Sacrificing Georgia for Iran...

His analysis is a bit blunt, but it's pretty much on target. I now have much more respect for Stratfor that I did before...

Georgia and the Balance of Power
By George Friedman

The Russian invasion of Georgia has not changed the balance of power in Eurasia. It has simply announced that the balance of power had already shifted. The United States has been absorbed in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as potential conflict with Iran and a destabilizing situation in Pakistan. It has no strategic ground forces in reserve and is in no position to intervene on the Russian periphery. This has opened an opportunity for the Russians to reassert their influence in the former Soviet sphere. Moscow did not have to concern itself with the potential response of the United States or Europe; hence, the balance of power had already shifted, and it was up to the Russians when to make this public. They did that on August 8.

Let's begin simply by reviewing recent events. On the night of Thursday, August 7, forces of the Republic of Georgia moved across the border of South Ossetia, a secessionist region of Georgia that has functioned as an independent entity since the fall of the Soviet Union (see map).



They drove on to the capital, Tskhinvali, which is close to the border. Georgian forces got bogged down while trying to take the city. In spite of heavy fighting, they never fully secured it, nor the rest of South Ossetia.

On the morning of August 8, Russian forces entered South Ossetia, using armored and motorized infantry forces along with air power. South Ossetia was informally aligned with Russia, and Russia acted to prevent the region's absorption by Georgia. In view of the speed with which the Russians responded—within hours of the Georgian attack—they had been expecting it and were themselves at their jumping-off points. The counterattack was carefully planned and competently executed, and over the next forty-eight hours the Russians succeeded in defeating the main Georgian force and compelling a retreat. By Sunday, August 10, they had consolidated their position in South Ossetia.
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On Monday, August 11, the Russians extended their offensive into Georgia proper, attacking on two axes. One was south from South Ossetia to the Georgian city of Gori. The other was from Abkhazia, another secessionist region of Georgia aligned with the Russians. (On August 26, Russia recognized South Ossetian and Abkhazian independence, turning the de facto situation of the last sixteen years into a de jure one.) This drive was designed to cut the road between the Georgian capital of Tbilisi and its Black Sea ports, Poti and Batumi. By this point, the Russians had bombed the Georgian military airfields at Marneuli and Vaziani and appeared to have disabled radars at the international airport in Tbilisi. These moves brought Russian forces to within forty miles of the Georgian capital, while making outside re-inforcement and resupply of Georgian forces extremely difficult should anyone wish to undertake it.

The Mystery Behind the Georgian Invasion

In this simple chronicle, there is something quite mysterious: Why did the Georgians choose to invade South Ossetia on August 7? There had been a great deal of shelling by the South Ossetians of Georgian villages for the previous three nights, but while possibly more intense than usual, such artillery exchanges were routine. The Georgians might not have fought well, but they committed fairly substantial forces that must have taken at the very least several days to deploy and supply. Georgia's move was deliberate.

The United States is Georgia's closest ally. It maintained about 130 military advisers in Georgia, along with civilian advisers, contractors involved in all aspects of the Georgian government, and people doing business there. (The United States conducted joint exercises with Georgian troops in July, with over a thousand US troops deployed. The Russians carried out parallel exercises in response. US troops withdrew. The Russian maneuver force remained in position and formed the core of the invading force.) It is inconceivable that the Americans were unaware of Georgia's mobilization and intentions. It is also inconceivable that the Americans were unaware that the Russians had deployed substantial forces on the South Ossetian border. US technical intelligence, from satellite imagery and signals intelligence to unmanned aerial vehicles, could not miss the fact that thousands of Russian troops were moving to forward positions. The Russians clearly knew that the Georgians were ready to move. How could the United States not be aware of the Russians? Indeed, given the deployments of Russian troops, how could intelligence analysts have missed the possibility that Russia had laid a trap, hoping for a Georgian invasion to justify its own counterattack?

It is difficult to imagine that the Georgians launched their attack against US wishes. The Georgians rely on the United States, and they were in no position to defy it. This leaves two possibilities. The first is a huge breakdown in intelligence, in which the United States either was unaware of the deployments of Russian forces or knew of them but—along with the Georgians—miscalculated Russia's intentions. The second is that the United States, along with other countries, has viewed Russia through the prism of the 1990s, when its military was in shambles and its government was paralyzed. The United States has not seen Russia make a decisive military move beyond its borders since the Afghan war of the 1970s and 1980s. The Russians had systematically avoided such moves for years. The United States had assumed that they would not risk the consequences of an invasion.

