia, one day, ought to be a member, too. 

If the basic original framework and purpose of NATO has already been abandoned, which it has for some time, and if it's now unrecoverable, which looks certain, and if NATO will not die or dissolve itself, a third virtual certainty, then we've got to start thinking about ways to take it on a new trajectory without dooming us all by trying to carry on useless vestiges of the old operation. This may result in some loopy ideas, but it also strikes me as a main requisite of a 21st-century foreign policy that seeks to lay claim to any prudence and foresight at all.

The Post-Mortem Begins

This is an important piece of the Russo-Georgian puzzle:

During a private dinner on July 9, Ms. Rice’s aides say, she warned President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia not to get into a military conflict with Russia that Georgia could not win. “She told him, in no uncertain terms, that he had to put a non-use of force pledge on the table,” according to a senior administration official who accompanied Ms. Rice to the Georgian capital.

Mixed messages, maybe, but that one can't be diluted by mere rhetoric, and Saakashvili should have known. It is much more likely that the US was a better judge of Georgian national interests than Saakashvili was of America's.

And again, as far as Randy Scheunemann's double play is concerned, what matters is whether McCain would have been inclined to take the same aggressively anti-Russian line whether Scheunemann was a trusted advisor or a figment of his imagination. By all indications, the answer is yes. What would McCain have told Saakashvili if he were at that dinner instead of Rice?

McCain: ready -- to start a war -- on Day 1! Probably not true, really, but too close for comfort. Sane Republicans and conservatives must push pack firmly against the idea that 'toughness' is foreign policy experience. Which is exactly the narrative McCain's trying to sell.

In Which I Send Back My Plate of Crow

Things were looking a bit troubled yesterday evening among the 'cooler heads' I've been mentioning lately apropos of the Russo-Georgian War. I had announced late the night before that Medvedev and Putin had 24 hours to halt hostilities before major, and possibly irreparable, harm would be done to Russian-Western relations. I insisted that only a fool would let that happen, and speculated wildly that Putin and Medvedev were not fools. 

And the invasion of Georgia proper went on.

So I awoke this morning half-expecting to be discredited forever as a commentator on all things Caucuasian...but no, as it happens Medvedev has announced an end to Russian attacks. Content, it seems, with cutting off the Georgian army at the knees, in addition to the obvious settlement of the Ossetia/Abkhaz situation, M and P must now make their way out of Georgia proper, no ifs ands or buts about it. If they do, aside from the brutal casualties and deaths and destruction, everyone will come out better for this ugly exchange. Apparently it is not even a condition of peace that Saakashvili step down. Which may indeed mean that a chastened, neutralized Georgia in NATO is more appealing to Russia than a reckless and irresponsible Georgia outside it. And who isn't that true for?

And Now, a War of Words

Friday evening, I submitted a blistering prose counterattack against what was set to be called the "hailstorm of shrillness" and "swooning gibberish" coming out of the anti-Russia lobby in the public prints. 

But I dialed it down as Russia pressed its attack into Georgia proper: see my current comments at The Guardian.

And yet I awake this morning to see the fever-blind editorial pages of the mainstream media aflame with brittle fury and cheap, irresponsible rhetoric. But cooler heads will not prevail if they are pulled into a shouting match, so I will reprint without comment, and wait.

The details of who did what to precipitate Russia's war against Georgia are not very important. Do you recall the precise details of the Sudeten Crisis that led to Nazi Germany's invasion of Czechoslovakia? Of course not, because that morally ambiguous dispute is rightly remembered as a minor part of a much bigger drama.

*

Exactly what happened in South Ossetia last week is unclear. Each side will argue its own version. But we know, without doubt, that Georgia was responding to repeated provocative attacks by South Ossetian separatists controlled and funded by Moscow. This is a not a war Georgia wanted; it believed that it was slowly gaining ground in South Ossetia through a strategy of soft power.

*

Today, the Vladimir Putins and Hu Jintaos and Mahmoud Ahmadinejads of the world — to say nothing of their junior counterparts in places like Sudan, Zimbabwe, Burma and North Korea — are no more likely than were Soviet leaders in 1924 to be swayed by "moral influence." Dictators aren't moved by the claims of justice unarmed; aggressors aren't intimidated by diplomacy absent the credible threat of force; fanatics aren't deterred by the disapproval of men of moderation or refinement.

PLUS...Yglesias begins to chime in from his new digs. More, please!

AND...I would be remiss not to link to the sober op-ed at the Christian Science Monitor penned by Georgetown Professor Charles King. 

Russia Serves Me Crow

Or maybe not crow, insofar as I said Russia could press into Georgia but would be extremely foolish to do so. But some unappetizing undomesticated bird. The presumptive aim here is to crush the Georgian military as a fighting force and overthrow Saakashvili. And although Georgia would be better off without Saakashvili, and only really needs an army to protect itself against the Russians, obviously the next question for Putin assuming that joint aim is secured is why not make Georgia as much a puppet as Abkhazia and South Ossetia?

The answer is equally obvious, alas: the Georgians will not go down without a fight that will make Chechnya a sweet reminiscence and the Siege of Leningrad look like a cakewalk. On the three big issues dominating Georgia -- Abkhaz and Ossetian final status and the person of Saakashvili himself -- the West has been extraordinarily weak and has known it. The West has had no good claim to settling those issues against Russian interest. By leaps and bounds, the claim against the destruction of the Georgian army and the occupation of inarguably Georgian soil is much stronger, and the stakes are much higher, and unless the Russian incursion stops within 24 hours tops this business is going to go from serious to grave to ugly to brutal and worse. 

We should pause here to note a few important things:

(1) The same people who will insist that they saw this coming will also insist that the Russians are utterly unpredictable and can never be trusted. This kind of cognitive dissonance will not help clearer Western heads prevail.

