Showing posts with label Georgia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Georgia. Show all posts
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Georgia's Recklessness
Georgia's Recklessness
By Paul J. Saunders
Friday, August 15, 2008; A21
The fates of South Ossetia and Abkhazia are chief among the many issues that are still unresolved in the war between Georgia and Russia. What's clear, however, is that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili ordered his country's military to assert his authority over South Ossetia by force. American officials should reflect on the implications of Saakashvili's behavior for U.S. policy toward Georgia, Russia and the region.
Saakashvili ordered the assault last week knowing that South Ossetia would resist, knowing that his forces would have to take on Russian peacekeepers and knowing that Moscow has been spoiling for a fight. In fact, his own government had claimed for some time that Russia was preparing to attack.
Georgia's president clearly thought that his troops could quickly occupy South Ossetia and that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin would not dare to intervene because doing so might provoke the West, especially the United States. A similar logic underlies Tbilisi's long-term foreign policy calculations. Throughout history, weak nations with powerful neighbors have energetically sought strong allies. Serbia enlisted Russian support against the Austro-Hungarian Empire, for example, and Poland turned to Britain to deter Nazi Germany.
Saakashvili has embraced this tried-and-true strategy with gusto, sending a substantial share of the country's small army to Iraq (from which its troops were understandably recalled in recent days) and parroting Bush administration talking points on international issues -- especially on promoting democracy -- more than almost any other leader worldwide.
Ultimately, however, it wouldn't matter to Georgia's president whether the United States was a democracy, a theocracy or ruled by Martians so long as he could use Washington to change the dynamics of Georgian-Russian relations.
Saakashvili's recent statements demonstrate how well he has learned to push America's buttons, probably with the help of his government's lobbyists in Washington. In several interviews and articles, including an op-ed in yesterday's Post, he has compared the recent Russian attack on Georgia to the Soviet invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. He has also invoked former president Ronald Reagan and tried to frame the war as a Russian assault on Western values. "We are attacked because we wanted to be free," he said on CNN.
But the situation inside Georgia belies Saakashvili's rhetorical commitment to freedom. Most glaring was his handling of opposition protests last fall. The State Department's 2007 Human Rights Report, released just a few months ago, found "serious problems" with Georgia's human rights record and notes "excessive use of force to disperse demonstrations"; "impunity of police officers"; and declining respect for freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly and political participation. Ana Dolidze, a democracy advocate and former chair of Georgia's Young Lawyers Association, has described in detail how Saakashvili acted quickly after entering office to empower the executive branch at the expense of parliament and to strengthen the government by "stifling political expression, pressuring influential media and targeting vocal critics and opposition leaders" -- including by using law enforcement agencies. Saakashvili is far from the morally pure democrat he would have the West believe he is.
Georgia's internal realities help make clear that the fighting erupted not primarily because of what the country represents but because of its government's actions. Tbilisi could have avoided the confrontation by deferring its ambitions to subjugate South Ossetia and pursuing them through strictly peaceful means.
Few seem to remember that the United States and Russia worked together with the Georgian opposition to ease out then-Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze and facilitate the election that ultimately brought Saakashvili into office. Russian views of Saakashvili changed over the past five years as Moscow perceived Tbilisi to become increasingly hostile and watched Saakashvili use threats of force to topple the government of another autonomous region, Ajaria, in 2004.
None of this justifies Russia's actions. But even if Moscow had been lying in wait for Saakashvili to provide an excuse to act, it was all the more foolish for him to do so. Regrettably, the Georgian leader has allowed Moscow to demonstrate quite clearly the limits of American interests in Russia's immediate neighborhood. The Kremlin has much more at stake there than Washington and is willing to act decisively and with overwhelming force. Recognizing the potential global consequences of a serious break with Russia, America has not been willing to do more than provide humanitarian relief, pointedly state that U.S. forces would not protect the Georgian ports and airfields where the aid is to arrive, and dispatch Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the scene.
Allowing the graphic exposure of these realities is a major failure of U.S. policy that will undermine American objectives throughout the region. One hopes that in private, the Bush administration is clearly communicating to Moscow that whatever Saakashvili's failings, the United States will not tolerate his removal by force -- and telling the Georgian government that America doesn't need reckless friends.
The writer, executive director of the Nixon Center, served as senior adviser to the undersecretary of state for democracy and global affairs from 2003 to 2005.
