When some bad actor does things over which the United States has no control, and in which our national strategic interest is limited, politicians and commentators rush to the editorial pages to do some moral posturing. They urge that we “do something,” almost always code for military action, even though those options are mostly nonexistent. A few months ago, it was the Burmese regime’s appalling indifference to the plight of its own people devastated by Cyclone Nargis. Back then, we had suggestions of military action, up to and including a U.S. invasion of Burma to distribute disaster assistance, and maybe topple the Burmese generals while we were at it – both absurd ideas that would have made an awful situation worse, gotten a lot of people killed, and embroiled us in an impossible, highly expensive Iraq-like nation-building project.
And today, it’s Georgia. Here the posturing gets even more transparent, as the Munich analogies fly once more. The basic problem here is that, no matter how much we might sympathize with pro-Western, pro-American Georgia, our military options are severely constrained. Russia’s actions are a problem and an ominous assertion of raw power. But Russia took them knowing there was very little the West would do about it – and also, presumably, with some strategic calibration, going far enough to humiliate Georgia and outrage the West, but not far enough to provoke a Western military response and a potentially catastrophic war. This is not to say we should trust Putin to be reasonable, just that he’s not crazy.
So, those urging “doing something” (or calling the immediate inclusion of Georgia into NATO, which would then require military action) have no clothes. But those urging the other course (I suppose, including myself) aren’t exactly sitting pretty either. Are we prepared to return to a Cold War era view and concede Russia a “sphere of influence” including hegemony over democratic, pro-Western states along its borders?
It is tantamount to saying that a large chunk of Europe, which isn’t wonderfully democratic but is surely more democratic than it used to be, should be subject to the effective authority of a state that doesn’t welcome the spread of democracy. This seems to me to set a terrible long term precedent. I don’t have specific policy recommendations for how the US and Europe should respond to the Georgia-Russia war – I am neither an area expert nor a guns’n’bombs specialist. But I’m going to stick my neck out and say that the key objective here isn’t to support Georgia – it’s to prevent this becoming a precedent for the recreation of Russian local hegemony across the wider region.
But of course this is not a binary choice between invasion and appeasement. There is nothing to be gained by openly or tacitly conceding Russia’s imperial designs here. The fact that the arguments are breaking down along these lines is one legacy of the simplemindedness of the post-9/11 Bush foreign policy (you’re either with us or against us; if you’re against us, we will not talk with you and might blow you up).
