Joe Klein accuses Robert Kagan of warmongering.
When a column starts off like this:
The details of who did what to precipitate Russia's war against Georgia are not very important. Do you recall the precise details of the Sudeten Crisis that led to Nazi Germany's invasion of Czechoslovakia? Of course not, because that morally ambiguous dispute is rightly remembered as a minor part of a much bigger drama.
The events of the past week will be remembered that way, too.
..the author has got to be a neoconservative pushing for the next war. In this case, it's Robert Kagan, girding for a new twilight struggle with the Sovi...uh, sorry: that was a couple of twilight struggles ago...Russia.
I don't follow. Kagan's main point is simply that Russia remains a dangerous and assertive rival to the West.
Historians will come to view Aug. 8, 2008, as a turning point no less significant than Nov. 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell. Russia's attack on sovereign Georgian territory marked the official return of history, indeed to an almost 19th-century style of great-power competition, complete with virulent nationalisms, battles for resources, struggles over spheres of influence and territory, and even -- though it shocks our 21st-century sensibilities -- the use of military power to obtain geopolitical objectives. Yes, we will continue to have globalization, economic interdependence, the European Union and other efforts to build a more perfect international order. But these will compete with and at times be overwhelmed by the harsh realities of international life that have endured since time immemorial. The next president had better be ready.
If I wanted to criticise that view I think I'd say it was too much a statement of the obvious, rather than attacking it as insanely militant. As Klein himself acknowledges,
To be sure, Russia's assault on Georgia is an outrage.
And yet, he continues
But it is important, yet again, to call out the endless neoconservative search for new enemies.
I cannot see that underlining the significance of an outrageous (in Klein's own view) Russian assault on a US ally (Georgian soldiers serve in Iraq) constitutes a desperate search for new enemies. What a strange reaction to these events.
My colleagues Quentin Peel and Robert Kaplan both have excellent commentaries, Quentin underlying the miscalculations on the Georgian side, Bob echoing Kagan's view that Russia is back as a grand adversary. Why is it so difficult to hold both of these ideas in one's head at the same time?
One further thought. Asked about Georgia on "Meet the Press" on Sunday, the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne said that a repaired alliance with Europe might make it easier for the next administration to contain Russia. I wish it were true but this is a classic instance of diverging interests among allies. Europe has no appetite to check Russia over Georgia. On an intelligent assessment of ends and means, what choice does it have? Europe has far more to lose than the US in resisting/antagonising Russia. Obama or McCain would make no difference.
The real question is this: can the US and Europe agree on whether and where to draw a line for Putin, and be willing to make it stick? Ukraine is the test, a much stronger ally than Georgia in its own right, and more defensible. Should it be admitted into Nato and the European Union? Like Georgia, it has been encouraged to seek membership of both--and indeed in April it was promised membership of Nato--but many Europeans, notably Germany, are cool on the idea, for fear of provoking Russia.
Now, most likely, they will be even cooler. One guesses that Putin's assault on Georgia was partly intended to diminish Ukraine's prospects of entering into a binding military and political alliance with the West. I would like to see that calculation fail, though I bet it succeeds: if Putin keeps this up, Europe will renege on its commitments to Ukraine. What would Joe Klein say? Would a promise to defend Ukraine then be warmongering--just more of the neocons' endless search for enemies?
Update: Be sure also to read Chrystia Freeland's column in today's FT. (Chrystia is the managing editor of the FT in the US, and a former Moscow bureau chief.)
Like all overly rigid objects, authoritarian regimes conceal a tremendous fragility in their apparent strength - and their leaders know it. It is this realisation that has driven Mr Putin's systematic destruction of all forms of civil society - an eminently pragmatic measure, although it has mystified some outside observers, who wonder why so popular a leader needs to be so heavy-handed. China's chiefs have figured this out, too, hence their anxiety about everything from the Muslim Uighurs to the internet to the former Soviet Union's "colour revolutions".
Of course, another way to ensure popular support for your authoritarian regime is by playing up nationalist sentiment. We are more tolerant of our home-grown bullies if we think we need them to fight our enemies abroad - as even democratic America has demonstrated in recent years. Mr Putin has understood this all along, launching a brutal attack on Chechnya even before his coronation as president in 2000.
Russia's expert taunting of the hotheads in Georgia, followed by immediate and massive retaliation the moment Tbilisi took the bait, is the latest evidence that, for the Kremlin, neo-imperialism is an essential bulwark of neo-authoritarianism. Bringing down the walls really did make the world safer. Now that so many leaders are building them back up again, figuring out how to contain the 21st century's monied authoritarians is our most pressing foreign policy dilemma.
