Where are the realists? When Russian tanks rolled into Georgia, it ought to have been their moment. Here was Vladimir Putin, a cold-eyed realist if ever there was one, taking advantage of a favorable opportunity to shift the European balance of power in his favor — a 21st century Frederick the Great or Bismarck, launching a small but decisive war on a weaker neighbor while a surprised and dumbfounded world looked on helplessly. Here was a man and a nation pursuing “interest defined as power,” to use the famous phrase of Hans Morgenthau, acting in obedience to what Mr. Morgenthau called the “objective law” of international power politics. Yet where are Mr. Morgenthau’s disciples to remind us that Russia’s latest military action is neither extraordinary nor unexpected nor aberrant but entirely normal and natural, that it is but a harbinger of what is yet to come because the behavior of nations, like human nature, is unchanging?
Today’s “realists,” who we’re told are locked in some titanic struggle with “neoconservatives” on issues ranging from Iraq, Iran and the Middle East to China and North Korea, would be almost unrecognizable to their forebears. Rather than talk about power, they talk about the United Nations, world opinion and international law. They propose vast new international conferences, a la Woodrow Wilson, to solve intractable, decades-old problems. They argue that the United States should negotiate with adversaries not because America is strong but because it is weak. Power is no answer to the vast majority of the challenges we face, they insist, and, indeed, is counterproductive because it undermines the possibility of international consensus.
They are fond of citing Dean Acheson, Reinhold Niebuhr and George Kennan as their intellectual forebears, but those gentlemen would have found most of their prescriptions naive. Mr. Acheson, as Harry Truman’s Secretary of State, had nothing but disdain for the United Nations and for most international efforts to solve world problems. As his biographer, Robert L. Beisner, has shown, he considered such efforts evidence of the naive hopefulness of “people who could not face the truth about human nature” and “preferred to preserve their illusions intact.” He strongly supported the NATO alliance but ultimately put his faith not in international institutions but in “the continued moral, military and economic power of the United States.” He aimed to build a “preponderance of power” and to create “situations of strength” around the world. Until the United States acquired this predominant power, he believed, negotiations and international conferences with adversaries such as the Soviet Union were worthless. He opposed talks with Moscow throughout his entire time in office.
…Leading realists today see the world not as Mr. Morgenthau did, as an anarchic system in which nations consistently pursue “interest defined as power,” but as a world of converging interests, in which economics, not power, is the primary driving force. Thus Russia and China are not interested in expanding their power so much as in enhancing their economic well-being and security. If they use force against their neighbors, or engage in arms buildups, it is not because this is in the nature of great powers. It is because the United States or the West has provoked them. The natural state of the world is harmonious; only aggressive behavior by the United States disturbs the harmony.
Excellent analysis by Robert Kagan — enjoy.
… isn’t what you have probably seen in the big media. Michael Totten filed this report from Tbilisi, Geogia, which begins as follows:
TBILISI, GEORGIA – Virtually everyone believes Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili foolishly provoked a Russian invasion on August 7, 2008, when he sent troops into the breakaway district of South Ossetia. “The warfare began Aug. 7 when Georgia launched a barrage targeting South Ossetia,” the Associated Press reported over the weekend in typical fashion.
Virtually everyone is wrong. Georgia didn’t start it on August 7, nor on any other date. The South Ossetian militia started it on August 6 when its fighters fired on Georgian peacekeepers and Georgian villages with weapons banned by the agreement hammered out between the two sides in 1994. At the same time, the Russian military sent its invasion force bearing down on Georgia from the north side of the Caucasus Mountains on the Russian side of the border through the Roki tunnel and into Georgia. This happened before Saakashvili sent additional troops to South Ossetia and allegedly started the war.
Regional expert, German native, and former European Commission official Patrick Worms was recently hired by the Georgian government as a media advisor, and he explained to me exactly what happened when I met him in downtown Tbilisi. You should always be careful with the version of events told by someone on government payroll even when the government is as friendly and democratic as Georgia’s. I was lucky, though, that another regional expert, author and academic Thomas Goltz, was present during Worms’ briefing to me and signed off on it as completely accurate aside from one tiny quibble.
Definitely read the whole thing. To emphasize the importance of Michael’s report, Michael Yon rang Glenn Reynolds on his satphone from Afghanistan to make sure Glenn saw the report. A commenter on Michael’s blog wrote this:
A clear 3 step process on the part of Russia:
1. Move troops into place.
2. Have Ossetian puppets provoke a response.
3. Invade.
which is a pretty good summary of what actually happened. And do leave a contribution to support Michael Totten’s work.
