Why won’t America and Nato help us? If they won’t help us now, why did we help them in Iraq? ~Djimali Avago (quoted in article)

Along with the Ossetian refugees who have fled into North Ossetia, the Georgian people are already suffering the consequences of their government’s criminal irresponsibility, and they are understandably bitter towards the West on account of the belief that the West would reward Georgia for charting a “pro-Western” course.  Earlier today I was remarking to someone that I would still like to go to Georgia, but after this week I supposed that Georgians might not care for American visitors.  Perhaps attitudes towards Americans as such will not change that much, but it seems impossible that pro-U.S. government sentiment is going to be very strong in the future.  Probably rather like Turkish public opinion, which had once been very keen on EU membership and soured after German and French opposition postponed entry indefinitely, Georgian public opinion may well turn against the political path that Saakashvili has represented.  It would not be the first time that disaster in the field has caused a dramatic shift in domestic politics, and it is probably more likely to happen since Saakashvili wagered his presidency on the success of this attack. 

I second Greg Djerejian’s remarks from the update to his post on the war:

It’s precisely because I care about innocent Georgian lives being needlessly spilled that I’m so dismayed by Saakashvili’s recklessness, including notably his naive belief in Western support should Putin get nasty (by the by, and to stress again, the notion that Georgia would become a full-fledged member of NATO was always absurd fare, and shame on Brussels and Washington for playing pretend).  

This might be an appropriate time to reflect on the exploitation of U.S. allies during 2002-03 and during the war in Iraq.  New and aspiring NATO members were particularly susceptible to the combination of arm-twisting and enticements that Washington used to get the heads of government from so-called “New Europe” to declare their support for an invasion of Iraq, but perhaps most tragic and inexcusable of all of these cases is Georgia.  While a boon to contractors, Georgia’s significant increases in military spending diverted resources in a poor country to building up the armed forces, an investment as misguided as it is now wasted.  To make itself an attractive candidate, the Georgian government had to demonstrate its eagerness to be out of Russia’s shadow, which inevitably involved confrontational posturing and actions that riled Moscow into increasingly punitive and often excessive responses.  In the twisted establishment view, to be pro-Western in the former Soviet states is first and foremost to be impeccably anti-Russian, which would be ridiculed as counterproductive nationalist bluster anywhere else but serves as a useful barometer of how willing a population is to be used as a pawn against the Russians.  The gradual realization by those who live in the country being used as a pawn that their country is being used this way naturally inspires resentment. 

Having been excited by the prospect of membership, which Western governments led Georgia to believe was only a matter of time, many Georgians unfortunately took Western assurances at face value.  And, after all, why not?  Yes, Georgia is just about as far from the Atlantic as you can get and still have any claim to being part of Europe and America has no vital interests at stake here, but there were so many other candidates admitted in previous rounds that made no more sense than admitting Georgia.  For goodness’ sake, even the Albanians have now been allowed to join, and no one would confuse their country with one that is either strategically important or militarily ready to merit inclusion.  You might say that if Albania is good enough for NATO, Georgia would be, too, except that neither belongs in the Alliance.  

That doesn’t change the expectation of being able to get in without much trouble.  Every time NATO expansion had happened in the past, the Russians issued grave warnings and denounced the U.S. but ultimately were not in a position to stop it from happening.  Relations between Moscow and the West kept getting worse, but the Georgian government must have taken Russian inaction over the entry of the Baltic states as the final proof they needed that Russia would do nothing.  From there it was a few short steps to launching the raid on the same assumption: Russia will protest and retaliate in certain ways as it had done in the past (e.g., economic sanctions, harrassing ethnic Georgians in Russia) but will ultimately yield. 

