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| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| Russia: Welcome back to the 19th century |
| 2008-08-12 |
| Excerpts from an opinion piece in Saturday's Wall Street Journal Online. A number of interesting pieces at the site. Go read them all. :-) Wait a minute, isn't this the 21st? Chronologically, it is. But last Friday, Russia -- like the mad scientist Emmett Brown in "Back to the Future" -- thrust us backward by about 150 years in the Caucasus: into the age of imperialism and geopolitics, resource wars and spheres of influence. It was strictly 19th-century when Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin casually announced that "war has started." In the old days, such pronunciamentos were routine; war, to recall Clausewitz, was just the "continuation of politics with the admixture of other means." Say hello to Vladimir Putin and his stand-in Dmitry Medvedev. By attacking Georgia, they have raised the curtain on a post-World War II premiere. They have launched the first real war in "Greater Europe" since 1945. (The 1990s clashes in the Balkans were secessionist/internal wars; the invasion of Prague in 1968 was, if you pardon the expression, an act of "bloc recentralization.") But the Caucasus is the real thing: armies marching, fleets circling, rockets flaring. Many are blaming "hot-headed" President Mikheil Saakashvili for having baited the bear, and he is no angel, for sure. Didn't he go first by ordering his army into South Ossetia? But in 1939, they also blamed the "hot-headed" Poles for refusing to placate Hitler, and so he just had to flatten Warsaw on Sept. 1. They also castigated the Czechs, a "faraway country of which we know little" for being so obstinate in resisting German demands on the Sudetenland. Apologists for Russia can point to lots of mitigating circumstances, starting with the biggest one of Christmas Day 1991, when the hammer-and-sickle flag over the Kremlin went down for the last time, and up went the Russian tricolor. Poof, and a whole empire from the Baltic to Kazakhstan was suddenly gone. Yes, that chilled the Russian soul, and so did Georgia's love affair with the United States. How dare Georgia, the birthplace of Stalin, sidle up to the EU and NATO? So, forget about Mr. Saakashvili's bluster and bumbling; think "revisionism" and "expansionism," terms beloved by diplomatic historians trying to explain the behavior of rock-the-boat states. A revisionist power wants back what it once had; an expansionist power wants more for itself and less for the rest. The R&E Syndrome is a handy way to explain all of Mr. Putin's strategy in the past eight years. Draw an arc from the Baltic to the Caspian and then start counting. Moscow has unleashed a cyberwar against tiny Estonia, formerly a Soviet republic. It has threatened the Czech Republic and Poland with nuclear targeting if they host U.S. antimissile hardware on their soil that could not possibly threaten Russia's retaliatory potential. It has exploited small price disputes (normally resolved by lawyers screaming at each other) to stop gas deliveries and thus show Ukraine, Belarus and former Warsaw Pact members who runs the "Common House of Europe," to recall Mikhail Gorbachev's famous phrase. Mr. Putin has always reserved the harshest treatment for Georgia. Tbilisi's mortal sin was the attempt to get out from under the bear's paw and snuggle up to the West. Ever since, Moscow has tried to subjugate Georgia or to split it up. It was either undermining the government by cutting off trade and gas, or putting the whole country on the butcher's block. Hence Russia's support, including arms and troops, for the secession of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Reports from the fighting suggest that Russia's war aims go way beyond driving Georgian troops from South Ossetia. According to President Saakashvili, the Russians have captured the city of Gori in central Georgia, cutting the country into two. Moscow denies this. George F. Kennan, the diplomat and historian, had it right. To him is attributed a very apropos aphorism: "Russia can have at its borders only vassals or enemies." But the issue runs a lot deeper as of 8/8: What are Russia's borders? Will it be satisfied with Georgia? As Prince Gorchakov, Russian chancellor, put it in 1864, in the midst of the Russian conquest of the Caucasus: "The greatest difficulty is to know when to stop." |
| Posted by:trailing wife |
| #2 You can view Russia as having skipped most of the 20th century due to communism. They are now going through the stages the rest of Europe did about a half century ago. In Moscow, it's 1938. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2008-08-12 23:28 |
| #1 If you ask me (and most people won't), it feels more like Europe 1938 and the "Sudetenland problem." Guess who's playing the part of Chamberlain. |
| Posted by: AlmostAnonymous5839 2008-08-12 16:47 |