How to Avoid a New Cold War
DANIELS, ROBERT V.
Some Lessons of History How to Avoid a New Cold War By Robert V. Daniels IS THE FUTURE of the West’s relationship with Russia as dire as many contend in the wake of the August war between...
...It means seizing any opportunity to press for political and military advantage, regardless of the rhetoric emanating from Washington about a “strategic partnership...
...My own view is that they feared not responding to Georgia’s attack on their clients in South Ossetia would confirm the world’s sense of their post-Soviet impotence...
...THE WHOLE EPISODE raises puzzling questions...
...For smaller, restive minority groups inside a larger country the recipe is simple: federalism...
...Real federalism, that is, as loose as necessary, with equal rights for citizens of any ethnic affiliation in a given jurisdiction...
...What should the United States do in this dicey situation...
...Despite their substantial differences, the two countries have been bracketed as NATO candidates...
...and other powers, if images of a Hitlerian juggernaut can be set aside...
...Surprisingly, Spanish statesmen have not done much to publicize the relevance of their country’s experience in places like Georgia...
...had a role in the initiation of hostilities...
...To be sure, Russian sympathy for the separatists in Georgia was not a matter of consistent principle, witness Russia’s violent suppression of its own separatists in Chechnya...
...That experiment blew up in his face, as long-suppressed ethnic discontents among the non-Russian minorities erupted into irresistible separatism...
...Gamsakhurdia replied by trying to abolish the separate status of those autonomous republics, and war ensued...
...By contrast, Western Ukraine, the most anti-Russian, pro-European region of the republic, was never part of the empire until Stalin seized it from Poland in 1939...
...Local elections in 1990 brought non-Communists to power in most of the republics, including the huge Russian Republic where Boris N. Yeltsin gained his power base...
...policy makers...
...Saakashvili was embraced as an American ally from the moment he assumed power, and Georgia is strategically situated on the new pipeline designed to carry oil from the Caspian Basin to Turkey without going through Russia...
...But even the introduction of Russian reinforcements into South Ossetia through the Roki Tunnel beneath the spine of the Caucasus Mountains was from Georgia’s point of view a violation of the republic’s sovereignty...
...Just now Georgia is the front line, but it could soon be sharing the spotlight with Ukraine...
...But it is hard to see Washington backing away from its new commitment to support Georgia, not to mention Iraq, Israel, or U.S...
...military aid to Georgia, mainly in training and equipping the 2,000 troops it sent to Iraq...
...So when the Caucasus crisis came to a head on August 7, the Russian leadership perhaps thought it a good idea to give other parts of the former Soviet Union an admonitory lesson...
...It is now a lost opportunity, yet neutrality may still be an option for the Caucasus...
...Getting America’s relations with Russia onto a more promising track would not be easy, given the stands of both sides and the wounds that have been inflicted...
...We know that a back channel existed, in the person of Randy Scheunemann, Republican Presidential standard-bearer John McCain’s chief foreign policy adviser, who was a Washington lobbyist for Georgia...
...Wherever one drew a boundary there were always ethnic minorities who found themselves on the wrong side of the line...
...Some Lessons of History How to Avoid a New Cold War By Robert V. Daniels IS THE FUTURE of the West’s relationship with Russia as dire as many contend in the wake of the August war between Russia and the former Soviet republic of Georgia...
...Still, all we can say definitely is that he made his move, the Russians reacted predictably, and American leaders have outdone one another in denouncing the Russian “invasion” and promising massive aid to the Georgians...
...All that remained was the diplomatic dance between Russia and the European Union (EU) over peacekeeping monitors and Russia’s withdrawal...
...Could there have been back-channel communications between Washington and Tbilisi carrying a contrary message...
...They had already evacuated most of the civilian population and positioned troops at their end of the Roki Tunnel...
...That seemed like a good idea to the Abkhazians and South Ossetians, who promptly declared their own independence from Georgia...
...Russian) Empire—articulated rather extravagantly by Vladimir V. Putin when he was president as “the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century...
...Central Ukraine, around Kiev, is of a mixed mind...
...Russian reinforcements came through the two and a half-mile tunnel as fast as the tortuous access roads permitted...
...In religion it adheres to the Uniate or Catholic Church of the Eastern Rite, not to Orthodoxy...
...WHAT SHOULD the U.S...
...Maybe a new Cold War is on after all...