Clearly, Saakashvili guessed wrong and has endangered his country’s future in the process, but it is not entirely unfair for Saakashvili and his countrymen to protest at what they understandably feel to be abandonment.  Imagine how much more cruel the disappointment would have been had Georgia been put on the course to membership and the same hard political realities kept NATO from lending support.  Our government should never make promises that it cannot or will not keep, and while strategic ambiguity is useful in public it is vital that clients and would-be clients understand exactly how much support the U.S. government is willing to provide.  Saakashvili’s blustery rhetoric about how the war is a defense of American “values” and how the future of the world is at stake sounds ridiculous because it is, but he is simply acting as if what President Bush said in his Second Inaugural were the working policy of the United States of America.  While it does not excuse him, Saakashvili has above all made the mistake of believing President Bush when he said that American liberty depends on the liberty of the rest of the world.  Since he fancies himself the champion of Georgian liberty, regardless of how hard that it is to take, he may have thought that the “freedom agenda” would save him.  Instead, he has pretty much ensured that the “freedom agenda” will lose whatever credibility it had.       

Update: The NYT has a similar article on disappointed Georgians.

Without wanting to dwell too much on Roger Kimball’s response to the war in Georgia, his new post concerning the candidates’ reactions prompted two reactions.  When I saw the headline, “The crisis in Georgia, 9/11, and the lessons of gratitude,” a strange thought flashed through my mind: “Maybe he’ll thank Putin for the help he provided us after 9/11!”  The more elaborate version of that momentary thought would go something like this: “Kimball’s a fair-minded guy.  He’s going to remind everyone that the first government to lend unequivocal support to the U.S. after 9/11 was the Russian government, and that Russia’s assistance and cooperation helped make the initial, overwhelmingly successful stages of the war in Afghanistan possible.  Maybe he’ll even work in a reference to Solzhenitsyn’s last published interview in which the great man talked about a missed opportunity in forging better U.S.-Russian relations.  I bet Kimball is going to temper all of his overheated rhetoric about Moscow reassembling the Soviet empire and remember that Russia was one of our strongest allies in the wake of the attacks.” 

From there he might have gone on to argue that the truly tragic thing about this unnecessary war is that both nations could be valuable U.S. allies, and that through a series of mistakes our ties to Georgia became one of the causes of the deterioration in previously decent U.S.-Russian relations.  Kimball could then have said that it makes no sense to perpetuate Cold War attitudes towards Russia in a post-9/11 world when a strong Washington-Moscow relationship is more vital than ever.  No such luck.  The post wasn’t about that at all.

Instead, Kimball offered these observations towards the end of the post:

On 9/11 we were grateful to have a leader who could distinguish between friends and enemies and who was not so crippled by moral relativism that he believed that victims should be equated with their victimizers. In 2008, we have a choice between 1) a man who knows evil and repudiates it and 2) a man who believes that there is “fault on both sides” and that discredited “progressive” institutions like the United Nations are better equipped to deal with disputes among sovereign nations than the nations themselves.

Which would you choose?

If I have only those choices and #2 is supposed to be Obama, then I would choose Obama.  No question about it.  It’s not even close.  You have to wonder how Kimball thinks wars between sovereign nations will be resolved if international institutions are rejected entirely and one of the belligerents is much weaker than the other.  It won’t work out well for the small country.  That much is certain.  In any case, after the last nearly seven years since 9/11, we have seen how the instinct that served Bush reasonably well in responding to terrorist attacks have been one of his most ruinous flaws in handling foreign policy questions, because he has consistently looked at conflicts and threats simply in terms of whether or not such-and-such a regime is to one degree or another evil.  I agree that McCain is very much like Bush in his aversion to complexity and hostility to the idea that both sides in a conflict usually do bear some share of the blame.  In this view, one side serves the forces of darkness and the other is simply resisting evil.  This view also contributes to the dehumanization and denigration of everyone on the side that is deemed reprobate, and it excuses injustices committed against that side because they are supposed to embody evil.   

