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Georgia

Posting will be light today, but James has updates on the very important story coming out of the Caucasus.  For as long as I can remember, I have warned that Saakashvili was reckless and dangerous, and with his bid to force re-integration of South Ossetia he provoked the inevitable Russian backlash.  You would think that someone who […]

Posting will be light today, but James has updates on the very important story coming out of the Caucasus.  For as long as I can remember, I have warned that Saakashvili was reckless and dangerous, and with his bid to force re-integration of South Ossetia he provoked the inevitable Russian backlash.  You would think that someone who has been complaining for years that Russia is using the separatist states as nothing more than proxies would not then go ahead and launch an attack on one of the proxies!  But that is exactly what he did, and everyone should remember that it was Saakashvili who created the current crisis.   

To understand the Russian response, imagine how Americans would respond if Serbia launched an attack into Kosovo while our KFOR troops were still there, and then imagine how much stronger the U.S. response would be if, in the course of the attack to retake the province, our troops took casualties because of that attack.  These are the unfortunate, ruinous things that happen when state sovereignty is reduced to a meaningless phrase by past interventions and partitions, and the governments that attacked Yugoslavia over its internal affairs and partitioned Kosovo have no authority to find fault with what Russia is doing now.  McCain’s complaints about violations of Georgian sovereignty are especially rich coming from the likes of him.  Of course, these regions are part of Georgia, and ideally Georgian sovereignty should be respected, but the folly of Saakashvili has probably ensured that he will lose both South Ossetia and Abkhazia and maybe more than that before it is all over.     

P.S.  Remember, both Obama and McCain wanted Georgia to join NATO, and the Bush administration tried to have them admitted at the last meeting in Bucharest.  Had it not been for the resistance of several European governments, this small, ugly crisis could have potentially been the trigger for an international disaster that might have dragged in all of Europe and the U.S.  I assume that this does not just mean that Georgia won’t be allowed into NATO, but that it also means that eastward NATO expansion in its entirety will halt.  Of course, that would make sense.  If I know McCain and his obsessive Russophobia, he will take this episode as proof that we must make Georgia a member of NATO and must do it right now.

Update: James Joyner writes:

If the U.S. and Western Europe aren’t prepared to use force upon the invasion of Georgia by Russia, then we’ve got no business even considering inviting them to join the Alliance.

Of course, since Georgia is not in NATO, the U.S. and our European allies have no reason to be prepared to use force in this case.  We already had no business in considering inviting Georgia into NATO, and this new conflict drives home why it was always a terrible idea.  We should all be grateful that Western governments are not prepared to use force to respond to this.  The dangers from the general war that could possibly follow are almost too grave to contemplate.  If other powers work to bring the parties to the conflict to the negotiating table, rather than backing the incomparably weaker state and prolonging the conflict, we can avoid the sort of blunders that made the July crisis such a disaster in 1914.  Small regional wars become global crises only when all of the major powers feel compelled to “do something” about them.  Had proponents of expansion had their way last year or earlier, we would be on the cusp of such a crisis right now.

I should add that there might have been a different, but also very undesirable outcome if Georgia had been welcomed into NATO and Saakashvili decided recklessly, just as he has now done, to test how far the Alliance would go only to be told that he was on his own.  It would avoid a broader war, but that would have made NATO security guarantees to all recent member states worthless and confirm that NATO is truly not a defensive alliance at all.  No matter which scenario had played out following Georgian entry into NATO, this outbreak of conflict would either have led to disaster or would have revealed NATO’s promises to be empty.  As I see it, the most worrisome thing is that we have already made security guarantees to other states that border Russia, some of which have significant Russian minorities that might become the focus of irredentism or separatism in the future, and it is not clear to me that we are really any more willing to go to war to defend those states than we would have been to defend Georgia.

Second Update: Robert Farley has a good, balanced post about the conflict.

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