...Pressing for NATO acceptance of Ukraine would only be a power play, hardly the outreach to proAmerican sentiment that NATO has been in Eastern Europe...
...Whatever the case, American intelligence must have been aware of the preparations for battle on both the Georgian and Russian sides, because Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice emphatically warned the Saakashvili government not to provoke the Russians...
...The answer really depends on one’s strategic vision for the country...
...If any additional aid was supplied, it obviously was not very effective...
...By tacit agreement it was made militarily neutral between the Western and Eastern blocs during the Cold War...
...Four years ago, the conflicts over Abkhazia and South Ossetia came unfrozen...
...Underlying this anxiety was their lingering humiliation and chagrin over the dismemberment of the Soviet (i.e...
...The limit for Moscow was probably crossed by NATO’ s promise at its Bucharest summit last April to consider a “membership action plan” (with its potential military guarantees) for the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia...
...The knife began to be turned in that wound by the West’s recognizing the independence of Serbia’s Albanian-dominated Kosovo Province, a close parallel to the Abkhazia and South Ossetia situation...
...As a NATO candidate it would be exceptional: a country where membership is opposed by a large segment of public opinion, even a majority in some polls...
...These questions cannot be constructively addressed without examining the historical and ethnographical circumstances that set the stage for the worst East-West dustup since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991...
...Here the unsung model is post-Franco Spain, which has rejected the country’s traditional centralism in favor of genuine federalism for Castilian-speaking provinces as well as for the linguistically distinct regions of Catalonia, the Basque Provinces, and Galicia in the northwest...
...Under Moscow’s rule the Caucasus region, like other minority areas, remained more or less quiescent, until Mikhail S. Gorbachev decided to revitalize the Soviet Union in the 1980s by relaxing the central dictatorship...
...Most widely debated is why the Russians appeared to welcome a casus belli...
...This would be in line with the words uttered by former Secretary of State James A. Baker when Yugoslavia started to fall apart: “We don’t have a dog in that fight...
...oil interests...
...Tensions have run high ever since, partly because the borders of Abkhazia and South Ossetia—as everywhere else in the former Soviet Union—are imperfect, leaving Georgian minorities in both...
...That solution used to be derided as “Finlandization,” but left internally free to develop, Finland has become one of the world’s most shining social and economic success stories (and is today a member of the EU, though not of NATO...
...Thus the expansion of NATO into the post-Communist vacuum, taking advantage of the anti-Russian sentiment among the former Soviet subjects and making the whole region between the Baltic and Black Seas a new American sphere of influence...
...Their Army retreated precipitously...
...Russian-speaking areas such as Odessa, the Donets industrial basin, and the Crimean Peninsula with its famous Sevastopol naval base were placed quite arbitrarily by the Soviet authorities inside the administrative borders of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic...
...A second murky question is whether the U.S...
...The meltdown followed a coup that installed Georgia’s current American-educated and -backed president, Mikheil Saakashvili, on a platform of fully reintegrating the separatist regions...
...The Russians pushed ahead at will into the town of Gori (Stalin’s birthplace), about 15 miles over the line, and into the Black Sea port of Poti, about 25 miles from Abkhazia...
...By the time of the 1917 Revolution, half the population in the expanding Russian Empire consisted of restive non-Russians...
...The Georgians have a venerable history going back to the Middle Ages and their own King David, “David the Builder,” who fought off the Turks and Persians with great éclat...
...The precarious Caucasian applecart was upset when Georgian military forces attacked South Ossetia last August...
...Besides, the concept of federalism may be difficult for others to understand, as it has been for the Georgians ever since 1990, or for any people whose only experience has been under some sort of centralized monarchy or despotism...
...Or it could retreat behind the walls of Fo r tress America and simply defend our national interests...
...The superpower approach has dominated U.S...
...Even some of his former supporters in Georgia have faulted him for defying this advice...
...Georgia, under its new president, the dissident intellectual Zviad Gamsakhurdia, followed the example of the Baltic republics and declared its independence, even before Yeltsin formally dissolved the Soviet Union...
...Federalism was difficult even for the United States, where a civil war was fought over what it means...
...Do we face a new Cold War...
...Under the settlement finally concluded the Russians pulled back from the five-mile buffer zones they had established beyond the borders of Abkhazia and South Ossetia and turned them over to EU monitors...