But let’s think a little more about how Kimball is framing this.  By likening McCain’s Georgia response to Bush’s response to 9/11, Kimball is implying that Russian retaliation in response to an escalation of violence is morally equivalent to the terrorist attacks on 9/11 (i.e., both are evil).  That would mean that Kimball thinks that the military of an internationally recognized government engaged in a retaliatory operation in defense of a proxy is doing something very similar to what Atta and the other hijackers did.  This sort of equivalence will accomplish only one thing, which is unintentionally to legitimize the terrorists and blur the lines between legitimate and illegitimate uses of force.  Indeed, this is the logic employed by the very relativists Kimball attacks, since they also tend to blur these lines.

Even though Saakashvili escalated the violence and bears a large share of responsibility for the deaths that have followed, McCain evidently did notsee that evil and did not repudiate it, which gets at the heart of how surprisingly flexible this gnostic approach to foreign affairs can be.  There is certainly no foolish consistency for the morally clear.  This moral clarity, so called, is the ability to see the crimes and villainy of people whom you already regard as villains, while being largely blind to one’s own flaws and those of one’s allies.  It also seems to involve a healthy dose of ingratitude towards those governments that have lent support and aid to ours in times of crisis, provided that those with “moral clarity” have decided that a given government is malevolent.

McCain, though, went with his instinct and with a sense of moral clarity that seems to have been borne out by Russia’s widening campaign. ~Ben Smith

So now McCain is trying to claim that he foresaw what Russia is currently doing in Georgia, when the only reason McCain “knew” what Russia would do is that he always assumes that Russians have the very worst motives and goals and then declares himself prescient when Russia does something objectionable.  At least Smith’s use of the word instinct is correct–McCain is viscerally opposed to Russia, and so instinctively lurches to whatever the anti-Russian position is on any given issue.  The video Smith digs up includes (the videos are being circulated by McCain aides) shows how fanatically anti-Russian McCain has been for at least the last decade and includes one of the many Shevardnadze references that McCain made during the 1999-2000 campaign.  Before he was the corrupt, dictatorial ruler who had to go (to make way for the reckless despotic one), Shevardnadze was, in McCain’s estimation, “one of the great men in the history of the world.”  Seriously. 

In the clip McCain imagines that the Second Chechen War was part of an agenda of reconquest aimed at former Soviet states, despite the rather important detail that Chechnya was within Russia’s borders all along and the war involved the suppression of a separatist movement that employed terrorist tactics.  By all means, let’s track down every pro-Chechen and pro-Shevardnadze thing McCain has ever said and look over his record on Russia very carefully.  Let’s remember how supportive of the Chechens he and those around him were, and how many excuses they used to make for anti-Russian terrorism.  That will, or should, scare enough people that it might finally start to undermine the media’s acceptance that he has foreign policy expertise, and it should draw a good, useful contrast between the two candidates by showing one of them to be possessed of a strange hatred for Russia that ensures that all of his policy proposals concerning Russia are hostile and dangerous.

Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s President, might have been profoundly unwise to employ massive force against the pro-Russian separatists in South Ossetia last Thursday, but his poor judgement is not the point. The commanders of Russian forces and their political masters in the Kremlin hoped he would behave exactly as he did. ~James Sherr

So when one side in a conflict does something that is profoundly unwise that leads to a dramatic escalation of violence that has already killed thousands of people, it’s beside the point?  That the Russians hoped Saakashvili would do something monumentally stupid, reckless and dangerous does not relieve him of the responsibility for doing it.  When you consider that war with Russia was almost certain to result from his decision and that the outcome of any conflict with Russia was always going to be very bad for his country, Saakashvili’s profound lack of wisdom seems to me to be at the heart of the issue.  You can argue that this is not what matters most at the moment, since the blunder has been committed and cannot be undone, but if we are going to judge Saakashvili’s actions I don’t see how his disastrous blunder can be dismissed so easily.  Embarking on a course that likely meant war with a vastly superior force in a fight he had no hope of winning was a deeply unjust thing to do.  Having been entrusted with high office to protect the interests of his country and people, he betrayed that trust with a horrible decision. 