Well, I at least partly agree with Kagan and Kaplan when they say that Russia is behaving aggressively again. But, I am not sure that the right response to their aggression is the expansion of NATO up to their borders. It depends upon the motivation of said aggression. If they want to ensure that they have a sphere of influence in all states with large Russian populations touching their borders, well I am not prepared to commit US troops to fight and die to prevent that. In fact, expansion of NATO to Ukraine may increase Soviet incentives to meddle, since they may begin to feel more encircled by NATO, and thus will take countermeasures.
On the other hand, if this really is the USSR revisited with global ambitions, then perhaps a more aggressive policy is called for.
"Europe has far more to lose than the US in resisting/antagonizing Russia."
Why should our interest in resisting/antagonizing Russia be greater than any European interest? Our interest in containing the Soviet Union, out of which came our desire to create NATO was borne of a need to protect western Europe from a Soviet takeover. It was in their interest as well as ours.
Our role in Europe after the end of WWII was that of a counterweight to Soviet power. What interests do we have now? And how can those interests be any different from the interests of the Europeans themselves? How can we have more at stake than they do?
Can we all stop comparing every country to Nazi Germany? Jesus, it's like that's all people can use cite as an example, the Nazis and Hitler. I don't think Klein is that off. Klein's reacted like that because he and many others are SICK of the neoconservatives oversimplifying and overhyping every threat we come across. They do this so they can have the political leverage to wage wars and reshape the globe. They play the zero sum game instead of trying to maintain peace and stability. (and no by the following I don't mean pacifism)
Georgia foolishly took the bait and are paying the price. I don't care what the Russians or seperatists did, as a small country you cannot afford to make mistakes like that. When you are a small country sometimes you cannot afford pride and security. Sometimes you have to swallow your pride.
Jamie: I think you state the issue very honestly, and Russia's motives are important. But do you think it was also a mistake for the West to bring Poland and other former Soviet satellites under its protection?
Davido: We have a misunderstanding. I don't think, and didn't say, that the US has more at stake in this than Europe. Europe has more at stake--more to gain if Russia behaves decently, and more to lose if it doesn't. I wasn't saying that the US has a stronger self-interested reason to act if Europe fails to; only that Europe is likely to cave, whatever the next US president might wish.
JP: I take your point about how it's tough luck to be a small, weak country next door to a big powerful one. Is that what we also say to Ukraine? (I don't mean that as a rhetorical question. Perhaps the answer is yes, as Jamie says.)
"that morally ambiguous dispute is rightly remembered as a minor part of a much bigger drama."
And the fight in Georgia goes back much further than last week, last year, or even 1989, as Jeff Sypeck argues in a post that deserves more recognition than it's received.
On a separate point, I think the best response to Russia's attack isn't military, but political and economic: to do as much as possible in our power to lower the price of oil via Pigouvian taxes and other incentives. This will harm Russia more and us less than probably any military course of action. Such an effort is not a short-term fix, of course, and would also go a long way to fixing various other problems, but it's the best one I can perceive.
I just want to ask one question: do many people in Europe and/or America want to see the same Russian tanks that defeated Georgian forces in three days of fighting stationed a few miles from the broders of Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria?
If the answer is 'no', then Ukraine should become a member of NATO as soon as possible. Otherwise, Ukraine will fall into Russia's sphere of influence either through democratic changes under Russian propaganda or through a 'peacekeeping' mission of Russian tanks...
Clive, I think you're being a bit unfair to Klein. Partly because this new "assertive, dangerous Russia" is as much a result of the past eight years of neo-conservative Russia bear-baiting. The Georgian presence in Iraq in particular was a calculated move to create additional western allies on the border with Russia, to "contain" Putin and I would imagine what many like Ledeen and Feith et. al thought was a "resurgent" Russia.
This is highly problematic because to some degree what we're seeing is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Scare up and try to avoid turning Russia back into a great power adversary and the moves you took to try to contain it have made it increasinly likely that Russia will be an antagonistic power rather than a strategically neutral state.
The comparison to Nazi Germany is disingenuous. If say tomorrow Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Costa Rica, El Salvadore and Venezuela suddenly annonuced strategic alliances with China, and that China wanted to place "theater missile defenses" into those countries as a precaution against "rogue states", would the US really just stand there and let it happen? I think most commentators would be screaming their heads off about how China was trying to hedge in the US and endanger it. This is essentially what NATO Expansion as well as the central Asian alliances done by the US has been like for Russia.
The fact of the matter is the Neoconservatives have spent the last eight years antagonizing and isolating Russia in its own backyard. That suddenly Russia decides to reassert itself as the regional hegemon in waiting should be no surprise.
