Read the invasion of Georgia as a humiliating lesson in diplomacy for the West: Make no promises you have no intention to keep.
There was never a possibility that the United States or the European Union would intervene in the Caucasus to thwart the Russian military assault – regardless of Georgia’s ancient cultural ties to the Mediterranean, or its commitment of a thousand troops to Iraq as the most loyal (and practically the last) member of Washington’s coalition-of-the-willing.
The reasons lie in two cornerstones of foreign policy. The first is a venerable, moot understanding that servile buffer states will be tolerated along the defensive periphery of major nations. On the Russian front, this principle went into temporary eclipse with the meltdown of the Soviet empire, allowing the Baltic States and Ukraine to squirm free from Moscow’s crushing embrace.
The events in Georgia demonstrate that the first cornerstone is now firmly back in place in what was once the Soviet Union’s southern tier – notwithstanding any Western promises, secret or otherwise, to the Georgians.
The second, more recent cornerstone is oil. The struggle to control its production and delivery is likely to dominate world politics for the next several decades, with the Caucasus among its principal arenas.
FAILED BLUFF
Both calculations are as essential to Washington as they are to its chief global competitors — Beijing, no less than Moscow. Protests, insults and empty threats may fly back and forth when the buffer policy is converted to action, as it was on August 8 in Georgia. But as the White House acknowledged on Wednesday (August 13), there is no prospect of a military response.
Whatever noble sentiments are voiced regarding the plight of Tibet or the suppression of Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang, Washington also tacitly accepts China’s expressed need for buffers on its porous western flank. The Caucasus has been Russia’s counterpart to these restless provinces since Moscow first annexed Georgia in 1801, defining a crucial sphere of influence where evidence of outside interference is guaranteed to elicit a hostile response.
Imagine the reaction in Washington if Texas seceded from the United States, then loudly allied itself with Hugo Chavez, and you have some idea of the impact that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s belligerent pro-Americanism has had in Moscow.
Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin was clearly waiting for an excuse to assert the moot understanding. Saakashvili gave it to him with his wildly ill-considered bombardment of the Russophile breakaway region of South Ossetia, which has resisted inclusion in the post-Soviet Georgian Republic ever since its declaration of independence 1991.
There is plenty of blame to share in the present crisis. Georgia’s decision to bombard South Ossetia was privately encouraged by neo-conservative officials in Washington, while the U.S. State Department publicly disowned it and President Bush fluctuated aimlessly between dovish shrugs and theatrical fist-clenching.
Putin, meanwhile, exploited the media distractions of the Beijing Olympics and confusion over South Ossetia to order a parallel invasion of western Georgia from another breakaway region, Abkhazia, where a brutal ethnic war broke out in 1998.
Like the Soviets in Cuba two generations ago, the Bush Administration placed a high-stakes bet that it could bring the Republic of Georgia fully into the U.S. orbit – knowing full well that it would be the Georgians, and not Americans, who would have to cover the losses if the bluff was called.
What seems incomprehensible, in retrospect, is that anyone expected the bluff to succeed. The second cornerstone guaranteed that it wouldn’t.
THE SECOND CORNERSTONE
The road into the city of Zugdidi, on the frontier between separatist Abkhazia and western Georgia, was lined with abandoned Soviet-era housing complexes when I drove through with San Francisco Chronicle photographer Tim Kao at the height of the 1998 war. All of their facades had been blown off by tank and artillery fire. But the apartments inside were strangely untouched, leaving rows of neatly ordered bedrooms, kitchens, living rooms and bathrooms exposed to view. They had been suddenly evacuated by ethnic Abkhaz, fleeing fierce battles along the border.
A quarter million ethnic Georgian refugees from the other side were packed in camps to the east. Like the Abkhaz, they’d escaped with nothing, on a few hours’ notice. Almost nobody dared return for their possessions. Two days before our arrival, one man had tried, a 25-year-old whose bullet-ridden corpse was found the next morning in a sewage ditch outside Zugdidi. His father spat on the ground at my feet when I offered condolences at the funeral. “I don’t want your pity,” he said. “It’s money I need from America, to buy Kalashnikovs for my other sons.”
Two miles away, the bridge that leads into Abkhazia was guarded by heavily armed Russian soldiers, ostensibly serving with a nonpartisan U.N. peacekeeping force. But they made no effort to disguise their sympathies. “Let him buy all the guns he wants,” the officer in charge said when I described the funeral. “They won’t bring his son back, or his home.”
I was a reporter in the Caucasus intermittently over 15 years, covering the vendettas of murderous political factions in Georgia, full-fledged wars in the neighboring republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan, the mindless slaughter in Chechnya, and the secessions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The scene in Zugdidi, with its seething hatreds and hunger for revenge, was repeated almost everywhere I went.
The 170,000 square miles of mountain ridges and coastal plain that make up the Caucasus are inhabited by 23 million people, settled in 28 distinct ethnic zones. It is as though Minnesota and Nebraska were fractured into 28 separate mini-states, each with a population smaller than that of metropolitan Dayton, Ohio, but speaking its own language and furiously obsessed with its own troubled history.
Their only common feature, apart from endless violence, is to lie on the main corridor linking the vast oil and gas fields of the Caspian Basin to the fuel-hungry West. However volatile these small republics and self-declared statelets may be, their immense strategic value – as a buffer and as an energy corridor – trumps their dangers for Moscow
Zugdidi was one of the first Georgian cities taken last week by the Russian Army, whose troops are still wearing the blue arm badges of a U.N. peacekeeping mission. The invasion immediately pressed onward to the town of Senaki, which lies very far from South Ossetia, the ostensible focal point of the Russian assault – but within a few miles of the Baku-Supsa pipeline, which carries oil from the Caspian to the Black Sea for transshipment to Europe. The Baku-Supsa is fed by the much longer Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, opened in 2006, which runs through central Georgia, then crosses Turkey to the Mediterranean.
Backed financially by United States and the European Union, the two pipelines deliberately avoid sovereign Russian territory. But both were quickly shut down by the Russian offensive. The message is that a vital European oil tap is now in Moscow’s hands, officially or not – as are the continent’s most important natural gas conduits, which are owned and managed by the government of the Russian Federation.
Another painful lesson: a failed foreign policy bluff can be a very expensive mistake.