Do the Russians bear some responsibility for setting the trap that Saakashvili so stupidly walked into?  I suppose they do.  Of course, they are responsible for any excesses they have committed or will commit, and given their overwhelming superiority their campaign ought to judged according to strict standards.  The attacks on Georgian infrastructure and the use of indiscriminate shelling and bombing are wrong and unnecessary.  While I am tempted to ridicule people in our government who have now discovered the importance of proportionality in warfare, since they have never before shown much concern for this principle before now, it is an essential principle that allows us to distinguish between legitimate and excessive uses of force.  Clearly, the war against Lebanon was a disproportionate response, and Russia is in danger of engaging in the same overkill that made the original, limited Israeli retaliation in 2006 go from enjoying broad international support to being almost universally condemned.  Will the Russians advance past Gori and attack the capital?  If they do, they will quickly find themselves with few defenders around the world.

Update: The Russians have reportedly bombed the Tbilisi airport.  I am still not persuaded that Russia intends to annex Georgia, but Moscow does seem to have decided on inflicting total defeat on the Georgians and presumably ousting Saakashvili in the process.  This would be an excessive response.  Just as it was no defense of Georgia’s actions to say that the Russians were goading Saakashvili into lashing out, it will be no defense of Russia’s excesses to say that Georgia escalated the conflict.  Moscow should accept the cease-fire proposal and halt its offensive, or its war in Georgia will start to push indifferent and even sympathetic nations into opposition.  Unfortunately, Moscow is probably more interested in its own kind of “demonstration effect” by making an example of Georgia. 

Update: Somewhat related, I agree entirely with Thomas de Waal, who argues that this was an entirely avoidable conflict and says it is outrageous that Russia is now bombing Georgian towns and villages.  That is why Russia should halt its offensive now and respond to the Georgian offer to negotiate.  His column on this is as balanced as any I’ve seen since the war started.

What we’ll think of is the country of Georgia and we’ll realize that August 8 was the date when Russia began reassembling the former Soviet empire in earnest. ~Roger Kimball

Via Tom Piatak

Yes, just as Iran is poised to revive the Achaemenid Empire!  It’s not just that I find the charges of Russian imperialism a bit tired coming from people who have insisted for years that invading other countries, toppling their governments and setting up puppet states is not imperialism, but I find them very boring.  I mean, how unimaginative can one be to say, “They’re bringing back the Soviet Union!”?  That’s the sort of thing an eccentric Bond villain would try to do.  There are no more workers’ councils, and there is no more USSR.  In every sense of the word, the Soviets are gone and their empire is dust.  No one–not Putin, not Medvedev, not anyone–is bringing it back as it once existed.  Now if Kimball had said that Moscow is trying to reassemble parts of the pre-revolutionary Russian Empire, at least in terms of its territorial dimensions, I would still say that he is grossly exaggerating what’s going on, but at least he wouldn’t be embarrassing himself by saying completely nonsensical things. 

The fact is that Russia has yet to advance its ground forces beyond the separatist regions, and it has given no indication in its movements or its rhetoric that it intends to do anything in the way of “reabsorbing” or annexing Georgia.  This is irresponsible alarmism.  While some suspect that the endgame is to overthrow Saakashvili, we cannot know that, either.  As hard as it is for some people to believe, Russia still seems to be defending the status quo ante and exacting punishment on Saakashvili’s government for his blunder.  When that starts to change, I will be among the first to acknowledge it, because at that point Russia’s fairly limited response will have mutated into something else.  There are parallels with the war in Lebanon two years ago: Israel could have waged a limited, focused campaign against Hizbullah that would have had the backing of most other countries, or it could engage in the wholesale wrecking of an entire country and lose international sympathy, and it chose the latter.  To the extent that the Russians are already starting to imitate Israel’s response in targeting public infrastructure, I think they are making a mistake.  The indiscriminate nature of the fighting so far is very troubling, seeing as it has already killed 1,500 people. 

