The Georgian-Russian Conflict: NATO Goes Global

This is the second of a two-part series dealing with the core issues underlying the Georgian-Russian War of 2008, most notably that ethnic Russian populations abandoned beyond the borders of the old of the Soviet Union.

Part 1, entitled “More than Barbed Wire,” dealt with the history leading up to the collapse, the impact of lost borders, and the isolation of Russian enclaves outside Moscow’s control. This part, entitled “NATO Goes Global ,” deals with Russification under Stalin, the current status quo of the “frozen conflict zones,” and the role of NATO (under the Bush administration) in contributing to the Georgian-Russian conflict.

The Russians are Coming…no Staying

So where did these Russians come from? A great part of Stalin’s consolidation of the USSR was based on guaranteeing the internal security of a nation with far flung borders and a great many hostile guests, most notably in Eastern Europe. It was not simply a matter to be resolved by the military and intelligence agencies alone. Subversion could easily permeate all sectors of the infrastructure – communication, industry, transport, commodities – no part having immunity from an orchestrated assault from within. The solution was to remove the upper echelon of management in these areas and replace them with Russians. This included the intelligentsia, the sort of social network that commingled within that stratum of business, society, and educational elites. They were labeled ‘enemies of the people’ (“people” being the working class) and as such deemed guilty of “informal opposition to the government,” defined as participating in little more than critical conversation about the limitations of the communist system. Most were sentenced to internal exile in the far reaches of Siberia or to the oil fields of Kazakhstan as laborers. Others entered the Gulag never to be seen again. These purges or population transfers were conducted throughout the USSR and Eastern Europe, resulting in a nearly 60% death toll among the deportees. In other cases, like the Tatar population of the Crimean peninsula (this was probably their fourth or fifth eviction over history), the transfers were purely a matter of ethnic cleansing aimed at removing a recalcitrant population from a sensitive area—that being the headquarters of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet. Combined, these actions amounted to the further russification of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – emphasis on “Union.”

So home is indeed where your hat is hanging, at least in the case of the Russian technocrats now in charge of the Soviet realm. What happened next is what always happens in forty years of living. Children are born, parents grow old, people are buried, and social networks ossify on the new land. In one sense, it mirrors the colonizing experience of other European ex-patriots, but with a different twist: The Soviet Union was not driven out of these territories, but also collapsed abruptly from the perimeter. In the chaos that followed, it quickly became apparent that these Russians not only didn’t want to go home (i.e., they were home), but under the circumstances weren’t really welcome in Russia anyway. The economic realities of the new Russia could ill afford the infusion of upwards of 20 million refugees.

Twenty years after the demise of the USSR, Eurasia is left with the four entities: South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karadakh and Transnistria – termed “frozen conflict zones” in the vernacular of diplomatic exchange. Following the founding of the CIS in 1991, the group went on to establish the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) mirroring both the precepts of NATO combined with economic notions ingrained in the principles of the European Union (EU). Little coalescence has been achieved by this collective since its inception, and two of the chief antagonists in the current dilemma, Georgia and Ukraine, have either failed to ratify the CSTO Treaty or actively withdrawn from it. Russia has flip-flopped, calling it of little use in 2007 while seeking CSTO recognition for South Ossetia and Abkhazia in ’08, no doubt in an attempt to force a lopsided vote on the issue. And to the north, the Republic of Moldova refuses to recognize Transnistria, also known as the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic. Not much can be asserted by the current Moldovan government since the zone is still home to a Russian army, there on the pretext of guarding two warehouses of obsolete ammunition. Russia’s sharp rebuke to the Saakashvili government in Georgia is more than ample evidence to Moldova that Moscow will not tolerate aggressive actions against Russian nationals in any of these conflict zones.

NATO Goes Global

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was a key element in the Cold War strategy of isolating and then encircling the Soviet Union. Its success has long been a subject of debate in the US and Europe. In some regards, it was a dangerous though necessary alliance because all assumptions pointed to a third confrontation on European soil, one with the potential to become global. By all accounts, the treaty was a mutual defense pact because an attack on West Germany constituted an attack on the United States. This was seen as a sensible response to the Soviet Union’s vast superiority in conventional forces stationed in Eastern Europe. No one cared to test the strength of this treaty in real time, for as the relationship between the US and USSR matured, and the evidence suggested that no winner would emerge from the contest.

