Matt Yglesias

Are We Still All Georgians Now?

This seems like some eminently reasonable conclusions:

A nine-month European Union investigation into the 2008 war in the Caucasus has concluded that Georgia triggered the conflict, but that Russia prepared the ground for war to break out and broke international law by invading Georgia as a whole.

Conclusions to the roughly 1,000 page report, released on Wednesday by Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini, also found that Russia-backed South Ossetian militias committed atrocities and “ethnic cleansing” of Georgian villages during and since the war. It faulted Russian forces in control of the territory that either “would not or could not” control the South Ossetians.

The report found no evidence to back Russian claims that Georgia committed genocide on the night of Aug.7-8.

As you may recall, last August it immediately—and somewhat mysteriously—became dogma in American political and media circles that the conflict was a front-line struggle between freedom and dictatorship in which everyone was supposed to embrace Georgian nationalism as a core element of US grand strategy. The reality, as we can see in this report, is that Georgia very unwisely chose to launch a war with its obviously-much-larger neighbor. Sober-minded people criticized Russia for a response that swiftly went well beyond what international law permits, but it would be very unwise for the United States to take actions that encourage small friendly countries to think that they can roll the dice and be backstopped by the United States on fights about issues that, like control of South Ossetia, have nothing to do with our interests.

Getting Real on Georgia Troop Training

Thom Shanker reports that “The United States is resuming a combat training mission in the republic of Georgia to prepare its army for counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan, despite the risks of angering Russia, senior Defense Department officials said Thursday.”

This strikes me as very, very, very silly. If we want to decide, as a matter of foreign policy, that we want to train Georgian troops in order to bolster Tblisi’s efforts to stand up to Moscow despite the risk of angering Russia, then fine. We should look at the costs and benefits of that strategy and maybe decide to adopt it. But it’s mighty dumb to be pretending that the reason we’re training Georgian troops is so that they might be prepared for counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan. It’s perfectly clear to everyone that Afghanistan is being used as a pretext to provide training, and that Georgia is participating in the Afghan operation in order to obtain the training. The only people who we could possibly be fooling with this gambit is ourselves, and fooling yourself is a dangerous thing in foreign policy.

Meanwhile, before condemning Russia’s anger over this sort of thing as representative of Russian evil and irrationality, people should give some consideration to how our government would likely react if China started training the Mexican military as part of preparation for Mexico to join a formal defensive alliance with China. I think you’d see a massive freakout.

Political Turmoil in Thailand

The conventions of inverted pyramid journalism mean that things like a story about increasingly high-tension clashes between protesters and police in Thailand wind up sort of burying the issue of what the dispute is about. One hesitates a bit to try to summarize the situation, since anything I do will strike a Thai person or a real specialist as overly simplistic, but I think it’s useful for people to have a summary at their disposal.

The key figure in the dispute is Thaksin Shinawatra, who became Prime Minister in February 2001. Thaksin was a populist leader with a rural economic base, who pursued policies designed to appeal to that downscale constituency who felt that Thailand’s growing prosperity had not been broadly shared. This naturally antagonized the Bangkok-centered elite which, significantly, included not only wealthy businessmen but a broader swathe of the urbanized middle classes and also important elements of the state apparatus including the security services. All this opposition led to a 2006 coup, which ended with Thaksin fleeing the country to avoid corruption charges. The coup installed in office a former general named Surayud Chulanont, who ruled until late January 2008. Upon the restoration of democracy, Thaksin’s party came back into power.

Soon enough, however, this new government was also brought down. Not, this time, through a coup. But not entirely through constitutional measures, either. Instead, a series of protests led by anti-Thaksin “yellow shirts” essentially made the country ungovernable which set the stage for parliamentary moves that brought Thaksin’s supporters down. The latest round of protests is led by pro-Thaksin “red shirts” who are trying to bring the yellow shirt faction down.

