Karl E. Meyer served as editor of World Policy Journal from 2000 to 2008. He is the author of 12 books, the most recent, with Shareen Blair Brysac, Kingmakers: The Invention of the Modern Middle East (Norton, 2008).
After Georgia: Back to the Future Karl E. Meyer
It is too soon to say for sure who or what ignited the August clash between Russia and Georgia, but already conspiracy scenarios abound, some as dark and convoluted as the infamous gorges of the Caucasus. To Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, the true culprits were most probably the Americans who encouraged Georgia’s unprovoked attack on breakaway South Ossetia. As evidence, Putin cites the close ties between Senator John McCain and Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, implying that the GOP hopeful may have recklessly fanned the crisis to further his own election. The Kremlin duly produced a military spokesman who claimed Russian troops in Georgia discovered a U.S. passport belonging to one Michael Lee White, an army veteran from Texas, thereby proving American complicity “together with Georgian commandos is a fact.” Well, not so fast. It develops that White is an itinerant English-language teacher, most recently in China. He insists he has never been to Georgia, and that his military service in 1992–97 consisted of driving oil trucks and fueling helicopters at air bases in Kentucky, Germany, and Bosnia, where he momentarily worked with peacekeepers. For their part, Georgia’s defenders reverse this sequence, affirming that the true © 2008 World Policy Institute
culprits are thuggish South Ossetian militias, acting in collusion with Russia, whose members precipitated the conflict by firing on Georgian villagers and peacekeepers on August 6 in violation of a 1994 armistice agreement. Already poised Russian troops then burst across the border before Saakashvili ordered Georgian troops into South Ossetia (pop. 80,000) on August 7. Therefore (in this version) Moscow, not Tbilisi, triggered hostilities two days before the conveniently distracting opening ceremonies for the Beijing Olympics. So what should one make of it? Possibly both versions are partly true—that Georgia’s macho president mistook expressions of American solidarity for a serious commitment to intervene, and leaped at the bait by overreacting—just as the Kremlin hoped he would, when Russia’s so-called peacekeepers stood by as loutish local militias misbehaved within and beyond the borders of South Ossetia. More interesting by far was the world’s stunned astonishment over a broadly predictable, thoroughly old-fashioned reaffirmation of big stick intervention, meant to demonstrate the renewed vigor of a long-humiliated, now-prospering great power dominated by an ice-blooded, fiercely ambitious leader, i.e., someone very like Vladimir Putin. 119
Over the past quarter century, the pages of World Policy Journal have chronicled a host of colossal missteps and a modicum of successes by world leaders and charlatans, heroes and rogues of all stripes. In my eight years at the helm, we watched as the American military burst into Iraq in a misguided adventure, yet at the same time maintained peace and a degree of order in the Balkans. We chronicled the horrors of 9/11 and the war on terror, not to mention the corrosive effects of an impending global environmental catastrophe. We watched as some major powers stumbled and others climbed upward, but through it all only the willfully innocent could have been shocked at the myopia and reflexive hypocrisy so often displayed by the world’s rulers—leavened, mercifully, by occasional bursts of decency and candor. Georgia’s agony is a case in point.
Great Power Behavior 101 From ancient times to the present, great powers have jealously sought to enforce their regional supremacy and expel rivals from their neighborhood. America’s Monroe Doctrine, proclaimed in 1823, conformed to this practice by unilaterally decreeing that the Western Hemisphere was no longer subject to further European colonization or interference. We tend to forget how robustly the doctrine was enforced and expanded, and how popular it proved domestically. In 1895, during a dispute over the frontiers between Venezuela and British Guiana, President Grover Cleveland demanded that Great Britain submit the issue to arbitration—which it did, amid triumphant cries that America was “practically sovereign” in the entire hemisphere. In 1920, Franklin Roosevelt boasted that he wrote Haiti’s “pretty good” constitution while serving as Woodrow Wilson’s assistant secretary of the Navy. Creditably, on becoming president, FDR had second 120
thoughts about intervention and inaugurated a long overdue “Good Neighbor” policy, which in turn was succeeded by a fresh eruption of interventions under Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan. While Americans justly condemn Moscow’s unilateral recognition of breakaway provinces like South Ossetia and Abkhazia as sovereign entities, Washington has used the same tool to further its perceived vital interests. On November 3, 1903, a small revolt was mounted in Panama City just as, coincidentally, naval forces of the United States appeared offshore. Within days, Washington formally recognized Panama’s independence from Colombia, to which it had long belonged. Within a fortnight, a treaty materialized authorizing the construction of a Panama Canal, signed by Philippe Bunau-Varilla, a lobbyist for a French canal company, who overnight was accredited as Panama’s envoy. Today, this Panama caper is rarely mentioned in American schoolbooks but still widely recalled in Latin America.