That Russia itself is fragile and apt to be hijacked along ultranationalist lines should also have been apparent. I am, personally sick of the Neoconservative self-fulfilling prophecies. By bombing Iraq for "not having WMDs" they essentially made Iranian and North Korean acquisition of nuclear weapons inevitable. This is the same situation.
And unless Ukraine can settle all its border disputes with Russia, any fundamental agreement to defend it must have a priviso that the US or allies will not intervene if Ukraine starts a shooting war over disputed territory. Anything else would be a strategic alliance blunder akin to the Triple Entente.
Nob,
Exactly which "disputed territory" exists between Ukraine and Russia? There is none. Borders have been properly demarcated, including the tricky delimitation of the Sea of Azov. You lose credibility when you go off on "disputed territory". If I'm wrong, give an exact geographical location that is in dispute.
FREE SIBERIA!
I am a bit scared that the Russian Federation will now draw too big a conclusion from their victory and start to think of NATO as defeatable, or at least to consider it too weak to act. That could imply that they would try to have a go at one of the Baltic states, NATO allies where Russians and Russian heritage is looked down upon. Mind you, there is quite some dirt from WW2 there; The Baltics weren't at all unhappy when the Germans entered and collaborated with them. You could see examples of how that still results in tensions last year in Estland.
If another of those incidents would occur, the Russians perhaps could be persuaded by this victory to try and roll some tanks in.
I am a bit scared that the Russian Federation will now draw too big a conclusion from their victory and start to think of NATO as defeatable, or at least to consider it too weak to act. That could imply that they would try to have a go at one of the Baltic states, NATO allies where Russians and Russian heritage is looked down upon. Mind you, there is quite some dirt from WW2 there; The Baltics weren't at all unhappy when the Germans entered and collaborated with them. You could see examples of how that still results in tensions last year in Estland.
If another of those incidents would occur, the Russians perhaps could be persuaded by this victory to try and roll some tanks in.
Excuse my duplicate, please feel free to remove one copy.
If NATO and especially US was not that pushy, then everybody would have been happier!
I'm sorry, did Crook just suggest that Robert Kagan, who turns out column after column practically shrieking, "More blood! More death!" like some Lovecraftian cultist, is not a warmonger? If you think this is an exaggeragation, please point to even one Kagan column from the last eight years in which he concludes that some issue in a foreign country does not ultimately merit US militarily action.
What does Georgia offer to America beside a check on Russia. Georgia is more important to Europe because of that natural gas pipeline that it will ever be to America. Let Europe defend Georgia not the US.
Peter,
Russia and the Ukraine have been hacing a dispute over a waterway in the Crimea Peninsula in the Black Sea. They've been disputing this since 1991, and I'm not sure how/if it was resolved as it has been off of my radar for a few years.
We remember the Sudeten crisis because it was one of the steps that led up to WWII, and that was true because the German goal was all of Czecholovokia, with the Sudetenland being only a first step. (And all of Europe after that, of course.)
Unless you believe that Russia's goal is to occupy or annex all of Georgia, the analogy is trivially false, and the invocation of Hitler dishonest.
Why does it seem like everyone finds the invasion by russia to be a surprise. I find it unbelievable that russia could move a fully equiped division and its navy in postion for a swift response and no one noticed. We (the west) no long have spies or satellites??...or did we out source it? Maybe someone forgot to tell the Georgian president russia was lying in wait for his mistake.
Many want to define this russian as assertive and dangerous...I believe Putin is just demonstrating his leadership. Leadership which is clearly stating that the borders will be defended...and Putin is not talking about building fences.
Klein is dead on. Any discussion of international events that includes the words "Czechoslovakia," "Nazi," "Munich" or "appeasement" is, until proven innocent, neoconservative drivel designed to convince us that we are faced with the equivalent of Hitler. But Putin is not Hitler, Russia is not Nazi Germany, and Georgia is not Czechoslovakia.
Putin is, no doubt, a bad guy, but he's not set on conquering huge chunks of territory and eradicating their inhabitants. And Russia has always been a difficult country to live next to, but its political system is not built on the kind of economic Ponzi scheme - dependent on ever-new conquests of resources - that was Nazi Germany.
Kagan is right and Crook is correct to back him. Nowhere in his essay does Kagan advocate going to war with Russia, hysteria about "neocons" notwhithstanding.
Crimea is next. It's the home of the Black Sea Fleet, which has been made a much bigger issue by its use in this long-planned and deliberate aggression by Russia; and it's a traditional Russian place where not only do most people speak Russian, but is beloved by millions of Russians as a vacation spot and cultural icon. Chekhov plays, smarmy old movies, residences of famous artists, scene of famous Czarist and Red Army victories--the works.
This is salami tactics. Once Georgia is throughly subverted, the intrigues will start in Crimea.