Seumas Milne
If there were any doubt that the rules of the international game have changed for good, the events of the past few days should have dispelled it. On Monday, President Bush demanded that Russia's leaders reject their parliament's appeal to recognise the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Within 24 hours, Bush had his response: President Medvedev announced Russia's recognition of the two contested Georgian enclaves.
The Russian message was unmistakable: the outcome of the war triggered by Georgia's attack on South Ossetia on August 7 is non-negotiable - and nothing the titans of the US empire do or say is going to reverse it. After that, the British foreign secretary David Miliband's posturing yesterday in Kiev about building a "coalition against Russian aggression" merely looked foolish.
That this month's events in the Caucasus signal an international turning point is no longer in question. The comparisons with August 1914 are of course ridiculous, and even the speculation about a new cold war overdone. For all the manoeuvres in the Black Sea and nuclear-backed threats, the standoff between Russia and the US is not remotely comparable to the events that led up to the first world war. Nor do the current tensions have anything like the ideological and global dimensions that shaped the 40-year confrontation between the west and the Soviet Union.
But what is clear is that America's unipolar moment has passed - and the new world order heralded by Bush's father in the dying days of the Soviet Union in 1991 is no more. The days when one power was able to bestride the globe like a colossus, enforcing its will in every continent, challenged only by popular movements for national independence and isolated "rogue states", are now over. For nearly two decades, while Russia sunk into "catastroika" and China built an economic powerhouse, the US has exercised unprecedented and unaccountable global power, arrogating to itself and its allies the right to invade and occupy other countries, untroubled by international law or institutions, sucking ever more states into the orbit of its voracious military alliance.
Now, pumped up with petrodollars, Russia has called a halt to this relentless expansion and demonstrated that the US writ doesn't run in every backyard. And although it has been a regional, not a global, challenge, this object lesson in the new limits of American power has already been absorbed from central Asia to Latin America.
In Georgia itself, both Medvedev's recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia's independence and Russia's destruction of Georgian military capacity have been designed to leave no room for doubt that the issue of the enclaves' reintegration has been closed. There are certainly dangers for Russia's own territorial integrity in legitimising breakaway states. But the move will have little practical impact and is presumably partly intended to create bargaining chips for future negotiations.
Miliband's attempt in Ukraine, meanwhile, to deny the obvious parallels with the US-orchestrated recognition of Kosovo's independence earlier this year rang particularly hollow, as did his denunciation of invasions of sovereign states and double standards. Both the west and Russia have abused the charge of "genocide" to try and give themselves legal cover, but Russia is surely on stronger ground over South Ossetia - where its own internationally recognised peacekeepers were directly attacked by the Georgian army - than Nato was in Kosovo in 1999, where most ethnic cleansing took place after the US-led assault began.
There has been much talk among western politicians in recent days about Russia isolating itself from the international community. But unless that simply means North America and Europe, nothing could be further from the truth. While the US and British media have swung into full cold-war mode over the Georgia crisis, the rest of the world has seen it in a very different light. As Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore's former UN ambassador, observed in the Financial Times a few days ago, "most of the world is bemused by western moralising on Georgia". While the western view is that the world "should support the underdog, Georgia, against Russia ... most support Russia against the bullying west. The gap between the western narrative and the rest of the world could not be clearer."
Why that should be so isn't hard to understand. It's not only that the US and its camp followers have trampled on international law and the UN to bring death and destruction to the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the early 1990s, the Pentagon warned that to ensure no global rival emerged, the US would need to "account for the interests of advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership". But when it came to Russia, all that was forgotten in a fog of imperial hubris that has left the US overstretched and unable to prevent the return of a multipolar world.
Of course, that new multipolarity can easily be overstated. Russia is a regional power and there is no imminent prospect of a serious global challenger to the US, which will remain overwhelmingly the most powerful state in the world for years to come. It can also exacerbate the risk of conflict. But only the most solipsistic western mindset can fail to grasp the necessity of a counterbalance in international relations that can restrict the freedom of any one power to impose its will on other countries unilaterally.