Note well that the same people who are warning desperately that Russia is trying to get its hands on the BTC pipeline are the same people who will deny to their dying breath that oil had anything to do with the invasion of Iraq.  It might be that they have a point about Iraq, but just watch how they attribute the most mercenary ambitions to other powers that they absolutely refuse to contemplate when thinking about our policies.  Note also how keeping the BTC pipeline from falling under Russian control or influence has become the most frequently-cited reason among Westerners why we should help the Georgians (i.e., they are urging us to back Georgia in a war for oil, or at least access to oil). 

Update: I said I would acknowledge that something has changed when Russian forces advanced beyond the separatist areas, and here is that post.

Charles Ganske has an interesting post about the war and the overheated anti-Russian reactions in the English-language  media, echoing my complaints about predictable Western commentary on Russia:

CNN briefly portrayed Russia as the big red USSR while showing Americans where South Ossetia and Georgia are on the world map. Hugh Hewitt, one of the most popular conservative talk radio show hosts in America, cited a report on the air from Austin-based Strategic Forecasting Inc. asserting that Russia was using the Georgia campaign to intimidate all of the former Soviet republics. The report, Hewitt seemed to imply, suggested a master plan by the Kremlin to revive the at least a rump Soviet Union through military might. Hugh Hewitt’s guest, Larry Kudlow, a popular conservative commentator who hosts the highly watched “Kudlow and Company” TV show on CNBC, called Russian leaders “war criminals”. A news announcer on the same national talk radio network said that Russian forces had reportedly killed 1,400 people in the region, even though this was actually the number claimed by the South Ossetians as victims of Georgian shelling and bombs. Headlines on AOL news said, “Russia Invades Small Neighbor”, which makes for a more dog bites man headline than, “Russia puts troops into small region invaded by former Soviet republic asserting sovereignty over disputed territory”. The U.S. taxpayer funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty website published a ridiculous article by Echo Moskvy radio’s Yulia Latynina, calling South Ossetia a “terrorist state” and comparing the region to the PLO or Hezbollah statelets in southern Lebanon — as if the South Ossetians were sending suicide bombers and rockets into Georgia.

Ganske then asks an important question:

…why do so many Americans, conservatives especially, who normally proclaim their distrust the media, accept it so unquestioningly on the subject of Russia? After all, it isn’t as if the same biases that lead many Americans to confess to pollsters that they have Obama fatigue from so many puff profiles of the Democratic presidential candidate do not also affect coverage of foreign affairs in the U.S. In other words, a media tendency to focus on compelling personalities, like Vladimir Putin, rather than report on a complex country like Russia from the bottom up. 

Ganske asks several questions that drive home just how persistent the anti-Russian bias in our media coverage is by the simple fact that virtually no one in the West ever asks them:

The question never seems to be raised: what if Russia’s neighbors are occasionally in the wrong? Were Ukraine and Belarus entitled to subsidized Russian gas at a quarter of the European price indefinitely? Is Georgia justified in forcing the issue of a separatist region with arms rather than negotiations? Should Poland host an American radar, supposedly designed to counter the Iranian missile threat, that can track anything in Russian airspace all the way to the Urals? Is Russia always doomed to be a nasty Bear roaming the woods looking for trouble?

The question about subsidized gas supplies is particularly important, since you will frequently hear about how Russia wields its energy supplies as an instrument of policy.  First of all, this is not all that incredible or even all that sinister, since the energy companies are state-run industries that are going to be used to give the government leverage overseas.  But even then the coverage of the change in subsidy levels was misleading, since it emphasized that the price was going up and neglected to note that Ukraine was still receiving the supplies at a heavily discounted rate.  Even so, what would normally have been greeted as a welcome reduction in government distortion of the market price was seen as a dastardly ploy to punish neighboring states.  

Ganske also addresses the important, if obvious point about double standards.  Missing from the discussion of double standards, however, is the extent to which Russian problems with Chechen terrorism have been treated very differently from the way our government has responded to domestic terrorist threats in other countries. 