NATO today is a relic of those forty years of distrust. It holds little value in defensive strategy outside of Western Europe, other than as a deflective tool in support of basically unilateral actions by the United States – as in Afghanistan or Iraq. Membership should seem somewhat ludicrous to the leadership of countries such as Georgia and Ukraine – except for one minor detail: The mere twenty years since the demise of the USSR. Former satellites of the Soviet Union have little trust in the “new” Russia, the once and still dominant power on the two continents. Russia however, has issues of its own and these issues demand both recognition and a degree of respect. Russia in its current geographic form has not existed in almost one hundred years. Considering its history and insular attitude, it should be noted as rather remarkable the degree of flexibility the nation has exhibited in that same twenty years. Too often the collapse of the Union is linked as a personal defeat of the Russian nation and its people. Hardly the case. The system changed, but not the sense of pride the people feel about their homeland. These former nations and SSRs simply cannot seek their own security at the expense of Russia’s. They need to broker a position based on what is real, not on the couched assurances heard at an embassy cocktail party.

NATO needs to back away and invest some of its energy on an introspective analysis on its purpose and objectives for the 21st century. It may discover that it has none. Selling its wares to Russia’s neighbors, whose own issues have little to do with European security, is both disrespectful and dishonest to all parties. The Georgian-Russian War of 2008 is a prime example of Russia’s restraint and perhaps more importantly its maturity. It mirrors the approach that it has taken on other issues concerning these “frozen conflict zones.” The Russian response was measured, to the point and designed to discourage any further provocation. Georgia is a little bent, but not broken. Perhaps it is also wiser for the experience. Membership in any strategic alliance demands common sense and discretion above all else. While the Bush administration saw fit to dangle the NATO carrot under Georgia’s receptive nose, it should have stopped for a moment and considered Russia’s reaction. Exporting democracy as an alternative to repressive regimes is one thing, but giving them the keys for a military option is quite another. Washington can assist in resolving the matter of these “unrecognized states,” but it will be Moscow’s signature on any substantive agreement. It may surprise some, but Vladimir Putin has read the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary. Maybe we should read it again, with a renewed sense that regional issues need to be resolved by regional players.

The Georgian-Russian Conflict: More Than Barbed Wire

This is the first of a two-part series dealing with the core issues underlying the Georgian Russian War of 2008, most notably ethnic Russian populations abandoned beyond the borders of the old Soviet Union. This part, entitled “More Than Barbed Wire,” deals with the history leading up to the collapse, the impact of lost borders and the isolation of Russian enclaves outside Moscow’s control. Part 2, entitled “NATO Goes Global,” will deal with Russification under Stalin, the current status quo of these “frozen conflict zones,” and the role of NATO (under the Bush administration) in contributing to the Georgian-Russian conflict.

The Impact of Population Transfers in the Post-Soviet World

Perhaps the biggest question to come out of the great Georgian-Russian War of 2008 was the one nobody bothered to ask: What were all these Russians doing in Georgia to begin with?  The U.S. State Department (under President Bush) might have asked themselves the same question, if not blinded by the rather zealous recruiting campaign underway for potential NATO partners, most occupying real estate literally in Russia’s backyard.  Lost in this sort of retro-cold war pimping strategy (one that should have run out of gas during the Reagan administration) were three very important points, especially if you happen to be Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, a well-educated cold warrior with solid intelligence credentials.  He is also highly invested in the next chapter of Soviet/Russian history, one that will help decide the future course of The Great Game. They are:  1) borders; 2) displaced Russian nationals; and, of course, 3) America’s seemingly endless infatuation with the NATO franchise.

More Than Barbed Wire Here

Secure borders have been a flash point in Russian history all the way back to the Mongol invasions of the 11th century.  Feudalism was an ineffective force because the Mongol armies could easily manipulate the existing fears and suspicions of the various city-states, implementing a “divide and conquer” strategy as it moved across the continent.  Not until Russians united under a common cause were they finally able to drive the Mongols beyond the Ural Mountains.  This notion of a central authority (hence, security) has been thematic of Russian history (much like China’s) in generating policies driven by the need to consolidate an empire that experienced constant expansion until the end of the Tsarist period in 1917. Unlike the other great European powers–England and France, Russia practiced “internal” colonialism, confining most of its activities to the contiguous land mass of its birth – Eurasia.  External colonialism was abandoned in the 19^th century, culminated by the sale of Alaska and the withdrawal of its small colonies on the Oregon and California coasts. Russia managing Russia in a hostile world was a fulltime job.

