America’s incoherent foreign policy caused Georgian crisis

Scoopit!

The Atlantic has an article from a Moscow based correspondent which provides some useful background and context to the Russia-Georgia conflict. It suggests blame should be attached to the USA’s incoherent foreign policy.

The article begins:-

Georgia’s forty-year-old president, the liberal Mikheil Saakashvili, may possess many admirable attributes—dashing looks, fluency in several languages (including English), a degree from Columbia Law school, and a heartfelt commitment to a Westward-looking future for his country—but strategic acumen, even plain old-fashioned common sense, do not, it is now tragically apparent, figure among them. Rather, Saakashvili is well-known in Georgia for his authoritarian streak and hotheadedness—the most damning character flaws imaginable in a confrontation with the calculating former spymaster and current Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin.

Then a little later:-

But his reckless decision last week to shell and then invade South Ossetia (populated mostly by ethnic Ossetes holding Russian passports) and attack Russian forces stationed there, combined with his now obviously misplaced faith in the senior Bush administration officials, including President Bush himself, who have been glad-handing him since he came to power following the Rose Revolution of 2003, may yet undo his presidency and return Georgia to Russian vassalage.

The pitiable David-and-Goliath asymmetry of Georgia’s dustup with Russia, plus Saakashvili’s repeated hyperbolic declarations to satellite news stations, have obscured both the United States’ culpability in bringing about the conflict, and the nature of the separatism that caused it in the first place. (Among other assertions, Saakashvili has called Russia’s response to Georgia’s assault on South Ossetia “a direct challenge for the whole world,” and has said, “tomorrow Russian tanks might reach any European capital . . . [the war] is not really about Georgia but in a certain sense it’s also an aggression against America”.)

Further the piece gives some useful historical background and context.

Then the article concludes:-

The United States has, for all intents and purposes, abandoned Saakashvili, the poster-boy of the color revolutions, and left him at the mercy of Putin, who appears bent on exacting revenge. Moscow and the separatist leaders in both republics have pledged to charge Saakashvili in the Hague for genocide. The lessons that emerge from the Russia-Georgia war are clear: Russia is back, the West fears Russia as much as it needs it, and those who act on other assumptions are in for a rude, perhaps violent, awakening.

The historically volatile Georgians overthrew their two previous democratically elected leaders for much less than humiliation at Russia’s hands and what will be the permanent loss of their two coveted wayward regions. Bitter notes of resignation and reproach toward the West are already creeping into Saakashvili’s public pronouncements. “I have staked my country’s fate on the West’s rhetoric about democracy and liberty,” he wrote in an op-ed piece for the Washington Post. He will take little comfort in remembering that the Bush administration, in adopting the outlandishly unrealistic National Security Strategy of 2006, did the same.

A useful piece, worth reading in full – not just for the Russia-Georgia insight, but for casting further light in US policy, which even if one does not necessarily agree with the author’s assessment is helpful background.