Moscow’s Sinister Brilliance
By: Victor Davis Hanson
VictorHanson.com | Thursday, August 14, 2008
Lost amid all the controversies surrounding the Georgian tragedy is the
sheer diabolic brilliance of the long-planned Russia invasion. Let us
count the ways in which it is a win/win situation for Russia.
The Home Front
The
long-suffering Russian people resent the loss of global influence and
empire, but not necessarily the Soviet Union and its gulags that once
ensured such stature. The invasion restores a sense of Russian
nationalism and power to its populace without the stink of Stalinism,
and is indeed cloaked as a sort of humanitarian intervention on behalf
of beleaguered Ossetians.
There will be no Russian
demonstrations about an “illegal war,” much less nonsense about “blood
for oil,” but instead rejoicing at the payback of an uppity former
province that felt its Western credentials somehow trumped Russian
tanks. How ironic that the Western heartthrob, the old Marxist Mikhail
Gorbachev, is now both lamenting Western encouragement of Georgian
“aggression,” while simultaneously gloating over the return of Russian
military daring.
Sinister Timing
Russia’s only worry is the United States, which currently has a
lame-duck president with low approval ratings, and is exhausted after
Afghanistan and Iraq. But more importantly, America’s attention is
preoccupied with a presidential race, in which “world citizen” Barack
Obama has mesmerized Europe as the presumptive new president and
soon-to-be disciple of European soft power.
Better yet for Russia, instead of speaking with one voice, America is
all over the map with three reactions from Bush, McCain, and Obama —
all of them mutually contradictory, at least initially. Meanwhile, the
world’s televisions are turned toward the Olympics in Beijing. The
autocratic Chinese, busy jailing reporters and dissidents, are not
about to say an unkind word about Russian intervention. If anything,
the pageantry at their grandiose stadiums provides welcome distractions
for those embarrassed over the ease with which Russia smothered Georgia.
Comeuppance
Most importantly, Putin and Medvedev have called the West’s bluff. We
are sort of stuck in a time-warp of the 1990s, seemingly eons ago in
which a once-earnest weak post-Soviet Russia sought Western economic
help and political mentoring. But those days are long gone, and
diplomacy hasn’t caught up with the new realities. Russia is flush with
billions. It serves as a rallying point and arms supplier to thugs the
world over that want leverage in their anti-Western agendas. For the
last five years, its foreign policy can be reduced to “Whatever the
United States is for, we are against.”
The geopolitical message is clear to both the West and the former
Soviet Republics: don’t consider NATO membership (i.e., do the
Georgians really think that, should they have been NATO members, any
succor would have been forthcoming?).
Together with the dismal NATO performance in Afghanistan, the Georgian
incursion reveals the weakness of the Atlantic Alliance. The tragic
irony is unmistakable. NATO was given a gift in not having made Georgia
a member, since otherwise an empty ritual of evoking Article V’s
promise of mutual assistance in time of war would have effectively
destroyed the Potemkin alliance.
The new reality is that a nuclear, cash-rich, and energy-blessed Russia
doesn’t really worry too much whether its long-term future is bleak,
given problems with Muslim minorities, poor life-expectancy rates, and
a declining population. Instead, in the here and now, it has a window
of opportunity to reclaim prestige and weaken its adversaries. So why
hesitate?
Indeed, tired of European lectures, the Russians are now telling the
world that soft power is, well, soft. Moscow doesn’t give a damn about
the United Nations, the European Union, the World Court at the Hague,
or any finger-pointing moralist from Geneva or London. Did anyone in
Paris miss any sleep over the rubble of Grozny?
More likely, Putin & Co. figure that any popular rhetoric about
justice will be trumped by European governments’ concern for energy.
With just a few tanks and bombs, in one fell swoop, Russia has cowered
its former republics, made them think twice about joining the West, and
stopped NATO and maybe E.U. expansion in their tracks. After all, who
wants to die for Tbilisi?
Russia does not need a global force-projection capacity; it has
sufficient power to muscle its neighbors and thereby humiliate not
merely its enemies, but their entire moral pretensions as well.
Apologists in the West
The Russians have sized up the moral bankruptcy of the Western Left.
They know that half-a-million Europeans would turn out to damn their
patron the United States for removing a dictator and fostering
democracy, but not more than a half-dozen would do the same to
criticize their long-time enemy from bombing a constitutional state.
The Russians rightly expect Westerners to turn on themselves, rather
than Moscow — and they won’t be disappointed. Imagine the morally
equivalent fodder for liberal lament: We were unilateral in Iraq, so we
can’t say Russia can’t do the same to Georgia. (As if removing a
genocidal dictator is the same as attacking a democracy). We accepted
Kosovo’s independence, so why not Ossetia’s? (As if the recent history
of Serbia is analogous to Georgia’s.) We are still captive to neo-con
fantasies about democracy, and so encouraged Georgia’s efforts that
provoked the otherwise reasonable Russians (As if the problem in
Ossetia is our principled support for democracy rather than appeasement
of Russian dictatorship).
From what the Russians learned of the Western reaction to Iraq, they
expect their best apologists will be American politicians, pundits,
professors, and essayists — and once more they will not be
disappointed. We are a culture, after all, that after damning Iraqi
democracy as too violent, broke, and disorganized, is now damning Iraqi
democracy as too conniving, rich, and self-interested — the only common
denominator being whatever we do, and whomever we help, cannot be good.
Power-power
We
talk endlessly about “soft” and “hard” power as if humanitarian
jawboning, energized by economic incentives or sanctions, is the
antithesis to mindless military power. In truth, there is soft power,
hard power, and power-power — the latter being the enormous
advantages held by energy rich, oil-exporting states. Take away oil and
Saudi Arabia would be the world’s rogue state, with its medieval
practice of gender apartheid. Take away oil and Ahmadinejad is
analogous to a run-of-the-mill central African thug. Take away oil, and
Chavez is one of Ronald Reagan’s proverbial tinhorn dictators.
Russia understands that Europe needs its natural gas, that the U.S. not
only must be aware of its own oil dependency, but, more importantly,
the ripples of its military on the fragility of world oil supplies,
especially the effects upon China, Europe, India, and Japan. When one
factors in Russian oil and gas reserves, a pipeline through Georgia,
the oil dependency of potential critics of Putin, and the cash garnered
by oil exports, then we understand once again that power-power is
beginning to trump both its hard and soft alternatives.
Paralysis
Military
intervention is out of the question. Economic sanctions, given Russia’s
oil and Europe’s need for it, are a pipe dream. Diplomatic ostracism
and moral stricture won’t even save face.
Instead,
Europe — both western and eastern — along with the United States and
the concerned former Soviet Republics need to sit down, conference, and
plot exactly how these new democracies are to maintain their
independence and autonomy in the next decade. Hopefully, they will
reach the Franklinesque conclusion that “We must, indeed, all hang
together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
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