The whole thing illustrates, I think, the fact that “democracy” is a somewhat problematic concept. Peaceful demonstrations are, of course, an integral part of a democratic process. And so is popular pressure forcing political change. But at the same time, elections and adherence to constitutional methods are also integral to the idea of a democratic process. When you have so much power in the hands of street demonstrations, then you seem to have slipped off the democratic path in some key ways. But at the same time, draconian crackdowns on demonstrators are hardly the hallmark of democracy, either. Democracy as we understand it simply assumes a baseline level of public consensus such that opposition party leaders won’t seriously try to challenge the legitimacy of election winners. When that consensus doesn’t exist, things start getting very fuzzy. You can see some of this on display in Georgia, where yesterday’s hero of democracy is now facing a mass protest opposition movement of his own.

Breeding More Georgians

Via Tyler Cowen, here’s one way to boost birth rates:

Two years after having one of the lowest birth rates in the world, Georgia [the country] is enjoying something of a baby boom, following an intervention from the country’s most senior cleric.

At the end of 2007, in a move to reverse the Caucasian country’s dwindling birth figures, the head of the Georgian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Ilia II, came up with an incentive. He promised to personally baptise any baby born to parents of more than two children.

There was only one catch: the baby had to be born after the initiative was launched. [...]

The country’s birth rate increased by nearly 20% during 2008 – a rate four times faster than the previous year.

Less clear to me is why so many people seem concerned by the specter of low birth rates. Historically, low levels of population are associated with high average living standards. That should be less true in the modern world where we’re not as dependent on agriculture for our economic activity. But the logic hasn’t completely vanished. If there were dramatically fewer people in the United States it would be much more realistic for us to all be eating free-range organic grass-fed beef. And even amidst a real estate bust, the country is far too crowded for a middle class family to afford a spacious residence in the most desirable markets such as San Francisco or Manhattan. I think that to deliberately constrain people from having large families would be abhorrent, but it’s not clear to me that we should be going out of our way to encourage them to do so.

Doing more to ease the burden on parents of families of any side—family leave, high-quality preschool, more day care, some kind of recognition for the value of the work done by stay-at-home moms (or dads)—is another matter. But why should the Georgians care if few families choose to have three or more kids?

Georgia on My Mind

Note that if, as seems reasonably likely, third party candidates get enough votes in Georgia to ensure that neither Martin nor Chambliss gets fifty percent, Georgia law stipulates that there must be a runoff in December, rather than the seat going to the winner of the plurality. I have to assume that the ensuring nationwide attention to the race would probably work to Chambliss’ advantage, since “nationalizing” the contest should be helpful to a GOP candidate in a Republican state. On the other hand, it’s possible that post-election demoralization and disarray will make it difficult for Republicans to organize effectively.

Long-Expected Shoe-Dropping

Russia officially recognizes independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Frankly, I’m a little surprised it took them this long. They threatened to take this step if the U.S. recognized Kosovo’s independence, which we did, and then Georgia attacked South Ossetia giving them an adequate pretext, and then Russia launched a counter-invasion and did a bunch of stuff that I would have considered going beyond the recognition step.

Note that as of a couple of weeks ago, Charles Krauthammer and Robert Kagan and such would have had us believe that short of strident anti-Russian measures by the United States, Russian tanks were about to pour into Kiev, Warsaw, and Helsinki. In practice, the Bush administration’s done nothing meaningful to stop the Russians from having their way with Georgia but the consequences for the wider world have been less than dramatic and everyone’s now more interested in the pseudo-event in Denver.

The Great Power That Wasn’t There

Having the Olympics in Beijing and watching the Chinese dominate the gold medal category naturally leads to an uptick in the “China anxiety” you expect from citizens of the existing hegemonic power watching the rising number two. Some figures, like Robert Kagan, have already taken the arguing that China is inevitably bent on an aggressive foreign policy that will lead to clashes with the United States — and thus we must prepare for clashes with China and not at all worry that such preparations will look threatening to China since, allegedly, we’re already destined for conflict.

It’s interesting to observe, though, that when you look at concrete cases, far from seeming hell-bent on world domination, China is actually oddly passive on the world stage. When the PRC clashes with Western positions on the UN Security Council — over Iran, for example — it almost invariably hides behind Russia even though in the real world, as in the Olympics, China surpassed Russia some time ago as an important country. And when something happens that China can avoid taking a position on because it’s neither geographically in China’s backyard nor formally up for discussion at the UN, China usually says and does nothing at all.