By Paul J. Saunders
Friday, August 15, 2008; A21
The fates of South Ossetia and Abkhazia are chief among the many issues that are still unresolved in the war between Georgia and Russia. What's clear, however, is that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili ordered his country's military to assert his authority over South Ossetia by force. American officials should reflect on the implications of Saakashvili's behavior for U.S. policy toward Georgia, Russia and the region.
Saakashvili ordered the assault last week knowing that South Ossetia would resist, knowing that his forces would have to take on Russian peacekeepers and knowing that Moscow has been spoiling for a fight. In fact, his own government had claimed for some time that Russia was preparing to attack.
Georgia's president clearly thought that his troops could quickly occupy South Ossetia and that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin would not dare to intervene because doing so might provoke the West, especially the United States. A similar logic underlies Tbilisi's long-term foreign policy calculations. Throughout history, weak nations with powerful neighbors have energetically sought strong allies. Serbia enlisted Russian support against the Austro-Hungarian Empire, for example, and Poland turned to Britain to deter Nazi Germany.
Saakashvili has embraced this tried-and-true strategy with gusto, sending a substantial share of the country's small army to Iraq (from which its troops were understandably recalled in recent days) and parroting Bush administration talking points on international issues -- especially on promoting democracy -- more than almost any other leader worldwide.
Ultimately, however, it wouldn't matter to Georgia's president whether the United States was a democracy, a theocracy or ruled by Martians so long as he could use Washington to change the dynamics of Georgian-Russian relations.
Saakashvili's recent statements demonstrate how well he has learned to push America's buttons, probably with the help of his government's lobbyists in Washington. In several interviews and articles, including an op-ed in yesterday's Post, he has compared the recent Russian attack on Georgia to the Soviet invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. He has also invoked former president Ronald Reagan and tried to frame the war as a Russian assault on Western values. "We are attacked because we wanted to be free," he said on CNN.
But the situation inside Georgia belies Saakashvili's rhetorical commitment to freedom. Most glaring was his handling of opposition protests last fall. The State Department's 2007 Human Rights Report, released just a few months ago, found "serious problems" with Georgia's human rights record and notes "excessive use of force to disperse demonstrations"; "impunity of police officers"; and declining respect for freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly and political participation. Ana Dolidze, a democracy advocate and former chair of Georgia's Young Lawyers Association, has described in detail how Saakashvili acted quickly after entering office to empower the executive branch at the expense of parliament and to strengthen the government by "stifling political expression, pressuring influential media and targeting vocal critics and opposition leaders" -- including by using law enforcement agencies. Saakashvili is far from the morally pure democrat he would have the West believe he is.
Georgia's internal realities help make clear that the fighting erupted not primarily because of what the country represents but because of its government's actions. Tbilisi could have avoided the confrontation by deferring its ambitions to subjugate South Ossetia and pursuing them through strictly peaceful means.
Few seem to remember that the United States and Russia worked together with the Georgian opposition to ease out then-Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze and facilitate the election that ultimately brought Saakashvili into office. Russian views of Saakashvili changed over the past five years as Moscow perceived Tbilisi to become increasingly hostile and watched Saakashvili use threats of force to topple the government of another autonomous region, Ajaria, in 2004.
None of this justifies Russia's actions. But even if Moscow had been lying in wait for Saakashvili to provide an excuse to act, it was all the more foolish for him to do so. Regrettably, the Georgian leader has allowed Moscow to demonstrate quite clearly the limits of American interests in Russia's immediate neighborhood. The Kremlin has much more at stake there than Washington and is willing to act decisively and with overwhelming force. Recognizing the potential global consequences of a serious break with Russia, America has not been willing to do more than provide humanitarian relief, pointedly state that U.S. forces would not protect the Georgian ports and airfields where the aid is to arrive, and dispatch Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the scene.
Allowing the graphic exposure of these realities is a major failure of U.S. policy that will undermine American objectives throughout the region. One hopes that in private, the Bush administration is clearly communicating to Moscow that whatever Saakashvili's failings, the United States will not tolerate his removal by force -- and telling the Georgian government that America doesn't need reckless friends.
The writer, executive director of the Nixon Center, served as senior adviser to the undersecretary of state for democracy and global affairs from 2003 to 2005.
There are reasons why European countries find it hard to unite against Russia
Unity is strength
Aug 28th 2008
From The Economist print edition
There are reasons why European countries find it hard to unite against Russia
THE European Union will be heeded by Russia only when it speaks with one voice. That was the universal battle cry in Brussels as EU officials and diplomats hurried back from their summer holidays to prepare for an emergency EU summit on the Georgian crisis, called by the current French presidency for September 1st. And faced with the sobering sight of tanks trundling around Europe’s backyard, there was equally loud agreement among national politicians that their usual squabbling over the right attitude towards Russia harms the common interests of the 27-member union.
