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Russia Policy: Making a Virtue out of Ceding the Initiative

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I had originally intended to post briefly on the implications of the Russo-Georgian War for State vs. State warfare and 4GW but today’s reactions by the Bush administration and Senators McCain and Obama are a more important concern. The United States has no strategic policy in regard to Russia – and if the statements of the candidates for president are to be believed – we won’t have one in the next four years either.

President Bush, speaking today:

….As I have made clear, Russia’s ongoing action raise serious questions about its intentions in Georgia and the region. In recent years, Russia has sought to integrate into the diplomatic, political, economic, and security structures of the 21st century. The United States has supported those efforts. Now Russia is putting its aspirations at risk by taking actions in Georgia that are inconsistent with the principles of those institutions. To begin to repair the damage to its relations with the United States, Europe, and other nations, and to begin restoring its place in the world, Russia must keep its word and act to end this crisis.

The President is alluding to Russia’s G-8 membership, the WTO, the OECD and similarly prestigious diplomatic entities. The strong emphasis Bush placed upon the need for Russian adherence to the cease-fire agreement and extending humanitarian aid was very well placed from the perspective of a moral level of conflict. The cancellation of American participation in a scheduled Russian-NATO meeting was also appropriate ( no allies signed on to that very minor reprimand). Though we need to be honest here, the dispatch of U.S. military personnel to deliver humanitarian aid is meant as a “tripwire” against a resumption of a full-bore Russian onslaught into Georgia, not just to hand out MRE’s and bottled water to displaced villagers. It’s a very serious move ( and unaccompanied as far as I am aware by German, French or other NATO troops – if I am wrong, please correct me).

Let’s be perfectly clear: the Russian Army’s invasion of Georgia was carried out in trademark Russian fashion, brutally with obvious disregard for civilian casualties and reports of casual murders and looting by Russian soldiers. The only noteworthy exception to their usual, thuggish, performance here has been the swift accomplishment of all military objectives and total rout of the enemy army. Not since special KGB commandos seized the Tajbeg Palace in Kabul and assassinated a Prime Minister in 1979 has a Russian military operation been carried out so flawlessly.

As a result, many people in European capitals, the State Department, the IC and the Pentagon have egg on their faces right now. A lot of serious VIPs have been embarrassed by a client ( Saakashvili and company) who performed so poorly in this debacle – at every level that matters – that much of their previous professional advice and opinions regarding said client in retrospect look like hopelessly incompetent bullshit. These VIP’s are faced with two choices: circle the wagons around their naked emperor and try to find some kind of bow to put on this disaster or candidly admit that they horribly misjudged the entire situation to their superiors and reassess the policy in regards to Georgia from scratch.

Guess which route we are going today ?

Now to be fair, many of the actions taken by the President are sound and wise ones. Russia needs to feel significant pushback here and Bush is doing that very firmly and responsibly – and without much help from our allies other than President Sarkozy. The problem is that these are ad hoc reactions – flailing about frantically because in truth the United States has had no strategic policy toward Russia or any objective that gets much further than pleasing insider interests who are squealing loudest to the administration or the Congress. Not decommissioning Russian nukes fast enough ? Look no further than American uranium company lobbies. In regards to Kosovo or Georgia, that would be the EU. What? Isn’t Saakashvili America’s “special project” ( to quote Russia’s Foreign Minister – some Putin toady, name unimportant, he warms a chair). Well, not really. My friend Dave Schuler has an outstanding post on Europe’s stake in Georgia. It’s a lot larger than is ours:

….Germany’s ties with Georgia are, if anything, closer. Georgia is Germany’s fifth largest trading partner. I presume that much of this trade is a consequence of Georgia’s two pipelines. Energy independence is as much a political hot topic in Germany as it is here but the term means mostly not being so terribly dependent on Russia. The path to greater energy independence for Germany lies through Georgia.

….In 2007 FDI in Georgia exceeded the $1 billion mark. A substantial proportion of that was EU countries.

Would any reader care to hazard a guess as to the number of German troops expected to be standing next to American soldiers in Georgia delivering humanitarian aid ? This is not to knock the Germans per se as to point out that the United States carrying all of the water for Europe and absorbing all of the friction in return for nothing doesn’t make a whole lot of strategic sense. Europe is safe, wealthy and grown-up and not shy about pressing their collective economic interests but slow to accept all of the responsibilities they ask of the United States and our own State Department is a reflexive enabler of the extended European adolescence. Leadership in an alliance does not always mean being the other guy’s doormat.

Deciding what our long-term interests are in the region and what our relationship with Russia should be is something seventeen years overdue and presidential candidates who have no clue, left to their own devices, of what to do or, who take foreign policy advice from a paid agent of a foreign government, worry the hell out of me.