This should be somewhat reassuring to Americans, but it can also actually be a problem. The Georgia situation, for example, has gotten to the point where some third-party mediation would probably be quite useful. A downward spiral in US-Russian relations across the board would be bad for both sides and the issues in play in Georgia just aren’t that important in the scheme of things, but nobody’s going to want to back down. It’d be a big opportunity for a China that was interested in becoming a traditional global power to kind of butt-in, do some mediating, and grab a bit of glory and it’d probably be a good thing for the world if it were to happen. But the Chinese leadership has seemed disinclined for years to try to play a global role in that sense and they give no indication of a desire to change that.

Anyways, consider that a bit of a not-quite-on-point introduction to CAP’s report on outlining a progressive approach to China policy.

The Trouble With Insurgency

It’s interesting to ponder under what circumstances a smaller country being attacked by a stronger country will attempt to mount an insurgent-type campaign against the larger one. History shows that insurgent warfare can be extremely effective at driving great powers out, but the price tends to be very high — the insurgents destroy their own country. The United States lost the Vietnam War, but it was Vietnam and not the United States that wound up devastated by years of conflict. Under the circumstances, simply giving in might be the best solution. Certainly that seems to be Mikhail Saakashvili’s take on the matter:

“We had a choice here,” he said. “We could turn this country into Chechnya — we had enough people and equipment to do that — or we had to do nothing and stay a modern European country.”

He added: “Eventually we would have chased them away, but we would have had to go to the mountains and grow beards. That would have been a tremendous national philosophical and emotional burden.”

That’s kind of a funny way to put it, but it seems basically correct to me.

Blaming NATO Expansion

I appreciate Tom Friedman’s effort to eschew simplistic Russia-bashing and try to put the Georgia crisis in some sort of larger context. I don’t, however, think that Friedman’s monomaniacal focus on the initial decision to expand NATO really makes a ton of sense. The first wave of Central European states — Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic — came on board back in 1997 and tons of additional stuff went down in the intervening years. What’s more, the NATO expansion process actually accomplished something useful in terms of helping to consolidate democratic norms (especially in the field of civil-military relations) in a swathe of countries that’s now pretty big and prosperous and somewhat important.

Contrast that with alienating Russia over, say, the Bush administration’s abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and subsequent determination to plow ahead with a national missile defense system. That angered Russia and accomplished nothing. Similarly with the Bush administration slow-and-steady moves toward the militarization of space. Then we recognized Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence even though Russia specifically said that would lead to consequences for South Ossetia and Abkhazia, then we helped Georgia upgrade its military at a time when Georgia’s political leadership wanted to re-assert control over those territories by force while simultaneously pushing for Georgian (and Ukrainian) membership in NATO.

That’s a whole lot of stuff and suggests to me that we could have given more consideration to Russian interests without conceding nearly as much as Friedman seems to think we should have. Suppose Russia agreed to recognize Kosovo independence and to allow a genuine independent peacekeeping force in South Ossetia and Abkhazia and in exchange we agreed to drop the missile shield, leave Ukraine and Georgia out of NATO, and sharply reduce military assistance to Georgia with the understanding that that assistance would be stepped up if Russia tried to coerce Georgia — who would that have left worse off? That deal would address Russia’s strategic concerns much better than a tenuous occupation of Gori does. It would have saved the United States money and allowed us to focus our bilateral relationship with Russia on Iran and terrorism issues. It would have saved Georgia from devastating Russian attack. It would have put Kosovo independence on a firm footing, and as best one can tell (which, admittedly, isn’t that far) it would have reflected the desires of the Ossetians and the Abkhaz. Georgian nationalist sentiment wouldn’t have liked it, of course, but look where nationalism has gotten the Georgians.

But the contours of that specific proposal aside, the point is simply that you can’t draw a straight line from the initial NATO enlargement decision to war in the summer of 2008. There were any number of points at which wiser leadership could have prevented the situation from deteriorating to the current point, and any number of bargains that could have been struck that would have better-served everyone’s interests.