Russia has continued to seek security by creating a confederacy of groups and tribes under one flag, a process of “russification” that has occupied the nation for most of its history, particularly in the modern age.  Russia’s borders are not only some of the longest in the world, but also the most complex in terms of the ethnic, religious and political diversification that make up a mélange of secular and ideological beliefs along what are largely geographic, not political divisions. Russia’s neighbors have always faced a double-edged relationship because Russia is both a perceived threat and concurrently a tenacious guardian of all that it shelters. What fuels this apparent paradox is Russia’s own fears about its ability to defend its territory from outside aggressors.  In the past two centuries, those threats have primarily come from the West, not only in the case of the French under Napoleon, but also from both the German/Austro-Hungarian alliance of World War I and later Hitler’s Third Reich.  The Axis defeat in World War II merely traded a vanquished threat for a potentially stronger one as a weary Western Europe quickly consolidated under the military umbrella of NATO (1949) and the economic might of the United States.  The first round of the Nuremberg trials coincided with the opening salvo of what became known as the Cold War.  Aside from stark differences in political philosophy between East and West, the perception of what constituted a national security policy also played out on polar grounds.  The United States had the technological edge, the economic advantage, and suffered no loss of infrastructure as a result of the war.  The Soviet Union had at least 22 million dead, split about equally between its military and civilian populations, including three million POWs that died in captivity.  Most of its European theatre was in ruins and another western army was sidling up to its doorstep.  Stalin was having none of it.  He would keep Eastern Europe and the scattered regions making up his southern flank.  The next war would be settled in Czechoslovakia or Poland – not at the gates of Moscow.

However, these new lands came with a lot of baggage, particularly in the case of countries and territories like Romania, Georgia, and particularly Ukraine.  The Bolshevik Revolution (which forced the Russians to withdraw from World War I) was hardly settled when Hitler turned his guns on Moscow.  Many captured soldiers quickly switched sides, as in the case of Ukraine forming its own Waffen SS Combat Division, later reformed as the Ukrainian 1st Division.  They actually preferred killing Russians to Germans, though they couldn’t be classified as allied with the German cause, for when sent to fight French or other Allied forces, they chose to flee or simply desert.  The German Waffen SS also deployed a Muslim division from the provinces of the Eurasian steppes.  And Romania, under Antonescu was of course fascist, the fourth peg in the Tripartite. The importance in this distinction is that many of these soon to be repatriated (re-seized) satellites of the post-World War II Soviet Union had far more serious issues with Moscow than Berlin.  Stalin’s sack of trophies from the German capitulation was offset by the demographic nightmare making up the contents. Having new lands was one thing, but holding on them was another topic entirely.

And so it went for the next forty years.  The nuclear card negated any potential for conventional warfare in Western Europe, as neither side could afford to win or lose under such surreal conditions.  An advantage by either belligerent could easily trigger an escalation to the nuclear option, one that promised to take the dispute global and for the most part, annihilate the human race.  Still, the Stalin mentality prevailed through the ensuing years and subsequent changes in leadership, holding Eastern Europe and a good portion of Eurasia as geopolitical hostages in a rivalry forced to play out on other fields–  Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Southeast Asia. These were the proxied “hot” wars of the Cold War.  The paramount symbol of this struggle was the Berlin Wall, perhaps the most symbolic border of the 20th century and perhaps the most pernicious.  It was not just concrete and barbed wire – it marked the very thin line between an edgy status quo and the new acronym of the cynics:  MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction).

The Berlin Wall ultimately became a new symbol with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989.  The new (old) state of Russia emerged from the deconstruction of the old Union, though it was forced to do so without the luxury of borders.  The real borders were on the outskirts of the buffer states, Russia’s true perimeter a porous delineation on some cartographers chart.  The loss of central authority, the denationalization of all services and financial systems, command and control of the military, and control of commodities entering or leaving the country occurred virtually overnight.  As far away as Hungary or Czechoslovakia, Russian border guards simply walked off the job.  The second most powerful country in the world was left with little or no communication, all its doors unlocked and an internal struggle for not only control of the country, but also the nuclear arsenal as well.  The anxiety generated in this vacuum could only be compared to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the only time in the atomic age where the Nuclear Clock theoretically showed one second to midnight. [In reality, the crisis proceeded too rapidly to alter the clock.]

Fortunately, a degree of sanity did manage to prevail in most sectors, necessary in light of the greater stakes on the table, that being the risk to all humanity inherent by the instability of Russia’s nuclear arsenal, part of which was no longer in their direct control.  A preemptive strike by the United States was on the table – one option of many if Russia’s divided leadership could not contain the threat posed by the disruption in command and control of its nuclear assets.  Sound absurd?  By the fall of 1993 Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s beleaguered president, was literally engaged in a tank battle on the front lawn of Moscow’s White House (Parliament building) against the Vice President Aleksandr Rutskoi for control of the government and military.  Of the old Soviet Union’s 27,000 nuclear weapons, approximately a third were outside of Russia, including bomber-based weapons in the Ukraine that were not under Moscow’s central command.  The US concern was that Ukraine might launch on Moscow.