(2) Aforementioned people will insist that had Georgia been brought into NATO, none of this would have happened...ostensibly because the unfathomably crafty and evil Russkies would have been cowed into prudent defensiveness by Georgian membership. The anti-Russia crowd still has to do the impossible to prove their point, which is to assert that, post-membership, Abkhazia and South Ossetia would have ceased to be the problems that inspired such a gamble from Saak as they did. In fact, they likely would have become even greater problems, and at any rate powder kegs that could have touched off by now a militarized crisis of literally global proportions -- which would have ended with not me but NATO eating crow, because the West is not anytime soon going to war with Russia, not even to save a NATO member. 

(3) That is the real bottom line, whatever happens: Russia can do as it wants with Georgia. Not that there won't be severe penalties -- there will be. Putin makes those calculations -- and miscalculations -- at his peril. The real bottom line is a tragic one: Saakashvili drove his country headlong into an unnecessary war, and Putin seems set to press forward with an even less necessary conflict -- squandering a golden opportunity to reach final status in the Caucasus without destroying any shred of basic good will, or even begrudging patience, in the West. Daniel and I continue to be of one mind on the whole issue.

Let's Start a War with Russia!

Hate that idea? Quiet, then! Roger Kimball, who I like a lot, keeps the madness rolling in this unfortunate case:

August 8 was the date when Russia began reassembling the former Soviet empire in earnest. When Russian tanks and troops poured into the separatist Georgian province of South Ossetia yesterday, it was not, as Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said, part of a “peacekeeping mission.” It was part of an imperialist mission whose undeclared goal is to reabsorb the whole of Georgia–West-leaning Georgia with its critical oil pipeline supplying energy to an increasingly thirsty Europe–into mother Russia. Indeed, that pipeline is the unacknowledged key to the drama–unacknowledged, anyway, by the belligerents.

Those Russian peacekeepers, indeed, are hardly peacekeepers in the blue-helmet way we're supposed to mean; then again, South Ossetia and Abkhazia are hardly integral parts of a sovereign Georgia in the way we're supposed to mean. South Ossetia and Abkhazia are not just separatist, they are separate. Kimball cannot present a frightening situation in fact, so he must rely on gnosis. How he is sure of Russia's undeclared goals and unacknowledged keys? By assuming precisely what he sets out to prove -- that the Russians are and always have been imperialists intent on conquering their way back to Muscovy's pre-1991 borders. 

I freely admit this is possible. But it is also possible that, however much Georgia is in the right and however kindred their citizens, America will not go to war with Russia to save Georgia from a 'reabsorbtion' that, I bet, is a figment of a number of exercised imaginations. Russia may be very strong relative to Georgia, but it is very weak overall, and knows it. Securing the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia under a passport-sharing/joint-citizenship regime will be more than enough for Moscow, which does not want to be the fur-swaddled brute stepchild beside the tech-bedecked golden kid Beijing for the rest of all time. The West can make Russia's life very difficult if Putin decides like a fool to gobble up Georgia, and this is well and plainly known. But creating many polite-but-firm pains in the ass for Russia, after that might happen, is one thing, and starting the war that Russia's critics seem to be agitating for, before it does, is quite another. 

PS my fellow comrade subversive and filthy Asiatic symp Daniel has lots more.

UPDATE: Georgia has folded like a losing hand. The US government knows the score and takes the stance I've suggested:

U.S. [...] deputy national security adviser, James Jeffrey, said it will be key to see the Russian reaction to the withdrawal of Georgian forces from the South Ossetia breakaway region. [...] The United States would also be "very, very concerned if in fact there is ground action inside of Georgia proper that is outside of these areas of Abkhazia and Ossetia," he said.

Ball in Russia's court. And the Security Council's.

UPDATE: somewhere in these posts I suggested Russia had 24 hrs. as of yesterday evening to call off the dogs without incurring major damage to its international status and position. This morning (8/11) Medvedev expresses Moscow's understanding on that point.

Former Soviet Union: Vanguard of the West's Future

Off to the north, he showed me, was the tentlike roof of Circus Circus, the first of the family-themed hotel-casinos, where he sometimes went as a kid; in the near distance were the Mirage and Treasure Island, home of the warring pirate ships (in dry dock, sadly, over the Christmas holiday); and behind us were the Luxor, Excalibur and the Mandalay Bay. The Strip is swelling outward to the south, toward the airport, he explained, with the resorts growing ever bigger and more gimmicky. “They’re all variations on a theme,” he said, “and I wonder what’s next. I keep waiting for the Fatherland.” -- NYT

An adventure park offers a journey back to the Soviet Union with KGB interrogation methods and "beatings" with a leather belt. The 1984 Soviet Union theme park is located outside the Lithuanian capital Vilnius in an old bunker which served as a secret TV station in case of a nuclear attack. Visitors to the park pay to be "beaten, interrogated and shouted at" by tour leaders dressed as agents of the Russian secret police, the KGB. -- Daily Telegraph [Thru K-Lo]

Vlad the Improver

I trust the man as much as I trust Amy Winehouse. But Andrew is right about Putin and the GOPers spluttering about Petraeus and so on are not.

UPDATE: Julie Ponzi defends the righteous indigation; Mitt's specifically. Beyond question Petraeus has done good work. Without him we'd probably be up to our necks in mess. But Putin's significance has been far, far greater, and that's what Human of the Year is all about. Petraeus will come and go, as most do who do their duty, do it well, and, thus satisfying it, stop. Putin will not go anytime soon, and what he has saved his country from ranks him among the towering figures of Russian history -- with a historical minimum of casualties, one might add. But, yes, I'd much rather have Petraeus watch my kids. (Don't trivialize that, either.)