Same As It Ever Was

Jim Lehrer and Ruth Marcus talk about John McCain’s lobbying ties to the Georgian government:

JIM LEHRER: Yes. What about the McCain lobbyist who lobbied for Georgia and is now McCain’s number-one foreign affairs adviser? Is that going to come up to bite McCain more, do you think?

RUTH MARCUS: So the Obama campaign hopes. I look at this on two different levels. On the substantive level, anybody who knows Senator McCain knows that he would have the same views on Georgia no matter what lobbyist came to talk to him. He feels this one in his bones. And he wasn’t going to — this is not a shift in position because some lobbyist came and whispered in his ear.

It’s worth noting the extraordinary level of benefit of the doubt that John McCain tends to get from the press, including from people who aren’t necessarily hugely sympathetic to his policy agenda. Normally reporters are ruthless about the motives behind politicians’ decisions, but everything McCain does is above question. Beyond that, how much better is it for McCain to be the kind of guy whose views on U.S.-Russia relations are identical to those that you would have if you were a paid agent of a foreign government? Of course it’s possible that America’s interests vis-à-vis Russia are identical to Georgia’s interests, but that doesn’t seem very likely to me.

Say what you will about Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, but he has an impressive ability to stay on message, blaming the Jews for Georgia’s defeat at the hands of the Russian military:

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Thursday asserted that “failed” Israeli generals had caused Georgia’s defeat in its current war with Russia.

“Israel exported failed generals in order to train the Georgian armed forces, including general Gal Hirsch, and we all know that the Georgian army was defeated by the Russian forces,” Nasrallah said in a speech to mark two years since the end of the Second Lebanon War.

I feel like the substantial size gap between enormous Russia and tiny Georgia may have played a larger role here, along with what looks to have been daft decision-making from the political leaders in Tbilisi.

Saakashvili the Pure

Amidst an overall useful column, former Bush administration official Paul Saunders makes the important point that Mikhail Saakashvili’s government in Tbilisi is not, in fact, as pure as the driven snow:

But the situation inside Georgia belies Saakashvili’s rhetorical commitment to freedom. Most glaring was his handling of opposition protests last fall. The State Department’s 2007 Human Rights Report, released just a few months ago, found “serious problems” with Georgia’s human rights record and notes “excessive use of force to disperse demonstrations”; “impunity of police officers”; and declining respect for freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly and political participation. Ana Dolidze, a democracy advocate and former chair of Georgia’s Young Lawyers Association, has described in detail how Saakashvili acted quickly after entering office to empower the executive branch at the expense of parliament and to strengthen the government by “stifling political expression, pressuring influential media and targeting vocal critics and opposition leaders” — including by using law enforcement agencies. Saakashvili is far from the morally pure democrat he would have the West believe he is.

By the same token, while Vladimir Putin’s Russia certainly falls short of norms of liberal democracy in a variety of ways, it’s hardly the greatest totalitarian dystopia known to man. Like the gambit to posit a gaping cultural void between “western” Georgia and “eastern” Russia the effort to impute a large ideological element of democracy versus dictatorship into the Russia-Georgia conflict is essentially bogus. Georgia by all accounts comes closer to the democratic ideal than does Russia, but both countries exist along the continuum flawed political systems. Georgia’s not a place like, say, Poland or the Czech Republic that’s really organized a clear post-Communist democratic politics. Russia and Georgia are fighting over land and influence, not big ideas, and as Saunders says “fighting erupted not primarily because of what the country represents but because of its government’s actions.”

Who Watches the Movie Studios?