One western response, championed by the Times this week, is to damn this growing challenge to US domination on the grounds that it is led by autocratic states in the shape of Russia and China. In reality, western alarm clearly has very little to do with democracy. When Russia collapsed into the US orbit under Boris Yeltsin, his bombardment of the Russian parliament and shamelessly rigged elections were treated with the greatest western understanding.
The real gripe is not with these states' lack of accountability - Russian public opinion is in any case overwhelmingly supportive of its government's actions in Georgia - but their strategic challenge and economic rivalry. For the rest of us, a new assertiveness by Russia and other rising powers doesn't just offer some restraint on the unbridled exercise of global imperial power, it should also increase the pressure for a revival of a rules-based system of international relations. In the circumstances, that might come to seem quite appealing to whoever is elected US president.
Source: the Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/28/russia.usforeignpolicy
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Saturday, August 16, 2008
Georgia is important. But what it tells us about global politics is far more so
Paul Kennedy
In the anarchic world we politely term international relations, there was little surprising or unusual about the Russian aggressions into South Ossetia and Abkhazia. A great power was in a fierce quarrel with a small neighbour about that most commonplace cause of war - who should be boss when mixed ethnic groups claim the same lands and straddle international borders. Eventually the larger nation savagely spanked the smaller one, chiefly to impose its own solution on the problem but partly also to remind onlookers of that age-old truth: "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must". Big boys still rule.
Yet if there are no surprises, there certainly are many intriguing implications. As diplomatic historians well know, a relatively small incident in foreign affairs can have an importance well beyond the region in which the clash takes place - because of the responses of the larger powers, because it reveals the strengths and weaknesses of the available international machinery, and because it reminds us of the political realities and priorities of the age. Yet crises that seemed serious at the time - say, the Anglo-French confrontation over Fashoda in 1898 - have faded into the dustiest textbooks. A somewhat later crisis, such as Munich in 1938, is continually thrown up as a "lesson" for our present age.
More often than not, a sudden confrontation can catch a great power in a state of some confusion. It would be fascinating, for instance, to know how the Chinese politburo is regarding the events in Ossetia. At present, clearly, its chief concern is the Olympics, and there must surely be irritation with both Georgia and Russia for pushing their quarrel into open shooting now. There must also be concern about revived Russian assertiveness and nationalism - although there is no fear in Beijing, for the Chinese know the canny Putin wouldn't push things against them: China is strong, and doesn't mind taking losses, so don't mess with it. More upsetting, Russia has breached that clause of the UN charter China holds most important of all: no interference in the internal affairs of a member nation.
On the other hand, the Han Chinese cannot but like the idea of dissident ethnic minorities along a troublesome border being firmly spanked. Georgia's fate is not a matter of direct concern to Beijing. And Putin's roughing of Mikheil Saakashvili's government is a blow to American prestige and influence in Asia, always a congenial thought to China. So, while never, ever trusting the Russians, China can see that the Ossetian mess is nothing to get upset about.
This is certainly not the feeling in Nato and the EU, or in the major capitals of Europe. Here, above all in France and Germany (Gordon Brown seems beset by his own regional difficulties, in Scotland), there is concern that Russian military actions and political toughness portend a fading away of the post-1991 "new European order" - that it is a sort of latter-day Rhineland crisis of 1936, heralding the end of Versailles treaty Europe. Friendship with Russia cannot wear the bullying and blackmail of western companies like BP, the attempted intimidation of Russian dissidents in the west, the re-entry of the KGB into foreign countries - in sum, the plain fact that Russia is not "normal". It is not Poland, it is not Hungary; it never knew the Enlightenment.
And it is scary in other ways. First, Russia is terrifying to all those east European states that sought eagerly to flee the bear's grasp at the first opportunity following 1989 and 1991: to states, therefore, to whom Europe extended not only the economic and cultural ties of the EU but the security ties of Nato, with all its frightening implications. Right now, Georgia is not a Nato member, despite the Bush administration's urgings. This must be a cause for massive, nervous relief in Brussels and Washington. But what if a border dispute arises between Estonia (now in Nato) and Russia? Are the Portuguese and Danish armies prepared to march east? Are the Germans? Secondly, how will western and central Europe handle its heavy dependence on Russian natural gas, and its awful capacity for being blackmailed by Moscow? Things have come a long way since the wall crashed down in November 1989.