Update: Greg Djerejian has a good post that covers a lot of ground.  Alex Massie also has a useful round-up of links along with his own comments from yesterday.

One United Nations diplomat joked on Saturday that “if someone went to the Russians and said, ‘OK, Kosovo for Iran,’ we’d have a deal.”

That might be hyperbole, but there is a growing feeling among some officials in the Bush administration that perhaps the United States cannot have it all, and may have to choose its priorities, particularly when it comes to Russia. ~Helene Cooper

It’s an encouraging sign that this feeling is growing at least among some officials, but what does it say about this administration that they apparently believed that the U.S. could have it all and didn’t need to prioritize which policies were more important and which were secondary?  This is the crew that thought it could expand NATO twice in five years and recognize Kosovo, all the while berating Russia for its internal political conditions, and then ask the Russians for help with Iran as if nothing had happened. 

There is a basic problem with having all these satellites whose interests we are supposed to protect.  U.S. interests will often require our government to raise the hopes of small nations, only to dash them when our real priorities conflict with lending support to them.  At the same time, to the extent that our government takes these obligations to numerous satellites seriously it requires compromising or limiting our ability to pursue policies in the American interest.

The Bolshevik government signed a treaty respecting Georgia’s independence — which Europe, as President Saakashvili pointedly reminded me, naïvely insisted on taking at face value. By the time the Europeans woke up to reality, it was too late. ~James Traub

Of course, the Europeans of the late 1910s and early 1920s may have had just a few other things that were higher priorities than the independence of Georgia.  It wasn’t a question of “waking up”–by 1920-21, European support for the Whites throughout most of the old empire had disappeared because the Bolsheviks had won.  U.S. aid to the Whites in Siberia would expire soon after that when the Bolsheviks took Vladivostok.  Meanwhile, there were problems brewing for different Allied powers in Iraq and Turkey at this time that took precedence.  Leave it to a nationalist like Saakashvili to think of post-WWI history in utterly ethnocentric terms.  Of course, he has every reason to portray the Russia-Georgia relationship today as a reprise of the Bolshevik takeover: it plays well with Western audiences, it inspires sympathy and aligns the modern Russian government with its far more despicable predecessor. 

Traub writes later:

The head of the Georgian Communist party was Lavrenti Beria, a cold-blooded killer who would become the master architect of Stalin’s terror.

I assume most people know who Beria was, but I cite this because it is important to remember that Saakashvili’s wife invoked Beria, along with Stalin, as an example of the kind of strong Georgian leader that she believed her husband to be.  Even once you account for Georgian nationalist bias, the old cult of personality directed towards Stalin and the collective post-Soviet amnesia about Soviet government crimes, that statement remains fairly shocking since his wife is Dutch and presumably knows more of the record of Stalin and Beria unclouded by mythology.  (Interestingly, the old Weekly Standard article by Richard Carlson that also included this detail has apparently been scrubbed from their site, but here is the cache of the page.)  Here is a telling excerpt from the interview with Saakashvili’s wife that I have mentioned before:

I think my husband is the right person to frighten people. That is not to say it is immediately fascism or something. Should he develop extremist traits he will be alerted to that. 

It seems that he was not alerted often enough.  

Traub adds this very debatable claim later:

Of course NATO is no longer an anti-Soviet alliance, and the fact that Russia views NATO’s eastward expansion as a threat to its security is a vivid sign of the deep-rooted cold war mentality of Mr. Putin and his circle.

Think about that one.  Having outlived its reason for being when the USSR collapsed, NATO remains a military alliance, and it is expanding up to the borders of Russia, but it reflects the Cold War mentality of Putin and his circle that they regard this as a threat?  Isn’t there at least as much evidence for the Cold War mentality of the people who support expanding an outdated Cold War alliance in deliberately anti-Russian ways?  Add to this that one of the biggest supporters of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and one of the biggest critics of Russia during the Second Chechen War and over the last decade, John McCain, is unusually strident in his hostility to Russia, which he expresses through his support for Tbilisi.  It doesn’t take a genius to grasp that Moscow perceives NATO expansion in anti-Russian terms because some of its foremost advocates, including someone who may be the next President, are obviously, reflexively anti-Russian. 

