John Sawyer over at Foreign Policy weighs in on the whole Georgia/Russia conflict. And he sees Georgia as primarily at fault.
While much of the world has been distracted by crises in Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, a dangerous dispute over espionage, energy, and ethnicity has been growing between Russia and its diminutive neighbor Georgia.
The relationship, prickly since the breakup of the former Soviet Union, took a sharp turn for the worse in late September, when Georgia arrested four Russian soldiers for alleged spying and threatened to block Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization. Russia responded with a ham-fisted crackdown on all things Georgian, cutting off trade and telecommunications to the country and deporting planeloads of Georgian citizens.
You should go read the whole thing, but according to him, it’s all Saakashvili’s fault. Naturally, given the excellent coverage Nathan has provided in this space, I’m not too big a fan of Sawyer’s characterization, which is long on criticism of Georgia but short on Russia’s role in the crisis. It’s true that the Georgian government has not been its people’s best friend, but neither can Russia be seen as an innocent bystander simply trying to keep the peace.
One thing Sawyer does do, however, is draw attention to the enabling role the U.S. has played. I share Nathan’s belief that Georgia is less at fault than Russia in escalating the crisis—Russia, afterall, responded to the arrest of four soldiers with a mass forced-exodus, a move Sawyer blames on Georgia. But the U.S. has been haplessly and recklessly enabling Georgia’s provocations, treating the situation as if it were the sole fault of Russia—a stance that will, ultimately, lead to war.
U.S. policymakers can do their part by asking Saakashvili to tone it down some. Right now, they’re part of the problem, not the solution.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
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“But the U.S. has been haplessly and recklessly enabling Georgia’s provocations, treating the situation as if it were the sole fault of Russia—a stance that will, ultimately, lead to war.” Between who, Russia and Gorgia? I don’t think so. I belive that Saakashvili overestimated how much the US really cares about Georgia, even with the pipeline. But I think now he knows that America will not back him up unquestionably, even if Tbilisi has the only GW Bush street in the world. The US will not be drawn into a conflict in the Caucasus it has no contol over (and I don’t mean as a combatant, but as an outspoken supporter). The US will continue to use Georgia to tweak Russia publicly, while telling Georgia to cool off.
I agree with Johnnie. I don’t think the US has really enabled Saakashvili all that much. Rather, I think he has miscalculated how much support he has overseas.
What I hear is that there’s quite a back and forth between the Caucasus and Russia hands at State over how to deal with this. The Caucasus folks want to get behind Saakashvili because Georgia is by far the most democratic state among the southern successor states of the USSR. The Russia folks want to restrain him because he makes their job more difficult. And it looks like we may have reached some kind of compromise by default in recent weeks. Saakashvili has learned he needs to play it cooler, Europe has told him to tone it down, and we sent a clear message that we are willing to compromise with Russia when it comes to the Caucasus when more pressing issues are at hand. We like them and all, but we’re far from having their back all the time.
That aside, I think that Sawyer’s article is crap. The one really good thing I take from it is that I don’t feel like I’m missing much in FP if they print stuff like this. He does a fine enough job seeing what is on the surface — aggressive escalation from the Georgian side — but does not see what is going on under that — seeming passivity, but genuinely provocative moves from Russia — nor the motivations for Saakashvili to act the way he does — to try to force a new format for resolving the conflict.
I think that we should try to get Georgia to tone it down, but I think we should do so in the context of trying to force some change on frozen conflicts in the former USSR. Part of that will have to of course include acting as if we really truly realize that Russia, like most countries, will do whatever it can get away with if no one will force it to be accountable.
I don’t think Sawyer is wrong to point out the disconnect between Bush lauding Saakashvili’s liberal credentials while HRW and many of his own people decry the very same thing. We’re not outrageous with our support of his government, but it is still far from anything we’d consider ideal or even acceptable.
Very recent events have indeed shifted the U.S.’s stance toward Georgia, and a huge fault in Sawyer’s article is that he doesn’t use current-enough information (a drawback to writing in a semi-professional rag).
And Nathan, writing off an entire magazine because of one bad article is a bit silly, isn’t it? All articles have faults, and if you’re going to write off FP, then you’d probably have to address their presence at and support from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. It’s not that easy to simply discard.
I’m not writing it off for that or at all. All I’m saying is that I haven’t read FP much lately because of time constraints. Sometimes I wonder what I’m missing. I did use to get it delivered to me at one time, after all. This is the first thing of theirs I’ve read in a while, and it’s not something that makes me feel like I’ve missed much. If I wanted normal, stuck-in-the-moment, no historical context, looking at the surface only journalism, I might as well just read the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Youch! No, their coverage is normally a lot better… which I guess is why I both pointed out the problems with this piece and why I’m defending them.
I rahter wonder why Russia doesn’t get a bit more criticism – they haven’t behaved very well in all this, but everyone is supposed to worry about their feelings. Does the US try to undermine Mexico’s government everytime one of her politicans rants about us, or they shove a few million poor over the border? A little maturity from Russia wouldnt hurt. God knows that they have enough influence to use quietly, should they choose.