As for the US, the possible implications of the last week are many and serious. Consider the challenge facing Washington: how on earth to make a coherent policy in response to a distant, fast-exploding ethno-linguistic conflict, contested borders, a risk-prone Georgian ally, an increasingly assertive Russia with a new energy trump card, a confused EU and a paralysed security council? All at a time when other areas of the world have sucked in US military resources, as if its own politicians were not already preoccupied enough by the nonsenses of presidential campaigning. We don't have the big stick. Moscow does, at least in this area of the world. You can only push western influence so far eastwards into Eurasia. Napoleon learned that, Hitler learned that: George Bush's time has come.
This brings us to the larger geopolitical meaning of the Georgian scrap - namely, the measure of US power in today's fast-changing world. It could be better. It has been brought lower during the past eight years by inconsiderate and sometimes arrogant diplomacy, by an obsession with "the war on terror" and reckless fiscal policies. The post-1991 decade of the US's position as unchallenged number one - in Charles Krauthammer's memorable phrase, "the unipolar moment" - is over. To later historians, the pace of this shift will seem astounding. In the early 1990s, the elder George Bush, James Baker and other foreign policy veterans were wondering how to prevent Russia collapsing. Now the concern is about excessive Russian power.
To other scholars, the Caucasian struggles may appear as a storm in a teacup. The real challenge to the US in the future - and perhaps to the west more generally - is the steady rise of Asia and, in particular, China. Putin's muscle-flexing against pesky small neighbours is a mischievous distraction.
At the end of the day (but when is that?), it is probably Putin's hard-knuckled Russia that will be the loser. He may look tough and confident now, but his deck of cards is not so strong for the future. His strength rests on two supports: energy supplies and Russian nationalism. Those oil and natural-gas resources may evaporate sooner than he thinks. And Russian nationalism provokes enormous fear, enmity and resistance. Around the vast, open frontiers of the present Russian republic, and among the 100 ethnic minorities within the borders, no one loves the Russians. That has to be a geopolitical drag.
So the Ossetian scrap is important, though it should not be exaggerated out of proportion. But it tells us a lot about our present, delicate, international system of states. We have interesting times ahead.
· Paul Kennedy is Dilworth professor of history and director of international security studies at Yale University. He is the author/editor of 19 books, including The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
the Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/16/russia.georgia/print
In the anarchic world we politely term international relations, there was little surprising or unusual about the Russian aggressions into South Ossetia and Abkhazia. A great power was in a fierce quarrel with a small neighbour about that most commonplace cause of war - who should be boss when mixed ethnic groups claim the same lands and straddle international borders. Eventually the larger nation savagely spanked the smaller one, chiefly to impose its own solution on the problem but partly also to remind onlookers of that age-old truth: "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must". Big boys still rule.
Yet if there are no surprises, there certainly are many intriguing implications. As diplomatic historians well know, a relatively small incident in foreign affairs can have an importance well beyond the region in which the clash takes place - because of the responses of the larger powers, because it reveals the strengths and weaknesses of the available international machinery, and because it reminds us of the political realities and priorities of the age. Yet crises that seemed serious at the time - say, the Anglo-French confrontation over Fashoda in 1898 - have faded into the dustiest textbooks. A somewhat later crisis, such as Munich in 1938, is continually thrown up as a "lesson" for our present age.
More often than not, a sudden confrontation can catch a great power in a state of some confusion. It would be fascinating, for instance, to know how the Chinese politburo is regarding the events in Ossetia. At present, clearly, its chief concern is the Olympics, and there must surely be irritation with both Georgia and Russia for pushing their quarrel into open shooting now. There must also be concern about revived Russian assertiveness and nationalism - although there is no fear in Beijing, for the Chinese know the canny Putin wouldn't push things against them: China is strong, and doesn't mind taking losses, so don't mess with it. More upsetting, Russia has breached that clause of the UN charter China holds most important of all: no interference in the internal affairs of a member nation.