Nonetheless, while there are certain problems with Traub’s piece (the constant references to 1938 are as grating as they are irrelevant, except insofar as it describes Saakashvili’s neocon-like obsession with that year), it offers some good background, particularly as it relates to the background of the current conflict:

Soon after taking office, he succeeded in regaining Georgian control over the southwestern province of Ajara. Then, in the summer of 2004, citing growing banditry and chaos, he sent Interior Ministry troops into South Ossetia. After a series of inconclusive clashes, the troops were forced to make a humiliating withdrawal.

Still, this violation of the status quo infuriated the Russians, and Mr. Saakashvili, for once listening to his few dovish advisors, agreed to seek a negotiated settlement in Abkhazia. By late 2005, a Georgian mediator had initialed an agreement: Georgia would not use force, and the Abkhaz would allow the gradual return of 200,000-plus ethnic Georgians who had fled the violence. But the agreement collapsed in early 2006, done in by hardliners on both sides. This chapter has been all but effaced from the history one hears in Georgia.

Traub also acknowledges the direct role Western recognition of Kosovo had on Moscow’s decision-making:

Although Russia, as the peacekeeping power, was charged with preserving an international consensus that recognized Georgia’s claims over Abkhazia, Russia lifted sanctions on Abkhazia last March. This had nothing to do with local events: Mr. Putin had tried for years to prevent Kosovo from declaring its independence from Serbia, and when the Kosovars went ahead, with strong American and European support, last February, Mr. Putin responded by leveling a blow at America’s Caucasus darling.

The thing that I find most frustrating, and what I think Russians may also find very frustrating, is that even after years of long Russian forebearance in the face of things Moscow regarded as serious provocations and humiliations Russia has continually been portrayed as an expansionist, revisionist and (in McCain’s crazy world) “revanchist.”  Many American pols were taking this view of Russia when it was quite weak, c. 1999, and you have them taking it up now that Russia is resurgent, and at neither time was it the correct view. 

Traub buys into the view that recent events have made it harder to advance a realist view of Russia:

In a recent essay, the archrealist Henry Kissinger argued that Putin-era policy had been driven not by dreams of restored glory, but by “a quest for a reliable strategic partner, with America being the preferred choice.” Some Russia experts on the left, like Stephen Cohen of Princeton, have taken a similar view. But Russia’s bellicose behavior, and now the hostilities along its border, make it increasingly difficult to act on such a premise without seeming naïve.

On this point, however, Kissinger and Cohen are right.  One of the impediments to building such a partnership between Washington and Moscow is the assumption that Moscow is a revisionist power that must be thwarted at every step.  The other obvious impediments are the steady eastward creep of NATO and the introduction of U.S. weapons systems into current central European member states.  Depressingly, some of the foreign policy advisors to the candidates don’t seem to understand this at all.  Just as worrying as Kagan’s misleading democracy/autocracy struggle model are the views of one of Obama’s Russia advisors, Michael McFaul:

He attributes Russia’s hostility to further NATO expansion less to geostrategic calculations than to what he says is Mr. Putin’s cold war mentality. The essential Russian calculus, he says, is, “Anything we can do to weaken the U.S. is good for Russia.”

There’s that Cold War mentality again.  But if he has a Cold War mentality, how would his response to NATO expansion be anything but the result of a geostrategic calculation about the military and political threat the expanded Alliance poses?  It is not encouraging that any of Obama’s advisors thinks that the current Russian government is dedicated to working against U.S. interests, since that attitude, if it continues to be enshrined in policy, will be a self-fulfilling one.

Update: The full Carlson article is here.

Correction: Carlson’s Weekly Standard article was not taken down from their site.  The mistake was entirely mine, and I regret the error.

