Last month, I mentioned that I was now reading The Caucasus by Thomas de Waal, and I promised addtional posts in the future. I probably won’t be blogging on every part of the book, but I wanted to make some general comments about it before I write posts on more specific topics. Given the complex and contentious nature of the subject matter de Waal is discussing, I have the found the book to be exemplary in its honesty and balance. He addresses the misconceptions and mistakes of the Russian government as straightforwardly as he does the errors of the local actors. The Caucasus also pays attention to national myths without simply endorsing them. The things that have stood out for me so far (I have not had a chance to read all of the chapters yet) are de Waal’s interest in thinking of the South Caucasus as a distinct region, his fair-minded handling of the question of the Armenian genocide, and his attention to the area’s demographic changes over the centuries that turned Tiflis from a predominantly Armenian commercial center in the early modern period into Tbilisi and the center of modern Georgia. This is something that has interested me since I first became acquainted with Sayat Nova, the great Armenian poet who served at the court of a Georgian ruler in Tiflis.

Something in the introduction that de Waal wrote about the relations between the South Caucasus and the rest of the world struck me as particularly worth noting:

In this conjunction of the deeply local and the global, the small players can overestimate their importance, and the big players can promise too much.

This has obvious applications for the recent past, and de Waal uses the 2008 war explicitly as an example of how this dangerous dynamic can work. Sympathizers with the Saakashvili government are partly to blame for causing the small player in this case, the Georgian government, to overestimate its importance. When major figures in the American political class are routinely praising and endorsing a client state as the hope of the entire region and the leading edge of progress, it is understandable that leaders of any small state might start imagining that they are more important than they are. Related to this are the unreasonably high expectations of help that the client state inevitably has as a result.

The situation in Georgia before the 2008 war was far from optimal, but after following the situation for the past several years and especially after reading de Waal’s treatment of the conflicts involved I am more sure than ever that U.S. support for the Georgian government enabled dangerous and self-destructive behavior. I have often criticized Saakashvili and his actions as reckless in the last six years of writing, but I should have been more clear that it was the U.S. that was truly reckless in its mindless encouragement of a Georgian government in a region that it didn’t understand. Yes, Saakashvili was foolish to expect American backing, but Washington was perhaps even more to blame for offering false hope and conjuring up the illusion of support. If Saakashvili overestimated how much he and his government mattered to the U.S., it was because Bush and his allies gave him reason to believe it.