Entertainment Weekly reports on the behind-the-scenes struggles over whether or not a 21st century audience will be in sync with the 1980s setting and Cold War themes of Watchmen:

In 2005, [Paul[ Greengrass was deep into preproduction on a present-day, war-on-terror-themed adaptation by David Hayter (X-Men), when a regime change at Paramount Pictures led to its demise. Enter Warner Bros., which acquired the rights in late 2005. Snyder was working on 300 for the studio at the time, and he was alarmed when he heard about the deal. After some soul-searching, his fear of seeing a bad Watchmen movie trumped his fear of trying to make a great one. ”They were going to do it anyway,” he says. ”And that made me nervous.” Over many months, and many meetings, Snyder persuaded Warner Bros. to abandon the Greengrass/Hayter script and hew as faithfully as possible to the comic. The key battles: retaining the ’80s milieu, keeping Richard Nixon (Moore did consider using an era-appropriate Ronald Reagan, but worried it would alienate American readers), and preserving the villain-doesn’t-pay-for-his-crimes climax. ”It was clear that Zack felt an intense obligation to the fans and the book,” says Warner Bros. Picture Group president Jeff Robinov. ”There was definitely a conversation about the best way to make it contemporary and relevant to today. Zack felt the best way was to go back to the roots of the novel.”

Of course now with the conflict in the Caucuses, Cold War themes seem relevant again — problem solved. Could Warner Bros. be manipulating the entire situation, using Georgia and Russia as pawns to advance its own nefarious agenda? Only on blogs can this sort of irresponsible speculation be meaningfully advanced.

A Question of Priorities

NYT reports on the Bush administration’s escalating rhetorical support for Georgia:

Russia’s military offensive into Georgia has forced the start of a wholesale reassessment of American dealings with Russia, according to senior Bush administration officials, and jeopardized talks on everything from halting Iran’s nuclear ambitions to reducing strategic arsenals to cooperation on missiles defenses.

The use of the term “forced” seems odd; perhaps Russia’s offensive caused a wholesale reassessment but surely it didn’t force it. The administration could have concluded that such matters as reductions in strategic nuclear arsenals, curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and cooperation on missile defense was more important than maintaining Tblisi’s sovereignty over Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Indeed, I would say those other issues clearly are more important than the Georgia conflict. But some evidently feel otherwise. Which is a debate worth having, but nobody’s being forced to change their mind about this issue.

Krauthammer: Russia Must Leave Georgia by 2014 . . . Or Else!

You wouldn’t expect Charles Krauthammer to turn in a sensible column ever. In particular, you really wouldn’t expect him to turn in a sensible column about the Russia-Georgia war. But I feel like today’s effort is an uncommonly silly one. Through his powers of clairvoyance, Krauthammer discerns that Russia’s “real objective is the Finlandization of Georgia through the removal of President Mikheil Saakashvili and his replacement by a Russian puppet” which reveals, among other things, a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of Cold War Finland. But Krauthammer darkly warns that the Finlandization of Georgia will let “Russia become master of the Caspian basin” (oh noes! the Caspian basin!) and then this, through magic, would lead to “re-establishing Russian hegemony” throughout its “former Baltic and East European satellites.”

I don’t know how many different ways there are to say this, but to think that Russia’s ability to detach two miniature provinces that don’t want to be ruled from Tblisi from a tiny country with a GDP of $20 billion will suddenly lead to Russian hegemony over, say, Poland with its GDP of $620 billion is daft.

But beyond all that, considering the high stakes Krauthammer thinks we’re playing for, his proposed remedies are pathetic. One, he wants to “suspend the NATO-Russia Council” that nobody’s heard of but that apparently was founded in 2002. Second, he wants to block Russian entry into the WTO which is already being blocked. Third, he wants to kick Russia out of the G-8. And then we get this:

4. Announce a U.S.-European boycott of the 2014 Winter Olympics at Sochi. To do otherwise would be obscene. Sochi is 15 miles from Abkhazia, the other Georgian province just invaded by Russia. The Games will become a riveting contest between the Russian, Belarusian and Jamaican bobsled teams.

