I expected the Chinese Olympics to lead the news all week: China’s grand coming-out party is a celebration of her arrival as a world power ready to join the world, bringing with it somewhat worried political analysis here in the US, where growing Chinese soft power comes at the expense of US hegemony. But the Olympics had to share the front page with less happy events on the Russo-Georgian border. The move is treated as an aggressive land grab on Russia’s part, and so it is, complete with scorched-earth tactics used to drive out innocent civilians belonging to demographics deemed insufficiently sympathetic to Russian control, but to tell it that way is misleading. Unless you pay attention, you’re likely to miss reports that Georgia grabbed first, albeit after ongoing attempts on Russia’s part to provoke such a move.
President Saakashvili was already considered something of a loose cannon—an assessment which has proven all too true. Because some Georgian nationals live in Ossetia, he reasoned that the entirety of Ossetia should be Georgian territory. (The argument mirrors Hitler’s belief that, because some residents of Czechoslovakia and Poland were Germans, that all of Czechoslovakia and Poland should be German, as well. Any excuse will do for a bully.) Buoyed by a false sense of security in NATO and US support, he ordered Georgian forces to seize the province, of which a majority would prefer to remain with Russia. By some accounts, the plan was to seal off the vital Roksky Tunnel, delaying Russian reprisal; by other accounts, Saakashvili needed the tunnel open as a conduit for ejecting non-Georgian residents. Either the attempt was never intended, never made, or simply failed, and Russian troops poured through with a vengeance, handily retaking Ossetia itself and rushing on with crushing momentum into Georgian territory proper.
The counterattack is ominous, foreboding a return to Russia’s age-old policy of slicing territory from any neighbor to leave itself vulnerable. It’s difficult to guess just what Russia will claim as spoils of this victory, but it will surely keep some significant prizes. All of Georgia is not entirely out of the question. But Russia may well be satisfied with less. Even without an acre of land annexed, the victory alone has earned Putin several significant gains:
1. Popularity at home, where Russian chest-thumping promises of taking a rightful place as a world power play very well indeed.
2. Control of the oil. Even if Russia eventually backs out, it will have had a good, long period to pipe the oil as it wishes. A pinpoint air force bombing on either side of the main Georgian pipeline served to remind everyone just who controls the flow of oil passing through central Asia—whether or not it passes through Russian-owned pipes.
3. A pointed warning to the rest of Russia’s central Asian neighbors of just what happens to little countries who anger the great bear. Russo-Asian relations are unlikely to be any warmer in the foreseeable future, but they will nevertheless be more…compliant for some time to come. Russia has a long and successful history of winning concessions through threat, and very little successful history of winning much of anything through kindness.
4. An even more pointed warning of what happens to former Soviet possessions and satellites who rely on NATO to protect them. Russia wishes to keep as much territory as possible within its orbit, and therefore as far from the European sphere as possible. Saakashvili has played beautifully into this ploy when his own military lunge went pear-shaped. Where are the Americans? Where is NATO? As though he had any claim on support from either. He doesn’t, but his pretense of being abandoned, of having promises of support revoked, makes good press for Russia to whisper to Belarus and the Ukraine.
5. Finally, a demonstration of European and American helplessness in the Russian geopolitical sphere. Both disapprove of Russia’s aggression, of course, but are they going to do anything?
Europe will offer nothing but some harrumphs of protest, it seems. In the short term, it’s powerless to do anything else, and the situation will settle into some unpleasant equilibrium before the long term arrives. Europe hasn’t the military strength or organization to take down Russia way off in its Caucasian bowels. And, of course, there’s the pipelines. Faced with the last decade’s threat of an energy crunch—a threat now blossoming into reality—Europe declined to search for alternatives to oil, and cheerfully locked itself into dependence on oil flowing from and through Russia. Fears of just such a result as this were assuaged by promises that economic interdependence would teach Russia to behave like a civilized country. So much for that happy myth. Russia may need European currency more than Europe needs Russian oil, but Russia is also more willing to see mutual benefit ruined before blinking.
The US position is even more uncomfortable, if only because it’s supposed to be the world’s only superpower, by definition a nation capable of taking on the entire world in pursuing its interests. Although Bush and Cheney seem to be looking forward to a chance to widen South Asian conflicts to a continent-wide state of war, the US is essentially powerless, as well.
Ironically, we are powerless to do anything because of our own little territorial adventure a few hundred miles away. The war in Iraq was sold to the American public, and presented to the world, as a pre-emptive seizure of nuclear weapons (which never materialized), punishment of slam-dunk links to al Qaeda (which also never materialized), and material relief for a people suffering under a brutal despot (which relief also never materialized), to be secured with a quick, cheap, and essentially bloodless victory (which, needless to say, never materialized). Skeptics said it was all about oil. We may never know just what motivated Bush and his walnut-sized brain to invade—outdoing Daddy, simple-minded desire for military “glory,” a true inability to distinguish Muslims from terrorists—but the skeptics were essentially right: Bush’s advisors, who created the Iraqi adventure, were indeed after the oil. Neoconservative doctrine held that the US should begin a program of active imperialism, taking advantage of excuses to seize vital resources. A few suggestive documents and books by very influential neocon thinkers indicate Iraq was to be just the first of many such adventures before its failure. Even in the face of its failure, the Bush administration generally, and Dick Cheney in particular, seek to widen the conflict to Iran and beyond. When Iraq fell, other oil-rich nations were expected to be so cowed as to treat the US more favorably in future dealings. And for those who didn’t, an excuse would be found to teach the region another lesson. The very pattern of Russian expansionism.
The Iraqi adventure has failed utterly: neighboring regions are not so much apprehensive of US power as galvanized against it. We are weaker not only in a raw material sense, broke and running out of recruits eager to play Bush’s tin soldier, but in terms of how others view the strength of the American military. We can’t do much to influence the Russo-Georgian conflict because we already have too much on our plate; we’re already tied down in our own imperial expansionism. More shamefully, we can’t even shake our heads in disapproval from the moral high ground as Europe does…because we’re already tied down in our own imperial expansionism.
Bush, blind to the beam in his own eye, sees no irony in chastising Russia. Unable to offer any material resistance, he has resorted to lectures on how intimidation has no place in 21st-century politics, how international sovereignty must be recognized even in the face of military strikes, how Russia will lose international standing if it doesn’t shape up. If we wish to be charitable, we could agree that Bush has learned these lessons from hard experience, but I think it’s more accurate to say he simply doesn’t recognize his own bullying, his own violations of national sovereignty, the justness of his own loss of international standing and his country’s with it. The bullying techniques are exactly the same. Only the competence with which it was executed varies, and, sadly, Russia stands to gain international standing where we have lost it. Everyone knows Russia to be a bully, and it gains in stature as it proves able to execute its threats. Once, everyone knew the US to fight for democracy and self-determination, and we lose stature as we prove willing to betray them for oil and war profiteering.
Under the neocon agendum of substituting hard power for soft, we have lost a staggering amount of both. We have most visibly lost them under Bush the lesser, but we have lost them, too, under Reagan before him, and under Clinton and Bush the elder, as well. The Georgian scuffle proves just how much we’ve lost of both at a time when the other half of the front-page news is filled with the Chinese Olympics, and rosy depictions of how much China has gained by substituting soft power for hard.