Foreign editor Greg Sheridan wrote an insightful piece on 16 August, which begins
YOU have to hand it to the Bush administration. It is very ballsy. Even in its dying days, with its military stretched in the Middle East, it managed, after an initial few days of dithering and hoping the Russians would come to their senses, to find a remarkably effective response to the Russian invasion of Georgia. The US sent its military to deliver humanitarian aid to Georgia. It did this after the Russians had committed to a ceasefire. The Georgians immediately and deliberately misinterpreted the move as meaning that the US would be guarding Georgia’s seaports and airports.
No, that’s not right, US spokesmen said. We’re not doing that. But we do expect that the Russians will not interfere with humanitarian aid. And we will be protecting our assets.
This was a brave and dangerous move by the Americans. But it was calibrated. It was tough. And it might just do enough to keep the pro-Western Government of Georgia’s President, Mikheil Saakashvili, in power.
The American move raises the stakes for everyone. It has its share of risks. But it puts the onus back on the Russians. Surely even Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin at his most reckless would hesitate before killing US troops. It’s one thing to attack Georgian soldiers and to murder Georgian civilians. It’s another thing altogether to do that to the US Army or Marine Corps.
RTWT.
Russian revisionist history is corrected by Brookings Institution president Strobe Talbott — excerpt:
Russia has been justifying its rampage through Georgia as a “peacekeeping” operation to end the Tbilisi government’s “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” of South Ossetia. That terminology deliberately echoes U.S. and NATO language during their 1999 bombing campaign against Serbia, which resulted in the independence of Kosovo. Essentially, it’s payback time for a grievance that Russia has borne against the West for nine years. The Russians are relying on the conceit that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili is today’s equivalent of Slobodan Milosevic, and that the South Ossetians are (or were until their rescue by the latter-day Red Army last week) being victimized by Tbilisi the way the Kosovar Albanians suffered under Belgrade.
This analogy turns reality, and history, upside down. Only after exhausting every attempt at diplomacy did NATO go to war over Kosovo. It did so because the formerly “autonomous” province of Serbia was under the heel of Belgrade and the Milosevic regime was running amok there, killing ethnic Albanians and throwing them out of their homes. By contrast, South Ossetia—even though it is on Georgian territory—has long been a Russian protectorate, beyond the reach of Saakashvili’s government.
An accurate comparison between the Balkan disasters of the 1990s and the one now playing out in the Caucasus underscores what is most ominous about current Russian policy…
Then comes the truly chilling part:
A question that looms large in the wake of the past week is whether Russian policy has changed with regard to the permanence of borders. That seemed to be what Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was hinting yesterday when he said, “You can forget about any discussion of Georgia’s territorial integrity.” He ridiculed “the logic of forcing South Ossetia and Abkhazia to return to being part of the Georgian state.”
Lavrov is a careful and experienced diplomat, not given to shooting off his mouth. That makes his comments all the more unsettling. If he has given the world a glimpse of the Russian endgame, it’s dangerous in its own right and in the precedent it would set.
…Among Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s important tasks in the days ahead is to get clarity on whether a Lavrov doctrine has replaced the Yeltsin one of 16 years ago. If so, big trouble looms—including for Russia….
RTWT.
I just listened to an interesting Popular Mechanics podcast on this topic — which included an interview with Jart Armin, whose RBNexploit.com specializes in fighting Russian cybercrime. Fragments of the interview are also in print. If Armin is correct, the Russian government is outsourcing cyber attacks to the Russian cyber-mafia — including the attack on Estonia.
Russian troops invaded Georgia’s South Ossetia on Friday, but Russian attacks on Georgia’s major Web sites and overall Internet access began a day earlier. That’s according to Jart Armin, editor of RBNexploit—the community blog that has been leading the reporting and analysis efforts on digital security in Eastern Europe this week, even as Russian officials ordered a stand-down today.
Apparently a DDOS attack [Distributed Denial of Service]. The attack could also be mounted by rival cybergangs with Russian IP addresses:
MOSCOW, May 18 — The computer attacks, apparently originating in Russia, first hit the Web site of Estonia’s prime minister on April 27, the day the country was mired in protest and violence. The president’s site went down, too, and soon so did those of several departments in a wired country that touts its paperless government and likes to call itself E-stonia.