On the other hand, the Han Chinese cannot but like the idea of dissident ethnic minorities along a troublesome border being firmly spanked. Georgia's fate is not a matter of direct concern to Beijing. And Putin's roughing of Mikheil Saakashvili's government is a blow to American prestige and influence in Asia, always a congenial thought to China. So, while never, ever trusting the Russians, China can see that the Ossetian mess is nothing to get upset about.
This is certainly not the feeling in Nato and the EU, or in the major capitals of Europe. Here, above all in France and Germany (Gordon Brown seems beset by his own regional difficulties, in Scotland), there is concern that Russian military actions and political toughness portend a fading away of the post-1991 "new European order" - that it is a sort of latter-day Rhineland crisis of 1936, heralding the end of Versailles treaty Europe. Friendship with Russia cannot wear the bullying and blackmail of western companies like BP, the attempted intimidation of Russian dissidents in the west, the re-entry of the KGB into foreign countries - in sum, the plain fact that Russia is not "normal". It is not Poland, it is not Hungary; it never knew the Enlightenment.
And it is scary in other ways. First, Russia is terrifying to all those east European states that sought eagerly to flee the bear's grasp at the first opportunity following 1989 and 1991: to states, therefore, to whom Europe extended not only the economic and cultural ties of the EU but the security ties of Nato, with all its frightening implications. Right now, Georgia is not a Nato member, despite the Bush administration's urgings. This must be a cause for massive, nervous relief in Brussels and Washington. But what if a border dispute arises between Estonia (now in Nato) and Russia? Are the Portuguese and Danish armies prepared to march east? Are the Germans? Secondly, how will western and central Europe handle its heavy dependence on Russian natural gas, and its awful capacity for being blackmailed by Moscow? Things have come a long way since the wall crashed down in November 1989.
As for the US, the possible implications of the last week are many and serious. Consider the challenge facing Washington: how on earth to make a coherent policy in response to a distant, fast-exploding ethno-linguistic conflict, contested borders, a risk-prone Georgian ally, an increasingly assertive Russia with a new energy trump card, a confused EU and a paralysed security council? All at a time when other areas of the world have sucked in US military resources, as if its own politicians were not already preoccupied enough by the nonsenses of presidential campaigning. We don't have the big stick. Moscow does, at least in this area of the world. You can only push western influence so far eastwards into Eurasia. Napoleon learned that, Hitler learned that: George Bush's time has come.
This brings us to the larger geopolitical meaning of the Georgian scrap - namely, the measure of US power in today's fast-changing world. It could be better. It has been brought lower during the past eight years by inconsiderate and sometimes arrogant diplomacy, by an obsession with "the war on terror" and reckless fiscal policies. The post-1991 decade of the US's position as unchallenged number one - in Charles Krauthammer's memorable phrase, "the unipolar moment" - is over. To later historians, the pace of this shift will seem astounding. In the early 1990s, the elder George Bush, James Baker and other foreign policy veterans were wondering how to prevent Russia collapsing. Now the concern is about excessive Russian power.
To other scholars, the Caucasian struggles may appear as a storm in a teacup. The real challenge to the US in the future - and perhaps to the west more generally - is the steady rise of Asia and, in particular, China. Putin's muscle-flexing against pesky small neighbours is a mischievous distraction.
At the end of the day (but when is that?), it is probably Putin's hard-knuckled Russia that will be the loser. He may look tough and confident now, but his deck of cards is not so strong for the future. His strength rests on two supports: energy supplies and Russian nationalism. Those oil and natural-gas resources may evaporate sooner than he thinks. And Russian nationalism provokes enormous fear, enmity and resistance. Around the vast, open frontiers of the present Russian republic, and among the 100 ethnic minorities within the borders, no one loves the Russians. That has to be a geopolitical drag.
