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De Waal on the Caucasus

Foreign Policy is to be congratulated on this very fair and intelligent article on the South Caucasus by Thomas de Waal. Mr. de Waal is an expert on the Caucasus and author of a forthcoming book on the region. He makes some excellent observations on how outsiders make problems in the Caucasus worse, and he […]

Foreign Policy is to be congratulated on this very fair and intelligent article on the South Caucasus by Thomas de Waal. Mr. de Waal is an expert on the Caucasus and author of a forthcoming book on the region. He makes some excellent observations on how outsiders make problems in the Caucasus worse, and he identifies three errors that those outside the region make in thinking about the region. In short, the errors include treating the region as if it were a chessboard and the locals as if they were pawns, viewing the region as a helpless target of unending Russian aggression and great power, and seeing the Caucasus as a strategically vital region.

De Waal is right about all of these, but it’s the third error, or “mirage” as he calls it, that probably matters most in practice. We in the U.S. regularly attach more strategic importance to other parts of the world than these places merit. Many advocates for these places rely on our exaggerated estimates of strategic importance to make their basically sentimental or ideological attachment to the places appear to have value to the nation as a whole. This is how advocates get away with dressing up their private enthusiasms as national security imperatives.

Before you know it, we have “vital” interests in every corner of the globe, when most of these places are tangential or irrelevant to American interests. This not only confuses us about where we have vital interests, which may cause us to neglect our genuine interests in pursuit of these phantoms, but it is usually serving the nations in the region poorly as well. That has clearly been the lesson of the experiment in treating Georgia as a U.S. satellite: Georgian and American interests were harmed and nothing was gained.

I very much agree with De Waal’s recommendation that policymakers should begin moving towards policies on the South Caucasus that stop empowering and reinforcing the worst habits of local politics. Taking a less intrusive approach and accepting the region as a “zone of neutrality” make for a very sensible course of action. It probably goes without saying that no regional policy for the South Caucasus will be very successful without involving Turkey, Iran and Russia along with the Caucasian republics, and that would involve repairing relations with Turkey and restoring relations with Iran. Over the course of the last decade, Washington has managed to alienate or aggravate almost every government in the region, and there is a lot of fence-mending that needs to take place before the U.S. can be effective in opening up those borders to trade and exchange.

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