...What really happened the night of August 7? It is well established that the Georgians opened a surprise artillery and rocket bombardment of South Ossetia’s capital, Tskhinvali, a town of some 20,000 residents in easy range...
...That would let the rest of the world congeal into a multipolar system of competing power blocs, where the Europeans would have to balance Russia off on their own and decide themselves how to handle situations like the Caucasus...
...But given President Saakashvili’s hotheadedness, and his longstanding commitment to bring the separatists into line, a wink and a nod would have been enough to set him off...
...One concrete step would be neutralizing areas of contention between the U.S...
...After the Revolution the Communists forcibly kept Georgia in the new Soviet Union, while placing within its boundaries two non-Georgian autonomous republics, Abkhazia in Georgia’s northwestern finger along the Black Sea coast, and Ossetia up against the Caucasus Mountains in the center of Georgia...
...They still have an opportunity...
...This was not exactly a “massive invasion,” as some commentators claim, though widespread Russian air strikes seem to have demoralized the Georgians...
...Today’s trouble can be dated precisely to June 1988, when the 19th Communist Party Conference acceded to Gorbachev’s proposal to allow democratic elections, both for the Union government and the republics...
...Moreover, there had already been a measure of U.S...
...Citing alleged telephone intercepts (released rather unconvincingly, a month late), Georgian authorities insist that their action was a reply to a Russian invasion of Georgian territory...
...The same could have worked for the band of countries between the Baltic and Black Seas, and kept the door open for a gradual integration of Russia into Western multilateral institutions...
...policy toward Russia ever since the end of the original Cold War...
...Robert V. Daniels, a frequent New Leader contributor, is professor emeritus of history at the University of Vermont...
...Soviet identity papers, for example, always had a separate line for an individual’s “nationality,” be it Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian, or even Jewish, Abkhazian or Ossetian...
...A net Russian gain, cemented by Moscow’s formal recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent republics...
...Admittedly the picture is complicated, but that is part of the problem for U.S...
...The most basic principle of politics in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus region is hard for Americans to grasp, because it is foreign to our melting pot experience: Nationality, in that part of the world, is not the same thing as citizenship...
...Everything in Ukraine, from election returns to languages taught in school, reflects its divisions...
...The USSR, really a refurbished reincarnation of the empire, gave ethnic minorities pro forma recognition and language rights under a dummy federalism of “Union republics” (such as Georgia) and, for lesser ethnic groups, “autonomous republics” and “autonomous provinces...
...Finland is the model...
...Nevertheless, federalism is the only reasonable solution for an ethnic crazy quilt like the Caucasus...
...It could strive to maintain its place as the world’s dominant superpower...
...outside of Tskhinvali there was evidently little if any contact between the opposing ground forces, either within South Ossetia or beyond the border with Georgia proper...
...Or it could aim for global reconciliation...
...What advice may have passed through that channel, or why, we do not know...
...But the lines between ethnic groups long intermixed in defunct empires could not be delineated any more neatly in the Soviet Union than in post-Versailles Europe...
...Of course, Spain’s solution is not without its problems...
...One can sooner imagine a Fortress America or a Fortress Western Hemisphere approach...
...The Russians clearly had prior intelligence about the attack...
...They could easily have gone on to Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital, but held off while hasty cease-fire negotiations were initiated by the French...
...These were only two of the many “frozen conflicts” around the old Soviet periphery...
...Ukraine has 10 times the population of Georgia, sits astride the main oil and gas conduits from Russia to Europe, is historically and linguistically much closer to Russia, and includes a significant Russian minority...
...Cease-fires brokered by Moscow in the early 1990s left Abkhazia and South Ossetia de jure part of Georgia but de facto independent, with Russian as well as Georgian “peacekeepers” in place...
...INTERNATIONAL RECONCILIATION is a more attractive, if uncertain, prospect...
...Russia’s attempts to reassert its influence in any of the former Soviet republics, if only by wielding its oil weapon, are therefore labeled “aggression,” to be resisted by whatever steps are required...
...In the early 1800s, however, they submitted to annexation by their Eastern Orthodox coreligionists of the Russian Empire to shield themselves from the Muslim infidels to the south...
...On August 8, Georgian troops briefly occupied Tskhinvali, but the small unit of Russian peacekeepers stationed there held out at their headquarters...
...But they would not agree to having EU monitors in the two separatist regions and kept their own forces in both...
...do at this sticky point...
Vol. 91 • September 2008 • No. 5