So the Ossetian scrap is important, though it should not be exaggerated out of proportion. But it tells us a lot about our present, delicate, international system of states. We have interesting times ahead.
· Paul Kennedy is Dilworth professor of history and director of international security studies at Yale University. He is the author/editor of 19 books, including The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
the Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/16/russia.georgia/print
Friday, August 15, 2008
Six days that broke one country - and reshaped the world order
Ian Traynor
Pity Georgia's bedraggled first infantry brigade. And its second. And its hapless navy.
For the past few evenings in the foothills of the Southern Caucasus on the outskirts of Joseph Stalin's hometown of Gori, reconnaissance units of Russia's 58th army have been raking through the spoils of war at what was the Georgian army's pride and joy, a shiny new military base inaugurated only last January for the first infantry, the army engineers, and an artillery brigade.
A couple of hours to the west, in the town of Senaki, it's the same picture. A flagship military base, home to the second infantry brigade, is in Russian hands. And down on the Black Sea coast, the radars and installations for Georgia's sole naval base at Poti have been scrupulously pinpointed by the Russians and destroyed.
Gori and Senaki are not ramshackle relics of the old Red Army of the type that litter the landscape of eastern Europe. "These bases have only recently been upgraded to Nato standard," said Matthew Clements, Eurasia analyst at Jane's Information Group. "They have been operationally targeted to seriously degrade the Georgian military."
"There is a presence of our armed forces near Gori and Senaki. We make no secret of it," said the general staff in Moscow. "They are there to defuse an enormous arsenal of weapons and military hardware which have been discovered in the vicinity of Gori and Senaki without any guard whatsoever."
The "enormous arsenals" are American-made or American-supplied. American money, know-how, planning, and equipment built these bases as part of Washington's drive to bring Nato membership to a small country that is Russia's underbelly.
The American "train and equip" mission for the Georgian military is six years old. It has been destroyed in as many days. And with it, Georgia's Nato ambitions. "There are a few countries that will say 'told you so'" about the need to get Georgia into Nato," said Andrew Wilson, Russia expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations. "But many more will want to walk away from the problem. And for the next few years, Georgia will be far too busy trying to pick itself up."
If Georgia and Nato are the principal casualties of this week's ruthless display of brute power by Vladimir Putin, the consequences are bigger still, the fallout immense, if uncertain. The regional and the global balance of power looks to have tilted, against the west and in favour of the rising or resurgent players of the east.
In a seminal speech in Munich last year, Putin confidently warned the west that he would not tolerate the age of American hyperpower. Seven years in office at the time and at the height of his powers, he delivered his most anti-western tirade
Pernicious
To an audience that included John McCain, the White House contender, and Robert Gates, the US defence secretary and ex-Kremlinologist, he served notice: "What is a unipolar world? It refers to one type of situation, one centre of authority, one centre of force, one centre of decision-making. It is world in which there is one master, one sovereign. This is pernicious ... unacceptable ... impossible."
This week, he turned those words into action, demonstrating the limits of US power with his rout of Georgia. His forces roamed at will along the roads of the Southern Caucasus, beyond Russia's borders for the first time since the disastrous Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
As the Russian officers sat on the American stockpiles of machine guns, ammunition, and equipment in Gori, they were savouring a highly unusual scenario. Not since the Afghan war had the Russians seized vast caches of US weaponry. "People are sick to the stomach in Washington," said a former Pentagon official. And the Russians are giddy with success.
Celebrating the biggest victory in eight years of what might be termed Putinism, the dogged pursuit by whatever means to avenge a long period of Russian humiliation and to deploy his limited range of levers - oil, gas, or brute force - to make the world listen to Moscow, the Russian prime minister has redrawn the geopolitical map.
In less than a week, Putin has invaded another country, effectively partitioned Georgia in a lightning campaign, weakened his arch-enemy, President Mikheil Saakashvili, divided the west, and presented a fait accompli. The impact - locally, regionally, and globally - is huge.
"The war in Georgia has put the European order in question," said Alexander Rahr, one of Germany's leading Russia experts and a Putin biographer. "The times are past when you can punish Russia."