If that was the case, then it points to the central reality of this situation: the Russians had changed dramatically, along with the balance of power in the region. They welcomed the opportunity to drive home the new reality, which was that they could invade Georgia, and the United States and Europe could not meaningfully respond. They did not view the invasion as risky. Militarily, there was no force to counter them. Economically, Russia is an energy exporter doing quite well—indeed, the Europeans need Russian energy even more than the Russians need to sell it to them. Politically, as we shall see, the Americans need the Russians more than the Russians need the Americans. Moscow's calculus was that this was the moment to strike. The Russians had been building up to it for months, and they struck.

Western Encirclement of Russia

To understand Russian thinking, we need to look at two events. The first is the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. From the US and European points of view, the Orange Revolution repre-sented a triumph of democracy and Western influence. From the Russian point of view, as Moscow made clear, the Orange Revolution was a CIA-funded intrusion into the internal affairs of Ukraine, designed to draw Ukraine into NATO and add to the encirclement of Russia. US Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton had promised the Russians that NATO would not expand into the former Soviet empire.

That promise had already been broken in 1998 by NATO's expansion to Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic—and again in the 2004 expansion, which included not only the rest of the former Soviet satellites in what is now Central Europe, but also the three Baltic states, which had been components of the Soviet Union.

The Russians had tolerated all that, but the discussion of including Ukraine in NATO represented to them a fundamental threat to Russia's national security. It would, in their calculations, have rendered Russia indefensible and threatened to destabilize the Russian Federation itself. When the United States went so far as to suggest that Georgia be included as well, bringing NATO deeper into the Caucasus, the Russian conclusion—publicly stated—was that the United States in particular intended to encircle and break Russia.

The second and lesser event was the decision by Europe and the United States to back Kosovo's separation from Serbia. The Russians were friendly with Serbia, but the deeper issue for Russia was this: the principle accepted in Europe since World War II was that, to prevent conflict, national borders would not be changed. If that principle were violated in Kosovo, other border shifts—including demands by various regions for independence from Russia—might follow. The Russians publicly and privately asked that Kosovo not be given formal independence, but instead continue its informal autonomy, which was the same thing in practical terms. Russia's requests were ignored.

From the Ukrainian experience, the Russians became convinced that the United States was engaged in a plan of strategic encirclement and strangulation of Russia. From the Kosovo experience, they concluded that the United States and Europe were not prepared to consider Russian wishes even in fairly minor affairs. That was the breaking point. If Russian desires could not be accommodated even in a minor matter like this, then clearly Russia and the West were in conflict. For the Russians, as we said, the question was how to respond. Having declined to respond in Kosovo, they decided to respond where they had all the cards: in South Ossetia.

Moscow had two motives, the lesser of which was as a tit-for-tat over Kosovo. If Kosovo could be declared independent under Western sponsorship, then South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the two breakaway regions of Georgia, could be declared independent under Russian sponsorship. Any objections from the United States and Europe would simply confirm their hypocrisy. This was important for internal Russian political reasons, but the second motive was far more important.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin once said that the fall of the Soviet Union was a geopolitical disaster. This didn't mean that he wanted to retain the Soviet state; rather, it meant that the disintegration of the Soviet Union had created a situation in which Russian national security was threatened by Western interests. As an example, consider that during the cold war, St. Petersburg was about 1,200 miles away from a NATO country. Today it is less than a hundred miles away from Estonia, a NATO member. The disintegration of the Soviet Union had left Russia surrounded by a group of countries that it sees as hostile to its interests in various degrees and heavily influenced by the United States, Europe, and, in some cases, China.

Resurrecting the Russian Sphere

Putin did not want to reestablish the Soviet Union, but he did want to re- establish the Russian sphere of influence in the former Soviet region. To accomplish that, he had to do two things. First, he had to reestablish the credibility of the Russian army as a fighting force, at least in its own region. Second, he had to establish that Western guarantees, including NATO membership, meant nothing in the face of Russian power. He did not want to confront NATO directly, but he did want to confront and defeat a power that was closely aligned with the United States, had US support, aid, and advisers, and was widely seen as being under American protection. Georgia was the perfect choice.