Russia’s Way in the Caucasus Let it be clear that this soiled linen in no way mitigates, condones, or excuses Russia’s brutal excesses in Georgia. It is heartbreaking to witness via cable news the aging Georgian couples driven from their shattered homes by swaggering Russians gleefully reasserting Moscow’s regional hegemony. From their first conquests in the early nineteenth century, the Russians have pursued a cynically divisive strategy for dominating the Caucasus, a craggy isthmus between the Black and Caspian Seas, with no fewer than 43 peaks exceeding 14,000 feet. In these valleys emerged the two earliest Christian kingdoms, Georgia and Armenia, squeezed between Islam’s two quarreling flocks, Sunni and Shia, amid what Arabs long ago called a “mountain of languages.” Early Western travelers reported that as WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • FALL 2008
many as 70 different languages could be heard in Tbilisi’s markets, employing five distinct alphabets: Cyrillic, Armenian, Georgian, Arabic, and Latin. It was but a matter of time before traditional Russian concerns and strategies resurfaced after the Soviet Union dissolved. In its early post-Soviet years, the Russian economy was in turmoil, President Boris Yeltsin was erratic and tipsy, and many Americans truly saw themselves as masters of a unipolar world. At the same time, under President Bill Clinton, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) expanded organically as Eastern European and Baltic republics joined the alliance. Moscow protested impotently in 1998 when a U.S.-led NATO coalition bombed and invaded Serbia, a traditional Russian ally, opening the way for Kosovo’s independence. America’s pro-democracy and free-market hawks claimed vindication when the Russian bear did nothing. What Moscow viewed as affronts were compounded when George W. Bush, having gazed into Putin’s eyes, said he liked what he saw. As we observed in the pages of World Policy Journal, Bush proceeded to 1) scuttle an anti-ballistic missile treaty his father had favored; 2) wave aside, without really addressing, Russia’s objections to the U.S.-led preemptive invasion of Iraq; 3) encourage and then recognize Kosovo’s independence despite Russia’s categorical opposition; 4) embolden Georgia’s defiance of Moscow by training its armed forces and favoring its fast-track accession to NATO; and 5) visit Tbilisi to take part in a rhapsodic rally, thereby demonstrating his personal support for a pro-Western, Americanschooled Georgian president.
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After Georgia: Back to the Future
Many of us may have forgotten, but during the 1980s, Leonid Brezhnev’s gestures of solidarity with Nicaragua’s leftist regime were less overt, but nevertheless caused President Reagan to circumvent a congressional ban and fuel a Contra rebellion, violate world law by mining
The triumphal vision of a globe dominated by a single superpower has faded, and our next president will have to recruit, energize, and inspire allies, rather than command.