Violent nationalism erupted on many other fronts, but was tempered by the presence of Soviet Army groups stranded in the respective countries.  However, the grudging acknowledgment of new frontiers meant that millions of Soviet (Russian) nationals were, in effect, trapped behind indifferent or openly hostile lines.  General Alexander Lebed’s 14th  Soviet Army was trapped in Moldova, a de facto warlord in a dispute between the Russian enclave on the east bank of the Dniester River (Transnistria for these purposes) and Romanian nationalists pushing for the reunification of the Moldavian SSR with Romania proper.  Lebed had no authority to stay and no ability to go home.  His one obligation was to protect the Russian populace – though he had no clear license to even carry that order out.  The 14th Army sat as a wedge between the two antagonists in a somewhat neutral stance.  When violence broke out following Transnistria’s declaration of independence in 1990, the 14th Army intervened, opening fire on the nationalist forces.  That caused an abrupt end to hostilities as neither side cared to go toe to toe with a well-equipped Soviet army group. This same scenario was repeated throughout the old empire with a variety of results, both positive and negative.

Russia did attempt to resurrect a Union through what was termed the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), though the effort was not particularly successful. The yoke had been lifted and most of the mules wanted to go their own way.  Repercussions continued for a number of years surrounding the formation of these independent states and former nations, and altercations provoked by the nature of the agenda:  The nationalist issue, the need for revenge platform, secular differences, various border disputes, the Balkan implosion, irreconcilable differences  (the Czech Republic & Slovakia), resources, nuclear arsenals, who owns what navy – endless stuff.  What wasn’t resolved was the fact that millions of Russian nationals were left behind in places like South Ossetia and Abkhazia (Georgia), Transnistria (Moldova), Nagorno-Karadakh (Armenia), and the Crimean peninsula in the Ukraine.  These composed the core of what is known as “the commonwealth of unrecognized states,” the unfinished agenda of the post-Cold War era.  Trouble is that Vladimir Putin has his own idea on how to close this chapter, and it doesn’t include the abandonment of what he considers a part of the “new Russia.”

A Scottish Bounce? Labour Stuns the SNP

If British Prime Minister Gordon Brown completes an unbelievable rise from the realm of a political dead man walking, he’ll have his native Scotland to thank. In what was thought only months ago to be the last stand for the Prime Minister,  there came a resounding victory in the Glenrothes, Scotland by-election on last November 6th.  Of course, the electoral statement of Scottish voters is a reaction to the economic realities of the day. It is the end product, not the cause. However, it will nonetheless be remembered as a symbolic watershed moment if Mr. Brown is to complete an amazing Labour comeback in time for the general election, which could occur as early as next spring. While most opinion polls have shown the Tories up by least 10-15 percentage points for most of the calendar year, the most the most recent opinion poll shows the Tories clinging to a mere 41-35% advantage.

So what happened at Glenrothes?

The open seat was caused by the death of Labour MP John MacDougall, who won comfortably in his 2005 reelection bid. However, in 2007, the Scottish National Party (SNP) took over the Glenrothes council and won the nearby Scottish parliament seat of Central Fife. In general, the SNP’s rise over the past few years has been indirectly correlated with the fortunes of the Labour party. Labour had recently lost two safe seats, Crewe and Nantwich and Glasgow East, both in by-elections. In fact, SNP First Minister Alex Salmond’s rhetoric recently has been very confident about taking most Scottish seats in the next general election. What made this seat all the more symbolic is that Prime Minister Brown resides over a neighboring district. Glenrothes was seen by many for months as the possible impetus to finally overthrow the unpopular Prime Minister.

However, to the surprise of many, Labour candidate Lindsay Roy, who happens to be the headmaster at Mr. Brown’s old school, defeated the Scottish National Party candidate Peter Grant by a resounding 18 percentage points.

What likely caused this surprise Labour victory?

First of all, one shouldn’t discount former American Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill’s famous words that “all politics is local.” The local SNP-controlled council has made some unpopular decisions regarding taxes that undoubtedly didn’t help them at the polls.

However, I believe the larger lesson lies in the current financial crisis. Although Prime Minister Brown shares much blame in the lack of fiscal control during the boom times that is now somewhat impeding the actions of the government, he does have much credibility economic issues, being the former finance minister. With the financial crisis as his opportunity, Mr. Brown has begun to govern as a populist who is out to help the people from the excesses of the market (of course ignoring the fact that he certainly didn’t help to prevent these excesses). Bailout of banks? Of course. Overall, this bounce could likely recede as times continue to get tougher for several generations of British who have never collectively experienced tough times outside of the history books. Will Labour call an early election? Probably not.  My belief is that 2010 is a safe bet. However, one thing is clear–Gordon Brown and Labour are far from dead.

What about the SNP?

Simply put, regional parties and the sentimentalism that comes with talk of Scottish independence are great ideas in better times. However, in tough economic times, one must look at practicalities and absolutes, and not at historical idealism. How would an independent Scotland be fairing in the current economic crisis? Probably as well as Iceland, which has been a Scottish example for independence in better times. Of course Britain is not exactly in the best shape right now either, but its diverse economy has the ability to weather this shock much better than would an independent Scotland. Local rule for local issues? SNP control of local councils? Of course. However, sending regional-minded representatives to Parliament during a global economic downturn may not be as popular in the days ahead.