By invading Georgia as Russia did (competently if not brilliantly), Putin reestablished the credibility of the Russian army. (It was no surprise that its operations would render thousands of people homeless and cause civilian casualties.) But far more importantly, Putin's invasion revealed an open secret. While the United States is tied down in the Middle East, American guarantees have no value. This lesson is not for American consumption. It is something that, from the Russian point of view, the Ukrainians, the Balts, and the Central Asians need to digest. Indeed, it is a lesson Putin wants to transmit to Poland and the Czech Republic as well. In July, the Czech government signed an agreement with the United States to set up a ballistic missile defense installation in the Czech Republic, and in August, days after the conflict in Georgia began, the Polish government announced that it has agreed to allow the Americans to build an anti-missile base in Poland. The US–Polish agreement was hurriedly signed as a gesture of defiance to the Russians. The Russians responded with threats that Condoleezza Rice dismissed as "bizarre."

The Russians knew that the United States would denounce their attack. This actually plays into Russian hands. The more vocal senior US leaders are, the greater the contrast with their inaction, and the Russians wanted to drive home the idea that American guarantees are empty talk. The Russians also know something else that is of vital importance. For the United States, the Middle East is far more important than the Caucasus, and Iran is particularly important. The United States wants the Russians to participate in sanctions against Iran. Even more importantly, it does not want the Russians to sell weapons to Iran, particularly the highly effective S-300 air defense system. Georgia is a marginal issue to the United States; Iran is a central issue. The Russians are in a position to pose serious problems for the United States not only in Iran, but also with weapons sales to other countries, like Syria.

Therefore, the United States has a problem—either it must reorient its strategy away from the Middle East and toward the Caucasus, or it has to seriously limit its response to Georgia to avoid a Russian counter in Iran. Even if the United States had an appetite for war in Georgia at this time, it would have to calculate the Russian response in Iran—and possibly in Afghanistan (even though Moscow's interests there are currently aligned with those of Washington).

In other words, the Russians have backed the Americans into a corner. The Europeans, who for the most part lack expeditionary military forces and are dependent upon Russian energy exports, have even fewer options. If nothing else happens, the Russians will have demonstrated that though they are not a global power by any means, they have resumed their role as a significant regional power with lots of nuclear weapons and an economy that is less shabby now than in the past. Russia has also compelled every state on its periphery to reevaluate its position relative to Moscow. That is what the Russians wanted to demonstrate, and they have demonstrated it.

The war in Georgia, therefore, is Russia's public return to great power status. This is not something that just happened—it has been unfolding ever since Putin took power, and with growing intensity in the past five years. Part of it has to do with the increase in Russian power, but a great deal of it has to do with the fact that the Middle Eastern wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have left the United States off-balance and short on resources. This conflict created a window of opportunity. The Russian goal is to use that window to assert a new reality throughout the region while the Americans are tied down elsewhere and dependent on Russian cooperation. The war was far from a surprise; it has been building for months. But the geopolitical foundations of the war have been building since 1992. Russia has been an empire for centuries. The last fifteen years or so were not the new reality, but simply an aberration that would be rectified. And now it is being rectified. Whether the US and its allies can mount a coherent response has now become a central question of Western foreign policy.

—August 27, 2008

George Friedman is Founder and CEO of Stratfor, a private intelligence company publishing geopolitical and security analysis at www.stratfor.com. He is author of America's Secret War . His new book, The Next Hundred Years , will be published in January 2009.

The chickens have come home to roost. That's my opinion about Georgia. Why are we stroking the ego of a democracy-crazed president who is hell bent on pissing off his utterly more powerful neighbor? Georgia already has the ear of the West, and they will in the future. NATO membership for Georgia would be a disaster.

Pull Russian and American troops out of NATO, send the billion or so dollars we just pledged to Georgia back to the US and use it for some productive purpose. I'm kind of grasping for straws here but basically anything that isn't used for military purposes would suffice. How about scholarships for Georgians and Russians to study together for a year? Might make those late night calls between Putin/Medvedev and Saakashvili a bit less awkward if they'd have had some quality, off the stage face time.