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Nicaragua’s harbor, and authorize an illegal arms-for-hostage swap with Iran in order to channel covert aid to the Contras. Imagine Washington’s response had Brezhnev himself taken part in a rally in Managua to announce that Nicaragua would be welcomed as a new member of the Warsaw Pact, and then offered the equivalent of a billion dollars to stiffen Sandinista resolve. Given Washington’s embrace of Saakashvili, at some point, there was bound to be a robust Russian counterstroke, both as a message to other post-Soviet republics (notably Ukraine) and as a warning to whichever candidate prevails in America’s November election. Bolstered by rocketing oil prices, Western Europe’s dependence on Russian natural gas, America’s distractions in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, Putin resourcefully turned tables this year by stepping down as president, hand-picking his protégé as his successor, then virtually naming himself prime minister, his powers enhanced by orchestrated applause in an authoritarian society. And now, after Georgia, the world has seemingly moved back to the future under a constellation of rival powers—Russia, America, the European 121
Union, China, and India—somewhat resembling the old five-power Concert of Europe that emerged after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. The triumphal vision of a globe dominated by a single superpower has faded, and our next president will have to recruit, energize, and inspire allies, rather than command. The Inscrutable Future With hindsight, none of this should have been a surprise. Nonetheless, the world’s political elite has been caught off guard, as usually happens when events take a radical left or right turn. Few mainstream experts in America or Europe foresaw pivotal events of our own era—the prolonged and disastrous Great War, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Great Depression, the rise of Hitler, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Hiroshima, the postWorld War II baby boom, the triumph of Iran’s ayatollahs, the collapse of the Soviet Union, 9/11, and the challenge of radical Islam. It is chastening, for example, to look afresh at Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Wiener’s futurist manifesto, The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (1967). There was no more seemingly tough-minded realist than Kahn, reputedly a model for Stanley Kubrick’s character, Dr. Strangelove. Both figuratively and literally, he loomed as an outsize prophet. He was America’s most celebrated nuclear strategist, the intellectual progenitor of MAD (mutual assured destruction) and author of Thinking the Unthinkable and On Nuclear War. In his effort to map the shape of things to come, Kahn was assisted by the brilliant, dedicated staff of the Hudson Institute, which along with RAND was then America’s most influential strategic think-tank. Yet, if you search the subject index of The Year 2000 you will find no entries for the following problems and places: oil, pe122
troleum, energy, pipelines, weather, climate change, environment, Islam, Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Syria, media, information technology, computer, torture, insurgency, and terrorism—the key words one hears nightly today in every primetime newscast. Kahn was assisted by the U.S. intelligence community, and with its help he compiled a list of countries most likely to equal America’s then-current per capita gross national product (GNP). The first four were Sweden, Canada, West Germany, and East Germany, which itself was expected to match U.S. per capita output within 17 years. Instead, the German Democratic Republic vanished entirely in 22 years. So why did Herman Kahn & Co. get so much wrong? Why did he and his colleagues assume the continued availability of cheap oil (or its ready substitution from other energy sources), the permanence of Soviet power, the ongoing pervasiveness of secularism in an irreversible global quest for material progress, American-style? I would venture two reasons: neglect of Orwell’s Law and the human stain. Of George Orwell’s many essays, my own candidate for compulsory rereading is “Second Thoughts on James Burnham,” written shortly after the end of World War II. In it, he reviews Burnham’s influential The Managerial Revolution, which established the Chicago-born academic’s global reputation. Its argument is that capitalism was disappearing, but would not be replaced by socialism. Instead, a new kind of society would arise that was neither capitalist nor democratic but a centralized state ruled by a new breed of business executive, technicians, bureaucrats, and soldiers, which Burnham collectively calls “managers.” Orwell finds some merit in this analysis, which anticipated and influenced his own dark vision in 1984. “But curiously enough,” he adds, “when one examines the predictions which Burnham has based on his WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • FALL 2008
general theory, one finds that in so far as they are verifiable, they have been falsified.” In successive years, Orwell points out, Burnham’s predictions change. In 1940, he took a German victory for granted, dismissing the British as decadent and concluding that Europe’s integration under the Nazis was irreversible. He further predicted that Germany would not attack Russia until after the defeat of Britain, and that subsequently the Soviet Union was bound to be defeated. But by 1944, Burnham was writing that Russia would gang up with Japan against the United States, and indeed that the Soviet Union—dismissed as a sure loser four years earlier—was now destined to control all Eurasia, a veritable recreation of the old Mongol empire. Orwell observes: “It will be seen that at each point Burnham is predicting a continuation of the thing that is happening. Now the tendency to do this is not simply a bad habit, like inaccuracy or exaggeration, which one can correct by taking thought. It is a major mental disease, and its roots lie partly in cowardice and partly in the worship of power, which is not fully separable from cowardice.... Power worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem invincible.” Thus, in the 1970s and 1980s, when the Soviet Union seemed to stride unchecked across the globe, arming client states in the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia, and the Americas, Burnham envisioned the suicide of the West, with his despair echoed by a phalanx of American neoconservatives who predicted the global victory of communism. Typically, in a 1980 manifesto, The Present
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After Georgia: Back to the Future
Danger: Do We Have the Will to Reverse the Decline of American Power?, Norman Podhoretz likewise warned that American liberals were infected by a “culture of appeasement” that ensured the country’s eventual subordination “to superior Soviet power.” (It is worth mentioning that the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, once an early ally of neoconservatives, concluded in the 1980s that Russian power was grossly overrated, noting that the Soviet Union was the only
What the new tenant in the White House needs most is a capacity for empathy: to see ourselves and institutions as others see us and them.
