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| A Big Chill
U.S. USES RUSSIAN PARANOIA ABOUT NATO TO STRENGTHEN NATO IDENTITY |
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August 19–24, 2008 |
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August 19 Though the Bush league is willing to do whatever it takes to keep a hawkish Republican in the White House (“Summertime in Georgia”), Russia really does provide the Bush league election-year opportunity. Secretary of State Rice, on her way to an emergency NATO meeting today, told the Associated Press “that by flexing its military muscle in Georgia as well as elsewhere, including the resumption of Cold War-era strategic bomber patrols off the coast of Alaska, Russia was engaged in high-stakes brinksmanship that could backfire. This ‘is a very dangerous game and perhaps one the Russians want to reconsider,’ Rice said of the flights that began again with frequency about six months ago. ‘This is not something that is just cost-free. Nobody needs Russian strategic aviation along America’s coast...We are not going to allow Russia to draw a new line at those states that are not yet integrated into the trans-Atlantic structures,’ she said, referring to Georgia and Ukraine, which have not yet joined NATO or the European Union but would like to” (AP, 8/18). “Two senior U.S. officials said on condition of anonymity Monday that intelligence...showed the Russian military had moved several SS-21 missile launchers into South Ossetia, in range of Tbilisi. The move Friday allows Russia to pull out of Georgia proper as promised, but punish Tbilisi at any moment with the push of a button. Experts said it is the same weapon system used in October 1999, when missiles slammed into the Chechen capital of Grozny and killed at least 140 people. All of the missiles that were fired into Georgia during the conflict were fired from Russian territory, one of the administration officials said” (ibid). “In recent days, several Bear-H bombers have carried out training missions over the Black Sea, according to American officials familiar with intelligence reports....In general, the actions are seen as a matter of muscle flexing, or ‘force projection,’ in Pentagon parlance...Russian officials may also be calculating that their nation’s military presence may make some NATO members more skeptical toward accepting Georgia into the alliance....[S]ome allied officials fear they may be dragged into a war in the Caucasus if Georgia is admitted” (NY Times, 8/18). “We’re determined to deny them their strategic objective,” Rice told reporters on her plane to Brussels (AP). “New Europe, backed by Britain and Scandinavia, is taking a harder line toward Russia, while old Europe ‘will only be reinforced in its view that Georgia and Ukraine are not ready for NATO,’” says Clifford Kupchan, a director of the Eurasia Group, a consulting firm in Washington (NY Times, 8/18). But “The European foreign ministers sense this is too big for them,” says Stefan Kornelius, foreign editor for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, “and they will in the end align themselves with the United States, while trying to affect policy” (ibid). In other words, the more bellicose that Russia gets, the more that the European order echoes a Cold War dynamic, which derives from Europe’s historical reliance on U.S. military defense that afforded old Europe a higher quality of life than in the U.S., but leaves them unable to advance their own interests. Meanwhile, NATO has never been aggressive, rather always defensive, while Russia has remained addicted to its confusion of nationhood with empire, which the fact of NATO threatens. “Russia has never been a nation state, but always an empire, with Muskovy gradually expanding its borders since the 15th century,” says Jacques Rupnik, an Eastern Europe expert at the Paris Institute of Political Studies. “Russia built a state as it built its empire; the two were inseparable” (ibid). But, after the dissolution of the USSR, “NATO never developed military plans to defend central and eastern Europeans,” says Ronald D. Asmus, director of the Brussels Transatlantic Center of the German Marshall Fund, who was a senior State Department official in the Clinton administration. “We said, ‘Russia’s not an enemy and not a threat,’ and we never backed up the new members with exercises and infrastructure” (ibid).
August 21 I may not largely understand the historical roots of the conflict between Ossetians and Georgia. But it seems clear to me that historically-valid grievances among South Ossetians don’t warrant Russian invasion of Georgia without the kind of UN-oriented process that caused the independence of Kosovo. Georgia is not doing ethnic cleansing (like Serbia), but Ossetians evidently are. The internationally-recognized borders of Georgia of the early ‘90s were compromises that didn’t register any legacy of the separatist regions’ belonging within the historical borders of Georgia, apart from USSR stipulation. Indeed, the separatist regions have the right to declare their allegiance to Russia—but not by thuggery. Though Saakashvili made integration of separatist regions part of his electoral mandate, he hasn’t sought to do integration via violence (which is absurd anyway, like saying “Trust me, or I’ll hit you”). But Russia has promoted a contrary fait accompli—asserting for the separatists a separation of their regions within Georgia’s legal boundaries, after years of Russian protection of separatists acting violently against Georgian villages and Georgian territory outside South Ossetia (militants lobbing rockets into non-Ossetian Georgia). It’s my understanding that, earlier, it was Ossetian thuggery against Georgians in Ossetia (who have long lived there) that compelled Georgia to intervene. Russia has opportunistically invaded the territory and is, evidently, digging in, within the undisputed territory of Georgia. August 22 Russia knows well that no nation can become a NATO member while having disputed borders or territories. So, Russia is ensuring that Georgia is internationally recognized to have irresolvably disputed territory. Next: Ukraine, via the Crimea. Russia will halt the extension of NATO by playing against NATO’s own rules. Russia also knows that military response from NATO is not feasible, as long as the world teeters on recession (to which Russia is presently immune, given its petroprofits). Also, of course, NATO is tied up in Afghanistan (Russia's sweet revenge?), and the U.S. is in the middle of its election. (Another hawkish U.S. president would suit the Dialectical Federation just fine. Maybe my lame joke earlier, about Cheney and Putin conspiring to make this scene, wasn’t off-the-mark after all.) |
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