In any case, echoing Arrighi, America's age of expansion and dominance has ended. The sooner we realize that, the sooner we can find a productive outlet for our post-imperial frustrations.

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Coming to Grips With Russia’s New Nerve
By JAMES TRAUB

WE all must think anew about Russia. But this process will prove harder for some of us than for others. When I grew up in the late 1960s and early ’70s, the Soviet Union had already begun to look like the Ottoman Empire on its last legs; the face of Soviet Communism belonged to Leonid Brezhnev, with his drooping cheeks and beetle brows and thick, square glasses.

What was there to fear from this pitiful giant? In my left-wing, antiwar, social democratic hothouse world, anti-Communism seemed almost as absurd as Communism. John Kennedy’s call in 1961 to “bear any burden” in the struggle between two world systems was as remote to us as the sectarian debates of the 1930s between Trotskyites, Shachtmanites and so on.

We were, unlike an older generation of “cold war liberals,” anti-anti-Communists. Fear of the spread of Communism had gotten us into Vietnam, and rationalized American support for right-wing dictators across the third world. That fear, to us, was thus a far more dangerous force in the world than the thing that we as a country were afraid of — Soviet and Chinese expansionism.

“The war against Communism is over,” declared George McGovern, our tribune, in 1972. Several years later, a much more centrist figure, President Jimmy Carter, would lament the “inordinate fear of Communism” that he said dominated public discussion of foreign policy. (That remark looked slightly less sage after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.)

Of course, the Soviet Union continued to keep a chokehold on its own extended empire, sending tanks into Czechoslovakia in 1968; and it kept the pot of insurgency bubbling across Africa and Asia. Yet, drained of all of its ideological attraction and much of its menace, Russia just didn’t seem to me very important, or at least very interesting. In “A New Foreign Policy for the United States,” a book written in 1969 that I read in college a few years later, Hans Morgenthau described the Soviet Union as a conservative and defensive power, driven by traditional national interests rather than ideology, and preoccupied above all with avoiding nuclear war with the United States. For all its bluster, it seemed eminently containable.

Russia had, in fact, been successfully contained; this was the era of summitry, détente and arms control treaties. A new generation of hardliners, soon to be known as “neoconservatives” and championed by Ronald Reagan, denounced the rapprochement as naïve; but their dark view of Russia seemed to us at odds with reality.

When I visited Georgia this summer, I felt like I had entered a time warp. Everyone in Tbilisi talked about Russia the way people had in the United States in, say, 1962, the year of the Cuban missile crisis. Alexander Rondeli, president of the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies, said to me: “The Russians talk about globalization, of course. But behind this is an absolutely black and white picture: It’s ours. It’s theirs. Everybody is enemy or vassal.” Russia was a nation of “bandits” — predatory, insatiable, calculating. “And they are cynical about it — they know that no one will fight for us.”

It all seemed hyperbolic, and possibly paranoid — a neocon nightmare in the Caucasus. But the Georgians had spent almost two centuries under the Russian boot. And then, a month later, Russia sent its tanks into Georgia, and Mr. Rondeli’s worldview looked a great deal less far-fetched. The Georgians, of course, had provided a provocation by launching an assault on South Ossetia, the breakaway region on its border with Russia. But when the Russian Army not only ejected the Georgians from South Ossetia but moved further into Georgia, occupied major cities and destroyed infrastructure, the safety of the Ossetians began to look like little more than a pretext. Russia’s prime minister, Vladimir V. Putin, had apparently decided to teach Georgia, and its flamboyantly pro-Western president, Mikheil Saakashvili, a lesson they would not soon forget.

But what is that lesson? That is the question the West must answer.

Russia’s president, Dmitry Medvedev, said last week that, like other countries, Russia “has regions where it has privileged interests,” adding that Russia has friendly relations with countries in its sphere of influence. Presumably this was meant more as an assertion of right than as a statement of fact. Moscow has amicable relations with Armenia and Belarus, which comport themselves with suitable deference, but extremely turbulent relations with Ukraine and Georgia, which have openly allied themselves with the West. Perhaps President Medvedev was trying to express delicately the view that Russia could have on its borders only enemies or vassals.

