Gary Schmitt and Mauro De Lorenzo
Wall Street Journal
August 12, 2008
Given the cutthroat politics Moscow has practiced at home and abroad in
recent years -- with only the softest protests from the U.S. and its
allies -- no one should be surprised by Russia's decision to conquer
the two breakaway regions of Georgia. Nevertheless, it should once and
for all disabuse policy makers in Washington and Brussels of hopes that
Russia intends to become part of the post-Cold War condominium of
democratic peace in Europe. The point of the Kremlin's invasion of
Georgia, which now threatens the capital city of Tbilisi, is to
demonstrate to the world how impotent that security order has become.
For Moscow, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili's mistake in finally
taking the bait of Russian provocations and ordering his troops in
South Ossetia last week was the opening they sought -- and for which
they had been planning for some time.
South Ossetia is not, as some have suggested, tit-for-tat payback for
American and European recognition, over Russian objections, of Kosovo's
independence from Serbia. Russia has been "at war" with democratic
Georgia for some time. Driven to distraction by Mr. Saakashvili's
assertiveness and Georgia's desire to join NATO, Russian Prime Minister
Vladimir Putin first tried to bring the country to its knees through
economic warfare beginning in 2005. He cut off access to Russian
markets, expelled Georgians from Russia, quadrupled the price of
Russian energy to Georgia, and severed transport links.
Georgia failed to collapse. To the contrary, it has flourished: After
the Rose Revolution of 2003 ended the corrupt reign of Eduard
Shevardnadze, the former Soviet foreign minister, Georgia instituted
far-reaching reforms to its governing structures, cleaned up the
endemic corruption that infected every facet of pre-Rose Revolution
life, and found new markets for its products in Turkey and Europe. It
persevered with some of the most profound and thorough economic and
pro-business reforms ever undertaken by a developing country --
slashing taxes and government regulations, and privatizing state-owned
enterprises. All of which is reflected in Georgia's meteoric rise on
the World Bank's Doing Business indicators. The irrelevance of Russian
economic sanctions to Georgia made the ideological challenge that the
Rose Revolution posed to Putin's vision of Russia even more profound.
Unable to bend Tbilisi to its will, the Kremlin in recent months
ratcheted up the pressure and provocations in South Ossetia and
Abkhazia -- reinforcing Russian forces and Russian-backed
paramilitaries, violating Georgian air space with Russian jets,
shelling Georgian villages and outposts, and passing a resolution to
treat the two provinces administratively as part of Russia. Starting in
2004, Russia began issuing passports to the residents of South Ossetia
and Abkhazia, a fact that today serves as one of the main pretexts for
the ferocity of Moscow's military campaign.
However, Georgia's "impertinence" in seeking NATO membership and
building close ties with Europe does not fully explain Moscow's blatant
display of brute power. In a speech before the Munich Conference on
Security Policy in February last year, Mr. Putin made it clear that
Russia would no longer accept the rules of the international road as
set by the democratic West. It was an in-your-face challenge to the
U.S. and Europe, and we blinked. With the exception of John McCain, who
warned against "needless confrontation" on the part of Moscow, no
American or European official at the conference made any attempt to
push back. Ever since, Moscow's contempt for NATO, the European Union
and Washington has only grown.
Reversing this course will not be easy, but it is absolutely necessary.
At stake are international law, energy security, NATO's future, and
American credibility when it comes to supporting new democracies. It is
also about resisting Russia's openly hegemonic designs on its neighbors
-- including Ukraine, which Mr. Putin reportedly described as "not a
real nation" to President Bush at their meeting in Sochi earlier this
year.
What can the West do? The first step is for the U.S. and its allies to
rush military and medical supplies to Tbilisi. If we want democracy to
survive there, Georgians have to believe that we have their backs. At
the moment, the tepidness of the Western response has given them
serious cause for doubt. In addition, Washington should lead the effort
to devise a list of economic and diplomatic sanctions toward Russia
that impose real costs for what Moscow has done. Russia should know
that the West has a greater capacity to sustain a new Cold War than
Russia, with its petroleum-dependent economy, does.
Next, the West should make use of Russia's claim that its role in South
Ossetia and Abkhazia is driven by the need to protect the populations
there. If so, Moscow should have no objections to U.N.-sanctioned
peacekeepers and observers moving into those two regions to replace the
jerry-rigged system of "peacekeepers" that, until the war broke out,
consisted of Russian troops, local separatist militaries and Georgian
forces. If nothing else, the goal should be to put Mr. Putin and Dmitry
Medvedev, the new Russian president, on their back foot diplomatically.
Over the longer term, it is essential that Russia's stranglehold on
Europe's energy supplies be broken. The EU's failure to get its house
in order by diversifying energy supplies and insisting that Russia, in
turn, open up its own market, has created a situation in which Moscow
rightly believes it has significant leverage over the policy positions
of key countries such as Germany.
It was Germany that led the opposition at the most recent NATO summit
in April against a Membership Action Plan for Georgia, emphasizing that
a country that has unresolved conflicts should not be allowed to enter
NATO. We presumably won't know for some time what the precise
calculations were inside the Kremlin when it came to the decision to
send troops into Georgia, but one can surely assume that the German
position did nothing to discourage Russia's plans.
The real payback for Moscow's decision to invade Georgia should be the
sweet revenge of a strong, prosperous and fully independent Georgia.
Building on the strides Georgia has already made, Brussels and
Washington should give Tbilisi a clear road to NATO and EU membership.
Mr. Schmitt is director of the
American Enterprise Institute's program on advanced strategic studies.
Mr. De Lorenzo is an AEI resident fellow.