Yet the rhetoric seems largely empty. The summit will certainly see a lot of joint finger-wagging over Russia’s recognition of the breakaway Georgian territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. There may be more talk of an EU civilian mission to monitor the situation in Georgia (though the idea of an EU military force has been shelved, at least for the moment). But when it comes to the stated purpose of the meeting—to re-examine EU-Russia relations—the 27 leaders will remain divided into several overlapping camps. These include: those who think Russia can and must be engaged as a partner; those who think Russia needs containing; and a larger group of fatalists who think that Russia “has us over a barrel”, as one diplomat punningly puts it. The summit is not expected to agree to make any big changes to the status quo, for the simple reason that the various leaders do not agree over whether that would be a good idea or counter-productive.
Does disunity towards Russia hurt the common EU interest? Probably. A November “power audit” by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), a think-tank, argued that Europe was throwing away what should be its considerable leverage over Russia. After all, the EU’s population is more than three times that of Russia, and its wealth more than a dozen times greater. The EU depends heavily on Russian energy, but the flipside is that it is Russia’s biggest market for gas (indeed, for all Russian exports). If the 27 EU countries dealt with Russia as one, they would surely have less to fear from Moscow hawks.
The problem is that the ECFR’s argument is both true and beside the point, because it is so far removed from the way that individual countries act and think (reminiscent, in this respect, of the French statement issued after the Olympics proclaiming that the EU had collectively won, with a total of 280 medals). The cold calculation of national interests is a complex business, as any student of game theory can tell you. Disunity would be irrational if EU members always saw their common interests as paramount. But they do not, certainly when it comes to dealing with big third countries, from Russia to China to America.
In Europe, it is rarely enough to show that the union, in aggregate, will gain from a given policy. One must also show that the overall European gain manifestly outweighs individual national interests. This may seem a shabby calculation, but it has democratic roots. The EU is not a single country, whose most senior leaders are elected by a single electorate. In its highest decision-making body, the European Council, the 27 heads of state and government remain accountable to 27 different sets of voters.
Europeans do not even agree on what unity means. Countries such as Germany, which come closer than most to believing in a common European interest, tend to talk of it in terms of the interests of a majority of EU countries, not the interests of all. In recent disputes that pitted Russia against such countries as Poland or Estonia, a favourite line of German diplomats or politicians was to complain that individual countries had no right to take the wider EU’s good relations with Russia “hostage”.
Nor do the costs of disunity fall equally. Take energy. It must be in the EU’s interests to diversify away from the block’s dependence on Russian gas—which is why it supports pipeline projects that would bring in gas from elsewhere. But in each individual EU country the voters expect to have the heating on this winter and the lights on all year as cheaply as possible (nor would they easily tolerate sharing their energy with neighbouring countries in the event of rationed supplies). In recent years, countries from Germany and Italy to Bulgaria and Greece have signed deals that increase the EU’s dependence on Russia, and undercut alternative routes. From the perspective of those individual countries, such selfishness probably felt quite rational.
I’m all right, Jacques
American officials often wonder why they seem to take European energy security more seriously than the Europeans themselves. One answer is that not every country has to worry about energy security. Russia may shut off oil or gas deliveries to smaller ex-communist countries for spurious “technical” reasons from time to time. But it has never turned off the taps to Germany or Italy. And plenty of EU countries, from Sweden to Portugal, barely consume any Russian energy.
Will the benefits of European unity ever trump the pursuit of national interests when it comes to Russia? Optimists like those in the ECFR say that a more united Europe still has the chance to prod Russia into being a more reliable partner, wedded to the rule of law, international norms and other virtues. Pessimists say that the EU is unlikely to show much grit and unity until Russian behaviour becomes a lot more threatening.
If Russia starts to act even more recklessly—perhaps by stirring up trouble in Ukraine, which has millions of ethnic Russians, or among Russian minorities in EU countries like Estonia and Latvia—EU members may decide that their individual national interest is to stand up together. Even the largest EU country would not wish to be in a club that cannot look after its own. But that won’t happen unless Russia throws its weight around a lot more. Meanwhile weakness, selfishness and division will continue, however many fingers wag in Brussels on September 1st.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