This was plainly a very different Russia, if not from the containable one I grew up with, then certainly from the nascent democracy of the 1990s that aspired to join the West. Many American officials and analysts have condemned Russia’s violation of Georgian sovereignty in language very much like that of the Georgians. Vice President Dick Cheney in Tbilisi last week told the Georgians they had endured “an illegal, unilateral attempt to change your country’s borders by force.”

But it’s not only cold warriors like Mr. Cheney who have characterized Russia as a rogue state. Richard Holbrooke and Ronald Asmus, former officials in the Clinton administration, compared Russia’s assault on Georgia with Hitler’s march on Czechoslovakia, airily justified by the alleged need to protect ethnic Germans. For the first time in almost 30 years — at least since the invasion of Afghanistan — Russia has come to be seen as a threat to world order.

But though widely shared, this view is not universal. A number of scholars and diplomats argue that Russia acted not out of an age-old impulse for territorial expansion, or the wish to banish the humiliation and contraction of recent years, but in response to a series of intolerable provocations. It was we, not they, this argument goes, who had violated the status quo.

“American unilateralism in the Balkans,” wrote Flynt Leverett, another former Clinton diplomat, “along with planned deployments of missile defense systems in Eastern Europe and support for ‘color revolutions’ in former Soviet republics, trampled clearly stated Russian redlines.” This was, I suppose, the kind of view I once would have embraced, though I don’t think I would have equated support for democracies with missile deployment.

These two pictures offer very different understandings of the nature of Russia in the Putin era: It is either an expansionist, belligerent power whose ambitions are insatiable, or a “normal” state seeking to restore influence and regional control along its borders, commensurate with its growing wealth and power.

If the first, Russia had no right to demand acceptance of its “sphere of influence.” Invading a neighbor who poses no threat to you or others is, as President Bush put it, “unacceptable in the 21st century.”

If, on the other hand, Russia was essentially demanding its due, then the moralistic response was inappropriate (not to mention hypocritical), and America should acknowledge the legitimacy of Russia’s concerns. The author Francis Fukuyama offered a variation on this theme, asserting that “an adversely shifting global power balance” means that the United States is no longer in a position to enforce its will, whatever the merits of the case.

How you think about the nature and legitimacy of Russia’s ambitions largely determines the response you advocate. Mr. Leverett argues that “America’s promotion of a dubious ‘democratic’ movement in Georgia — or in other ethnically divided and unstable post-Soviet states — is not as important to Western interests as working with Russia on the most significant energy, economic and international security challenges of our time.” He and Mr. Fukuyama would quash the ambitions of Georgia and Ukraine to join NATO; more broadly, they would reduce the grasp of American policy to reflect our more modest reach.

If, on the other hand, Mr. Putin’s Russia has embarked on a drive for regional hegemony — if not through conquest, then through intimidation and economic blackmail — then the policy question is: How can the West block Russia’s ambitions? Mr. Cheney promised the Georgians $1 billion in reconstruction aid and vowed to redouble American support for Georgia’s campaign to join NATO — an absolute redline for Russia.

Georgia’s fate, however, rests not with President Bush, but with his successor. John McCain, a longtime friend of Georgia and President Saakashvili, has threatened “severe, long-term consequences” for United States-Russia relations, and has proposed offering security guarantees to Ukraine and Georgia, including NATO membership. Barack Obama, whose natural inclinations are less punitive, has also declared that we “must review all aspects of relations with Russia,” though he and several leading Democratic policy figures have been more cautious on the question of NATO.

Of course, American policy will not be shaped only by our view of Russia. Our European allies, especially Germany and France, are more dependent on Russian energy and trade than we are, and far more directly threatened by Russian aggression. European officials, by and large, have been every bit as appalled by Russian behavior as Washington has been; but most have taken a less confrontational line. Sheer proximity made ideological anti-Communism an unaffordable luxury for Europe a generation ago; the same may be true for an anti-Russian posture today.

In America, though, where we do have the luxury, the struggle between Russia and Georgia feels almost Miltonic. Even some former ’60s peaceniks find themselves sounding like neocons, who no doubt would say the peaceniks have finally woken up to the truth. Or perhaps there’s another explanation: that there’s all the difference in the world between an enfeebled and defensive empire, and a nation emboldened by vast wealth and brimming with resentment at past humiliations. This Russia does not look so very containable.