Yglesias:

Soviet mucking around in Latin America never accomplished much of anything for the USSR, but it was at least in keeping with the broader strategic logic of the Cold War. The current situation is totally different. Russia basically got what it wanted out of the war with Georgia. But it did harm its relationship with the United States and to some extent with Europe. The smart play would have been to consolidate gains in the Caucuses [sic] by making nice with the West, and making Americans and Europeans wonder how much we really care about Georgia. Picking new fights just increases the chances that we’ll decide to help rearm the Georgians in a robust way.

Let’s think about this for a moment.  Besides making the pedantic point that self-appointed foreign policy thinkers should know how to spell the names of the places they are discussing, I would make some additional observations.  Russia could not have made the “smart play” Yglesias outlines here, because “making nice with the West” and consolidating its gains in the Caucasus are mutually exclusive.  Washington insists on making them so, and Moscow has made clear that it is not bothered by this.  Russian gains include removing the separatist regions from any possibility of being recovered by Georgia, demonstrating that NATO membership for Georgia is extremely foolish and making the point that Kosovo’s independence comes at a price.  “Making nice” at present would involve acceding to U.S. and European demands to respect Georgian territorial integrity, which Russia is committed at this point to disrespecting.  So long as it is the bipartisan policy consensus that Ukraine and Georgia should be brought into the Alliance and missile defense sites should be established in eastern Europe, Russia cannot continue on its present path and simultaneously engage in rapprochement with the West.  Moscow does at least seem to understand that relations with the West will suffer when it engages in actions the West deems provocative and outrageous, while Washington continues to express its bewilderment about Russian behavior in response to each Western provocation.  

The bombers flying to Venezuela and efforts to tweak Washington with support for Morales are the sort of empty gestures that do not augur an era of Russian competition for influence in Latin America.  These are headline-grabbing moves that signify nothing, but which are probably calculated to imitate and thus belittle Washington’s support for democracy promotion in Russia’s backyard.  You can almost imagine officials at the Kremlin laughing about their recent expressions of solidarity with the “democratically-elected governments” of Venezuela and Bolivia, as if to say, “Oh, look, we can support corrupt quasi-democratic regimes, too!”  Morales does have his own autonomist/separatist problem in the east; the situation is almost exactly reversed from the one in Georgia: in Bolivia, the autonomists are generally pro-U.S. and the government is hostile to American influence.  Perhaps Medvedev would say mockingly, “Mi vse Boliviitsi!”  None of this constitutes “picking a fight.”  It is more like exploiting discontent with U.S. influence in the region to get some good P.R. back home and offer some small demonstration of why Russian citizens should be glad that all those oil revenues have been wasted invested in rebuilding Russian military power.  Considering how weak Venezuela and Bolivia actually are in the region, Russia could try to build up real strategic relationships with them and still accomplish next to nothing.  Shambolic, corrupt, poor countries make for lousy proxies, especially when they are headed by hot-headed demagogues whose bark is worse than their bite.  Rather like the Russian peacekeepers who took the Pristina airport in the middle of the night back in ’99, all of this is an exercise in nose-thumbing in place of being able to project real power overseas.  Besides, Moscow must already know that Washington has every intention of rearming the Georgians.  Our policy towards Russia is so reflexively hostile and irrational that there is no incentive for Moscow not to engage in these little dramas, which definitely are evidence of how weak internationally Russia still is and how unthreatening Russian resurgence is to real American interests.