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leading industrial state where the average life expectancy of its citizens steadily declined.) When tables turned and the Soviet Union disintegrated, the same commentators, much in the Burnham tradition, now glimpsed “an end of history” sealed by the permanent victory of democracy and market economics in a unipolar world yearning to emulate the American model. So it is perhaps no surprise that after the Russian assault on Georgia, which rattled and confused Western leaders who need to work with counterparts in the Kremlin, even as they fear and distrust them, some foresee a new Cold War pitting the Free World against a resurgent Russia. My own conclusion, modestly ventured, is that what a new tenant in the White House needs most to cultivate is a capacity for empathy, which entails making an active effort to see ourselves and our institutions as others see us and them. With reason, many thoughtful foreigners rankle at moralizing lectures by Americans, and our reluctance 123
ever to acknowledge our own sins and blunders. I was struck by a passage in former President George Herbert Walker Bush’s just-published China Diary—a day-by-day record of his service as head of the United States Liaison Office in Beijing in 1974–75. In his role as interim envoy, he penned these lines in May 1975, “The American people do not have any concept of how others around the world view America. We think we are good, honorable, decent, freedomloving. Others are firmly convinced that…we are embarked on policies that are anathema to them. We have a mammoth public relations job to do on all this.” Although Bush’s son, George, spent a brief few weeks visiting his parents in Beijing, his presence is barely noted in these diaries. Not a line appears concerning George W.’s thoughts and experiences during his days in China, one of the few foreign countries he visited before assuming office as America’s chief executive in 2001. His silence sadly prefigured a certain lack of curiosity that marked his tenure and bequeathed so confusing and inconsistent a legacy to whichever candidate has to deal next year with Putin and Saakashvili alike.
vak Communist Party leader Alexander Dubcek’s efforts to give socialism a human face, despite Moscow’s glowering disapproval. The Prague leaders were summoned to the Kremlin, Soviet forces conspicuously staged Warsaw Pact maneuvers, and experts in the West pondered Leonid Brezhnev’s next moves. The consensus among diplomats and my press colleagues was that a negotiated settlement would resolve differences, as had happened in Poland after the reform-minded party Wladyslaw Gomulka became party leader in 1956. By chance, Joseph Alsop, the most hawkish of mainstream columnists, was in London, and we had lunch. So what did he think? “Of course the Russians are going to invade.” Really? On what evidence? “Just look at the stony faces of the Russian generals meeting with their Czech counterparts: they want to eat them alive.” That same day, I took part in a BBC World Service roundtable with other London-based correspondents. What did we all think? Impressed by Alsop’s vehemence, I was the sole participant flatly to predict a Soviet invasion, which occurred the following week, briefly according me an undeserved reputation as a prophet. (Having managed to obThe Human Stain tain a visa from the Czechoslovak embassy A final personal reflection. Impersonal forces in London, I was able to fly a few days later assuredly define the limits and opportunities to Prague, where I reported for five weeks for the Washington Post, after my predecessor confronting leaders bent on changing the there, Alfred Friendly, had been expelled.) course of history. But it is foolish to ignore Whatever Alsop’s other shortcomings, the role that human ambition, pride, and he was a shrewd judge of faces. One can aggressiveness so often play in determining imagine what he might have said about the which path events may follow. This was driven home to me in August 1968, when I glacial eyes, rigid smile, and impeccable grooming of Vladimir Putin. was an American correspondent in London. The talk of the moment was the Czechoslo-
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