That seems to be the view among leading European policymakers who have been scrambling all week to arrange and shore up a fragile ceasefire, risking charges of appeasing the Kremlin.
"Don't ask us who's good and who's bad here," said Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister, after shuttling between Tbilisi and Moscow to try to halt the violence. "We shouldn't make any moral judgments on this war. Stopping the war, that's what we're interested in."
His boss, President Nicolas Sarkozy, went to the Kremlin to negotiate a ceasefire and parade as a peacemaker. Critics said he acted as Moscow's messenger, noting Putin's terms then taking them to Tbilisi to persuade
Saakashvili to capitulate. Germany also refused to take sides while Italy warned against building an "anti-Moscow coalition".
That contrasted with Gordon Brown's and David Milliband's talk of Russian "aggression" and Condoleezza Rice's arrival in Tbilisi yesterday to rally "the free world behind a free Georgia".
The effects of Putin's coup are first felt locally and around Russia's rim. "My view is that the Russians, and I would say principally prime minister Putin, is interested in reasserting Russia's, not only Russia's great power or superpower status, but in reasserting Russia's traditional spheres of influence," said Gates. "My guess is that everyone is going to be looking at Russia through a different set of lenses as we look ahead."
In Kiev certainly. Ukraine's pro-western prime minister, Viktor Yushchenko, Saaksahvili's fellow colour-revolutionary, is chastened and wary. His firebrand anti-Russian prime minister, Yuliya Tymoshenko, has gone uncharacteristically quiet.
Invasion
"An invasion of Ukraine by 'peacekeeping tanks' is just a question of time," wrote Aleksandr Sushko, director of Kiev's Institute of Euro-Atlantic Cooperation. "Weimar Russia is completing its transformation into something else. If Russia wins this war, a new order will take shape in Europe which will have no place for Ukraine as a sovereign state."
All around Russia's rim, the former Soviet "captive states" are trembling. Even Belarus, the slavishly loyal "last dictatorship in Europe", went strangely silent, taking days before the regime offered Moscow its support. "Everybody's nervous," said Wilson.
The EU states of the Baltic and Poland are drumming up support for Georgia, with the Polish president Lech Kaczynski declaring that Russia has revealed "its true face". That divides the EU since the French and the Germans refuse to take sides and are scornful of east European "hysteria" towards Russia. Rahr in Berlin says the German and French governments are striving to keep the Poles and the Baltic states well away from any EU-led peace negotiations. It was the Germans and the French who, in April, blunted George Bush's drive to get Georgia into Nato. They will also resist potential US moves to kick Russia out of the G8 or other international bodies.
There are many who argue that Putin's gamble will backfire, that he has bitten off more than he can chew, that Russia remains weak, a "Saudi Arabia with trees" in the words of Robert Hunter, the former US ambassador to Nato.
Compared to the other rising powers of China, India or even Brazil - the companions referred to as the BRIC - Russia does indeed appear weak. Its economy struggles to develop goods or services, depends on raw material exports and on European consumption and the price of oil for its current wealth.
Resources
But Putin's talent is for playing a weak hand well, maximising and concentrating his limited resources, and creating facts on the ground while the west dithers.
"There is a lack of a clear and unified European policy towards Russia," said Clements. In the crucial contest over energy "the Russian strategy of keeping control of exports and supply is outpacing any European response".
Putin may now calculate he can call off the dogs of war, having achieved his aims and able to pocket his gains very cheaply. The Georgia campaign becomes the triumphant climax of Putinism.
"In politics, it is very important to know one's measure," wrote Aleksey Arbatov, director of Moscow's International Security Centre. "If Russia continues to inflict strikes on Georgian territory, on facilities, on population centres, we may lose the moral supremacy we have today."
But Wilson and many in eastern Europe worry that rather than being the climax of Putinism, the Russians in Georgia signal the start of something else. "This may not be a culmination, but only step one," said Wilson. "If you don't stop this kind of behaviour, it escalates."