John Cole cuts through the superficial Politico coverage of the candidates’ responses to the war in Georgia and comes to the right conclusion:

So, in what the Politico calls a 3 am test, John McCain responds belligerently towards Russia, and were he President there is no doubt it would exacerbate the situation, and it turns out that his top foreign policy advisor just so happened to be a wholly owned subsidiary of the nation of Georgia.

This is right, but John can push this a bit more if he looks back at McCain’s history of statements about Georgia.  As Justin Raimondo wrote for TAC earlier this year, McCain has been taking the anti-Russian line on South Ossetia for years:

In 2006, McCain traveled to Tskhinvali, in the disputed region South Ossetia, where pro-Russian citizens want to secede from the former Soviet republic of Georgia and seek union with Russia. After his visit, he concluded:

I think that the attitude there is best described by what you see by driving in [to Tskhinvali]: a very large billboard with a picture of Vladimir Putin on it, which says ‘Vladimir Putin Our President.’ I do not believe that Vladimir Putin is now, or ever should be, the president of sovereign Georgian soil.

Imagine if the British, annoyed by American encroachments in Texas, had sent a member of Parliament to denounce the defenders of the Alamo. That, at any rate, is how the South Ossetians think of it. And what American interests or values are at stake in that dirt-poor, war-torn corner of the Caucasus?

Of course, McCain’s hostility to Russia and his weird chumminess with the Georgian government predates 2006 and even predates the rise of Saakashvili.  1999-2000 GOP debate watchers may remember how frequently McCain invoked Shevardnadze’s name and declared his desire to defend Georgia against the Russians.  The same advisor who has been on the Georgian payroll, Scheunemann, is also the advisor who coined the phrase “rogue state rollback” that McCain was peddling in his first bid for the White House, and in McCain’s mind for almost a decade Russia has been one of the states whose influence he wants to roll back.  This has become evident in other anti-Russian poses he has taken, including his proposal that they be thrown out of the G-8 and excluded from his dangerous pet project, the League of Democracies. 

Reacting to the same article, Robert Stacy McCain says:

So, if getting tough with the Russkies is what you want, Maverick’s your man. 

If “getting tough with” means “mindlessly provoking for no good reason,” that’s absolutely right.

Now for something completely different. 

If Joe Lieberman is named McCain’s running mate, what else will happen?  James has a vision: 

Paleocons will set fire to their TVs, AIPAC will commission an aircraft carrier, and a Day of Mourning will be proclaimed in Damascus; Putin will quietly switch places with Daniel Craig, and Reason magazine will announce the Death of Fun in a double issue that endorses John Edwards for President. John McCain himself will unveil a 50:1 size artist’s rendering of the new dollar coin, with Harry Truman on one side and Ariel Sharon on the other, and he will promise to appoint Doug Feith Attorney General and Hillary Clinton Ambassador to Yemen. Bill Clinton will board himself up in the Chateau Marmont with Kristanna Loken and Carla Bruni, and Sarkozy will annex Lebanon and then commit suicide.

Pat Buchanan will immediately announce his candidacy on the Tory Party ticket for the Presidency of Canada, Daniel Larison will be appointed Comes privatae largitionis of Chicago, and Will Wilkinson will declare central Iowa a sovereign Misery-Free Zone with completely porous borders. Andrew Sullivan will move to the Isle of Man. Ross and Reihan will be named the emergency interim CEOs of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Matt Lauer will melt into a puddle of Awesomeberry flavored Kool-Aid, Family Guy will run only on Danish satellite, and The New Republic will become profitable. Joel Osteen will gain eighty pounds, David Brooks will become the Scarlet Pimpernel, and the Bilderbergs will relocate to Shanghai.

That all sounds about right, except for the outlandish part about paleocons burning their televisions.  To do that, we would need to own televisions in the first place.  We do respect private property rights, after all, and we’re not about to start burning other people’s TVs.  I would prefer to be mesazon of Greektown, but I’ll take what I can get.