thanks to Bad Attitudes

Russia, Georgia, and NATO: Cold War Two

The Russian invasion of the South Ossetian enclave in Georgia should call into question a basic component of US foreign policy – the integration of Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics into NATO. This policy has been pursued by Democratic and Republican administrations, but with no public debate and with little thought as to the long-term consequences. The consequences are now becoming clear, and they are unpleasant. The attack signals several Russian positions. Russia will intervene in foreign countries to protect ethnic Russians living there. Russia can readily control or even cut off important oil pipelines connecting the resources of Central Asia to western markets, one of which of course runs through Georgia. The attack also signals Russia’s displeasure with NATO expansion into Eastern Europe and former Soviet Republics. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, NATO has taken under its increasingly expansive wing Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and Slovenia. Georgia plans to join in the next few years. This process has been going on for fifteen years, under the Clinton and Bush administrations. And it is as ill thought out as any foreign policy the US has pursued in decades. The American public greeted each new NATO member as though they were new neighbors, not as distant and even remote countries we were now obliged to defend. NATO is a mutual defense pact. Members are required to go to war if a member is attacked. Nor was the effect on Russia thought out. As is well known – though not well comprehended – Russian history is filled with periodic devastating invasions, from Germany (twice), France, Sweden, and the Mongols. Russian governments, and the public as well, look upon events on their periphery with concerns and fears that people of a country sharing borders with Canada and Mexico cannot understand. NATO forces, pressing steadily deeper into what Russia thought to be a defensive glacis from a resurgent Germany, set off alarms in the Russian bureaus and public alike, thereby contributing to the return to authoritarian government based on national security and militarism.

[more]

On US over-stretch

When I blogged about the Ossetia crisis Sunday, I wrote that one thing it clearly showed was that "The 'west' is hopelessly over-stretched, what with all its current commitments of troops in Iraq, a crisis-ridden Afghanistan, and (still) in the Balkans..." Today, McClatchy's dogged reporter Jonathan Landay gives us more details of that over-stretch. (HT: Dan Froomkin.) Landay quoted one US official as saying that the US military authorities had not really understood the seriousness of the preparations the Russian military had recently made along the Georgian border-- because US spy satellites and other means of technical espionage were "pretty well consumed by Iraq, Afghanistan and now Pakistan." That, you could describe as logistical over-stretch. But there has also been political over-stretch. You'll recall that back last year, shortly after the Bush administration announced that portions of its new "ballistic missile defense system" would be placed in Poland and the Czech Republic, Russia announced that it would withdraw from the 1990 Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE). Few people paid much heed at the time, or thought thaqt Moscow's exit from that older treaty was very important. But one of the key provisions of the CFE Treaty was that signatories were committed to engaging in regular exchanges of information about troop movements and submitting to challenge inspections from other treaty participants. Guess what. After Russia withdrew from the CFE, they no longer had to do that. And guess what else. It truly seems that no-one in the Pentagon was on duty last week as Russia's troop build-up gained momentum.

[more]