About this articleClose
Russia's victory over Georgia has redrawn the geopolitical map This article appeared in the Guardian on Saturday August 16 2008 on p12 of the Top stories section. It was last updated at 01:19 on August 16 2008.
Source: the Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/16/georgia.russia1
Pity Georgia's bedraggled first infantry brigade. And its second. And its hapless navy.
For the past few evenings in the foothills of the Southern Caucasus on the outskirts of Joseph Stalin's hometown of Gori, reconnaissance units of Russia's 58th army have been raking through the spoils of war at what was the Georgian army's pride and joy, a shiny new military base inaugurated only last January for the first infantry, the army engineers, and an artillery brigade.
A couple of hours to the west, in the town of Senaki, it's the same picture. A flagship military base, home to the second infantry brigade, is in Russian hands. And down on the Black Sea coast, the radars and installations for Georgia's sole naval base at Poti have been scrupulously pinpointed by the Russians and destroyed.
Gori and Senaki are not ramshackle relics of the old Red Army of the type that litter the landscape of eastern Europe. "These bases have only recently been upgraded to Nato standard," said Matthew Clements, Eurasia analyst at Jane's Information Group. "They have been operationally targeted to seriously degrade the Georgian military."
"There is a presence of our armed forces near Gori and Senaki. We make no secret of it," said the general staff in Moscow. "They are there to defuse an enormous arsenal of weapons and military hardware which have been discovered in the vicinity of Gori and Senaki without any guard whatsoever."
The "enormous arsenals" are American-made or American-supplied. American money, know-how, planning, and equipment built these bases as part of Washington's drive to bring Nato membership to a small country that is Russia's underbelly.
The American "train and equip" mission for the Georgian military is six years old. It has been destroyed in as many days. And with it, Georgia's Nato ambitions. "There are a few countries that will say 'told you so'" about the need to get Georgia into Nato," said Andrew Wilson, Russia expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations. "But many more will want to walk away from the problem. And for the next few years, Georgia will be far too busy trying to pick itself up."
If Georgia and Nato are the principal casualties of this week's ruthless display of brute power by Vladimir Putin, the consequences are bigger still, the fallout immense, if uncertain. The regional and the global balance of power looks to have tilted, against the west and in favour of the rising or resurgent players of the east.
In a seminal speech in Munich last year, Putin confidently warned the west that he would not tolerate the age of American hyperpower. Seven years in office at the time and at the height of his powers, he delivered his most anti-western tirade
Pernicious
To an audience that included John McCain, the White House contender, and Robert Gates, the US defence secretary and ex-Kremlinologist, he served notice: "What is a unipolar world? It refers to one type of situation, one centre of authority, one centre of force, one centre of decision-making. It is world in which there is one master, one sovereign. This is pernicious ... unacceptable ... impossible."
This week, he turned those words into action, demonstrating the limits of US power with his rout of Georgia. His forces roamed at will along the roads of the Southern Caucasus, beyond Russia's borders for the first time since the disastrous Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
As the Russian officers sat on the American stockpiles of machine guns, ammunition, and equipment in Gori, they were savouring a highly unusual scenario. Not since the Afghan war had the Russians seized vast caches of US weaponry. "People are sick to the stomach in Washington," said a former Pentagon official. And the Russians are giddy with success.
Celebrating the biggest victory in eight years of what might be termed Putinism, the dogged pursuit by whatever means to avenge a long period of Russian humiliation and to deploy his limited range of levers - oil, gas, or brute force - to make the world listen to Moscow, the Russian prime minister has redrawn the geopolitical map.
In less than a week, Putin has invaded another country, effectively partitioned Georgia in a lightning campaign, weakened his arch-enemy, President Mikheil Saakashvili, divided the west, and presented a fait accompli. The impact - locally, regionally, and globally - is huge.
"The war in Georgia has put the European order in question," said Alexander Rahr, one of Germany's leading Russia experts and a Putin biographer. "The times are past when you can punish Russia."
That seems to be the view among leading European policymakers who have been scrambling all week to arrange and shore up a fragile ceasefire, risking charges of appeasing the Kremlin.