All of these steps (except dissolution of the G-8, which should be irreversible) would be subject to reconsideration depending upon Russian action — most importantly and minimally, its withdrawal of troops from Georgia proper to South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Basically, Krauthammer thinks that it’s extremely important to American security for Russia to withdraw forces from Georgia proper and his idea of a good way to make them do that is to . . . threaten to boycott an Olympics (note that this didn’t work in 1980) . . . that’s happening six years from now. That would seem to me to give Russia plenty of time to muck around in Georgia. Indeed, I see no indication whatsoever that Russia so much as aspires to have its forces in Georgia proper by 2014; certainly it won’t take them anywhere near that long to finish wrecking Georgia’s military. This seems to me to be an excellent example of what (via Dan Nexon) Jack Snyder calls “The Myth of the Paper Tiger” whose adherents hold that:

[Enemies are] capable of becoming fiercely threatening if appeased, but easily crumpled by a resolute attack. These images are often not only wrong, but self-contradictory. For example, Japanese militarists saw the United States as so strong and insatiably aggressive that Japan would have to conquer a huge, self-sufficient empire to get the resources to defend itself; yet at the same time, the Japanese regime saw the United States as so vulnerable and irresolute that a sharp rap against Pearl Harbor would discourage it from fighting back.

That sums up Krauthammer’s view perfectly. If we don’t stop Russia from having its way with Georgia, next thing you know the entire Soviet sphere of influence will be reconstituted, but Russia might be coerced into backing down by mild gestures.

Russia, Georgia, and “The West”

This is really neither here nor there as far as any public policy issue is concerned, but as a Russophile since my teen years it’s been a bit strange for me to see a conflict between Russia and Georgia described as somehow implicating a larger issue of a clash between “the West” and an alien Other. For one thing, the classification of Russia as non-western is a bit problematic on its own terms. There are some clear differences between Russia and the west proper. But at the same time, figures like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Tchaikovsky are part of the western cultural tradition. Russia, meanwhile, was a key participant in many of the major historical events of “the West.” Unlike, say, China or Brazil or Nigeria — important countries, but peripheral ones to the western experience — you can’t write the history of World War I or the French Revolution without talking about Russia.

Then on the other side of the equation, you have Georgia. Georgia, like Russia, has a reasonable amount in common with the West. But insofar as Russia has non-western characteristics, Georgia shares all of those characteristics. Like Russia, Georgia was ruled by Mongols, lacks a tradition of liberalism or democracy, practices Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and doesn’t use the Roman alphabet. There’s nothing wrong with any of that, but it means there’s no gaping cultural void between Georgia and Russia that puts Georgia on the side of “the West.” Georgians have often conceived of themselves as a far-flung outpost of European civilization, but the relevant contrast there was that Georgians are Christians just like Russians but unlike the Muslims who live nearby. It happens to be the case that the current constellation of power politics in the Caucasus has Georgia (and Muslim Azerbaijan) aligned against Russia while (orthodox Christian) Armenia is aligned with Russia but I don’t think any of that reflects some extraordinarily deep cultural divide or deep affinity between Georgia and the West.

What Was McCain’s Advice to Saakashvili?

Mark Kleiman wonders: “If McCain has really been talking to Saakashvili “daily,” what advice has McCain been giving him? Did he reinforce the urgent advice of the State Department and the White House that Saakashvili avoid allowing himself to be provoked into giving the Russians a pretext for invasion, or was McCain encouraging the imprudence that handed Putin the victory we and the Georgians are now trying to recover from?”

McCain should answer this question directly, but his record strongly suggests the possibility that he was encouraging imprudence. And why shouldn’t he? Most pundits seem to think that foreign crises provoked by bad conservative policies are politically beneficial to conservative politicians and, certainly, the McCain campaign sees things that way and is trying to milk the crisis for all it’s worth politically. Under the circumstances, doing what he can to promote international instability seems canny.

Today’s Georgia Links

A few links for your perusal:

– In The American Prospect I argue that people are badly overstating the significance of all this.

– In The Root, Spencer Boyer puts the conflict in the larger context of deteriorating US-Russia relations.

– In The Guardian, James Poulos provides a Russia-sympathetic point of view.

– Last, Dan Nexon’s summation of what we know about the conflict.

NB: My writing about national security issues has normally been dominated by Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, etc. throughout my career because those have been the high-salience issues, but Russia and the former Soviet Union is the part of the world I was originally interested in and probably still know more about. Thus on a personal level, I’ve sort of been perversely glad to see the region return to prominence even though, on the merits, these are very sad events that have been unfolding.