Russia seizes an opportunity to discourage Western drift

Russia seizes an opportunity to discourage Western drift

Based on recent events in Georgia, reports of the death of the Soviet Union may have been exaggerated.

Regardless of the provocation, it was clearly foolish (not to mention immoral) for Georgia to launch an attack on South Ossetia, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds or thousands of ethnic Russians, depending on who is doing the counting. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev went so far as to describe the Georgian attacks as “genocide.”

Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili gave Russia just what it was looking for, a chance to crush the Georgian military, reassert its position of power and influence over former Soviet states and send a message to other independent nations that might be flirting too aggressively with the West. As a bonus, Saakashvili gave Russia its opening to act before Georgia became aligned with NATO, which would have required a military response from the 26 NATO nations.

And given that it is possible, even likely, that Russia’s end game is to topple Saakashvili’s regime, Georgia’s NATO ambitions may have been crushed by the Russian tanks that rumbled across the border.

In some ways, these might be the first shots fired in a new Cold War. While the United States has been preoccupied in Iraq and Afghanistan, Russia has been asserting itself internationally, something made all the easier by its emergence as an oil exporter. Prosperity at home made it relatively easy for Vladimir Putin to subvert democracy by installing a puppet, Medvedev, as his successor as president, while Putin slid over to become prime minister.

Putin in charge

After Georgia’s assault on South Ossetia, Putin left the Olympics in Beijing and flew to Vladikavkaz, the capital of North Ossetia, from which he oversaw Russia’s response and from which he issued a statement inviting Georgians to pass judgment of Saakashvili’s leadership.

A few weeks ago, Republican John McCain suggested that Russia’s increasingly autocratic government had disqualified it as a member of the G-8, a group of economic democracies that also includes the United States, Canada, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Japan. In the heat of a presidential campaign dominated by other issues, McCain’s suggestion got little traction. Today, it deserves more serious consideration.

President Bush is in a difficult position. The United States encouraged Georgia’s alignment with Europe — indeed, in an oped piece in The Washington Post former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev said Saakashvili launched the attack on the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali because he was expecting unconditional support from the West, and the West had given him reason to think he would have it.

So even as Russia has sent a message to Georgia and other former vassals about the cost of drifting to the West, the United States sends a message by its response, or lack of response, to Russia’s counterattack.

President Bush and his European allies should not only be talking about what they should be doing to protect the independence of Georgia, the perspective NATO ally, but what they are prepared to do to protect Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, which are already NATO members.

The world outside the Middle East has suddenly gotten a lot more complicated and a lot more dangerous.