"Don't ask us who's good and who's bad here," said Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister, after shuttling between Tbilisi and Moscow to try to halt the violence. "We shouldn't make any moral judgments on this war. Stopping the war, that's what we're interested in."
His boss, President Nicolas Sarkozy, went to the Kremlin to negotiate a ceasefire and parade as a peacemaker. Critics said he acted as Moscow's messenger, noting Putin's terms then taking them to Tbilisi to persuade
Saakashvili to capitulate. Germany also refused to take sides while Italy warned against building an "anti-Moscow coalition".
That contrasted with Gordon Brown's and David Milliband's talk of Russian "aggression" and Condoleezza Rice's arrival in Tbilisi yesterday to rally "the free world behind a free Georgia".
The effects of Putin's coup are first felt locally and around Russia's rim. "My view is that the Russians, and I would say principally prime minister Putin, is interested in reasserting Russia's, not only Russia's great power or superpower status, but in reasserting Russia's traditional spheres of influence," said Gates. "My guess is that everyone is going to be looking at Russia through a different set of lenses as we look ahead."
In Kiev certainly. Ukraine's pro-western prime minister, Viktor Yushchenko, Saaksahvili's fellow colour-revolutionary, is chastened and wary. His firebrand anti-Russian prime minister, Yuliya Tymoshenko, has gone uncharacteristically quiet.
Invasion
"An invasion of Ukraine by 'peacekeeping tanks' is just a question of time," wrote Aleksandr Sushko, director of Kiev's Institute of Euro-Atlantic Cooperation. "Weimar Russia is completing its transformation into something else. If Russia wins this war, a new order will take shape in Europe which will have no place for Ukraine as a sovereign state."
All around Russia's rim, the former Soviet "captive states" are trembling. Even Belarus, the slavishly loyal "last dictatorship in Europe", went strangely silent, taking days before the regime offered Moscow its support. "Everybody's nervous," said Wilson.
The EU states of the Baltic and Poland are drumming up support for Georgia, with the Polish president Lech Kaczynski declaring that Russia has revealed "its true face". That divides the EU since the French and the Germans refuse to take sides and are scornful of east European "hysteria" towards Russia. Rahr in Berlin says the German and French governments are striving to keep the Poles and the Baltic states well away from any EU-led peace negotiations. It was the Germans and the French who, in April, blunted George Bush's drive to get Georgia into Nato. They will also resist potential US moves to kick Russia out of the G8 or other international bodies.
There are many who argue that Putin's gamble will backfire, that he has bitten off more than he can chew, that Russia remains weak, a "Saudi Arabia with trees" in the words of Robert Hunter, the former US ambassador to Nato.
Compared to the other rising powers of China, India or even Brazil - the companions referred to as the BRIC - Russia does indeed appear weak. Its economy struggles to develop goods or services, depends on raw material exports and on European consumption and the price of oil for its current wealth.
Resources
But Putin's talent is for playing a weak hand well, maximising and concentrating his limited resources, and creating facts on the ground while the west dithers.
"There is a lack of a clear and unified European policy towards Russia," said Clements. In the crucial contest over energy "the Russian strategy of keeping control of exports and supply is outpacing any European response".
Putin may now calculate he can call off the dogs of war, having achieved his aims and able to pocket his gains very cheaply. The Georgia campaign becomes the triumphant climax of Putinism.
"In politics, it is very important to know one's measure," wrote Aleksey Arbatov, director of Moscow's International Security Centre. "If Russia continues to inflict strikes on Georgian territory, on facilities, on population centres, we may lose the moral supremacy we have today."
But Wilson and many in eastern Europe worry that rather than being the climax of Putinism, the Russians in Georgia signal the start of something else. "This may not be a culmination, but only step one," said Wilson. "If you don't stop this kind of behaviour, it escalates."
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Russia's victory over Georgia has redrawn the geopolitical map This article appeared in the Guardian on Saturday August 16 2008 on p12 of the Top stories section. It was last updated at 01:19 on August 16 2008.
Source: the Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/16/georgia.russia1
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