UPDATE:

Fabius Maximus had some recommended posts on Russia-Georgia worth sharing that I’d like to add here along with a few others I caught this morning:

Stratfor War Nerd Helena Cobban Joshua Foust Glittering Eye Coming Anarchy Robert Kaplan (Hat tip CA)

Whirledview SWJ Blog Global Guerillas Selil Blog Andrew Sullivan

D-Day: “Clink”

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One of my favorite writers is A.J. Liebling. This recent review of the new Library of America volume of his Six Armies in Normandy. The reviewer justly praises John Keegan’s book Six Armies in Normandy, then compares Keegan’s writing about the invasion to Liebling’s on-the-scene reportage.

His account of the Normandy Invasion is pretty much limited to a single cross-channel trip by a single landing craft. Its art is almost the inverse of Keegan’s. It begins in boredom, unacknowledged anxiety, uncertainty; its later moments of danger and violence are realized largely after the fact. It is so small a fragment of the gross event that it has almost no significance in the success or failure of the invasion. Liebling later found out that of the ten landing craft that were part of the group with which he went in, four were sunk before they had unloaded the men they were carrying, “a high proportion of whom were killed.” …
 
Liebling was, he says, on the upper deck during the four minutes it took for the two platoons the landing craft carried to disembark. “I looked down at the main deck and the beach-battalion men were already moving ahead, so I knew that the ramps must be down.” Just as the stern anchor was being taken up “something hit the ship with the solid clunk of metal—not as hard as a collision or a bomb blast; just ‘clink.’” This is the direct experience of what was later discovered to have been a seventy-five-millimeter antitank shell with a solid-armor-piercing head hitting the forward anchor winch, being deflected toward the stern, tearing through the bulkhead, smashing the ramp winch, breaking into several pieces, and killing two of the crew. Clink.

We read of spectacular and overtly horrific events on D-Day. Yet, often death came in seemingly trivial form. People are walking along, in photos of the invasion, apparently nonchalant, next to them, not five feet away, someone is falling, hit by German fire. Tanks that are supposed to “swim” ashore are deposited in the water too far off, they drift off target, they try to steer toward where the troops are pinned down on Omaha Beach, off-angle in the surf, they founder, they sink like stones, all their crews die. People who think they have reached safety, behind barriers, away from the enemy, are smacked, lethally, by random shell fragments or stray bullets.

D-Day was a gargantuan, colossal undertaking. It was a juggernaut, a Moloch. It ate men with both hands. It consumed the Germans in stacks and heaps. Read about what it was like to be under the hammer of Allied naval artillery and airpower. It was like the Earth was being torn up by the roots. Few lived to tell the tale. Americans, especially at Omaha Beach, where the German resistance was strongest, also died in droves.

There was no other way to do it. The Third Reich had to die. The Allies, including the Red Army, had to kill it. There was no easy, clean or humane way to do it. They were fighting a malign enemy which had, insanely, chosen to launch a war against the entire world. It would not surrender when it was beaten, but only when it was crushed. There was no rapier thrust, no magic bullet. It was sledge-hammer blows, straight on, with men and machines, until the beast was smashed, and had bled its life away. It cost lives and it was going to cost lives.

Defeat for the Allies was possible on D-Day. Eisenhower knew that. Montgomery, the meticulous planner and unsung hero of Overlord, knew it too. Rommel, who planned to beat them, knew it.

On top of all the massive armament hurled at the Germans, the day was finally carried by the courage and will of the attackers to press on, to come to grips with the Germans, destroy them, and push inland. Napoleon said that in war the moral is to the physical as ten to one.

Let us have perpetual gratitude to the men of D-Day.

Some Thoughts on Kosovo

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The former Yugoslavia is a mess. It has been so since before the Ottomans ruled that part of the world, and judging from recent events, it will continue to be so long into the future. My blog partner CW is fond on quoting from Dame West’s “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon”, because the pre-war Balkan region she describes in that book is remarkably similar to the situation today.

In “What Went Wrong”, Bernard Lewis noted the stark cultural difference between Turkey and the rest of the Muslim world in the period from roughly 1880 to 1922. When confronted with the reality of European dominance and success, the Turks asked themselves “What did we do wrong?”. The Arabs asked themselves: “What did they just do to us?” Turkey flourished, relatively speaking, and the Middle East today would be right where it was in 1922 if it were not for oil. In fact, it is pretty much where it was in 1922, just with more automobiles and guns.

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Selected 2007 Posts, Part 2

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On Tuesday, I posted a selection of my posts from 2007, encompassing the categories Education, Management/Leadership/Business, and Markets/International Trade. Here are the other categories, which are Policy/Politics, Media/Blogging, History, Thought Processes & Fallacies, and Books/Photography/Recordings.

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