Then the attacks, coming in waves, began to strike newspapers and television stations, then schools and finally banks, raising fears that what was initially a nuisance could have economic consequences.
The attacks have peaked and tapered off since then, but they have not ended, prompting officials there to declare Estonia the first country to fall victim to a virtual war.
“If you have a missile attack against, let’s say, an airport, it is an act of war,” a spokesman for the Estonian Defense Ministry, Madis Mikko, said Friday in a telephone interview. “If the same result is caused by computers, then how else do you describe that kind of attack?”
Officials in Estonia have accused Russia of orchestrating the attacks, officially or unofficially. They raised the issue at a meeting of NATO on Monday, with Defense Minister Jaak Aaviksoo saying that the alliance, which Estonia joined in 2004, needed to urgently debate the question — once seemingly a distant threat — of whether mass computer attacks posed a threat to national security.
“Events of this nature make a lot of people sit up,” a NATO spokesman, Robert Pszczel, said in a telephone interview. “Today Estonia, tomorrow it could be somebody else.”
…
“We can’t say we have seen the biggest attack yet,” he said, “because each wave is bigger than the one before.”
For more background see this earlier post “Do you know what your computer is doing right now?.
Technorati Tags: Cyberterror
In the meantime, the Kremlin preserves all its options, a reminder, as Glen Howard of the Jamestown Foundation observes, of an old KGB maxim: First create a problem, and then offer to be part of the solution. On that score, at least, Mr. Putin is nothing if not true to type.
Given Russia’s history of highly “flexible” pronouncements on Iran, How can we know?
Mr. Kasparov gives a wry smile. “I think the best thing [the U.S.] could have done was to get Saddam [Hussein] 15 years earlier,” he says. “By going after Saddam in 1991, I think we could have saved Yugoslavia from a civil war and could have sent a message, a very powerful message, to many dictators. . . . In 1991, the United States was much stronger and everybody else was much weaker.”
The decision to let Saddam stay in power happened under the watch of President George H.W. Bush, whom Mr. Kasparov isn’t shy about criticizing. But he’s far more scathing about President Bill Clinton. “During the Clinton years, the United States did virtually nothing in the international arena. . . . There were a lot of activities, but when you look at the core events, I think the influence was irrelevant. . . . Leadership. There was no leadership. . . . There was a big window of opportunity to show leadership, in 1992-93. In those years the whole world was in an ambiguous state after the Cold War. It was a new world, and it required leadership. The way Winston Churchill and [Harry] Truman showed it in World War II. . . . Missing this chance and playing sporadically–you know, boom, boom, you play one move here, one move there. The United States was asleep.”
Garry Kasparov has formed an opposition called “The Other Russia“. I couldn’t guess what their chances are, but we can hope:
As the longtime world chess champion, Garry Kasparov was a famously aggressive player. His latest game is politics, and his style is equally aggressive. “Our goal is to dismantle the regime,” he says, speaking of the political coalition he leads to bring down Vladimir Putin…
The Russian Constitution forbids Mr. Putin from running for a third term–though that doesn’t quell widespread speculation that the president will ignore the rule of law and do so anyway. He “has the administrative resources” to do so, Mr. Kasparov agrees, but it would be at the price of his legitimacy–both in the West and at home. “I don’t think Putin wants to take such a chance.”
Mr. Kasparov believes Mr. Putin’s “mentality is just to run away–with all the Russian billionaires. This is the richest ruling elite in the world. They are way ahead of the Saudi princes. They are mega-rich. When you’re so rich, you have to make sure that your funds are safe.” But “if Putin goes, then who will be in charge? That’s a big problem. Then it’s instability. An authoritarian regime cannot have a successor while the big name [Mr. Putin] is still alive, much less well, young and strong.”
As the new year unfolds, Mr. Kasparov predicts “a political crisis” in Mr. Putin’s government, along with “less stability, more uncertainty.” That’s the opening for the Other Russia. “We should keep our group together, close to the wall, to get into the hall when it’s broken. But not too close to be buried under the debris.” And then? “If the Other Russia wins, who cares? The victory of the Other Russia candidate destroys the legacy of any institution built under Putin. You have to start from scratch. You have to call new [parliamentary] elections. You have to introduce new laws. You have to undergo judicial reform. You have to destroy censorship.” In short, you have to start over, back to where Russia was before Mr. Putin took over, building democracy, block by block.
From the WSJ Energy Blog, good roundup on activities of the energy-czar:
Latest Comments
RSS