Date: Sat, 29 Nov 2008
From: GORDON HAHN <gordon-hahn@sbcglobal.net>
Subject: Review of Leon Aron's “The Georgian Watershed”
The NATO Watershed: Response to Leon Aron’s “The Georgian Watershed,”
American Enterprise Institute, November 12, 2008
[DJ: Aron's essay carried in JRL #209, 14 November]
Russia - Other Point of View, November 25, 2008, www.russiaotherpointsofview.com/2008/11/the-nato-watershed.html
In a recent article “The Georgia Watershed” Leon Aron, a Russia analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, offered ideas on the considerable downside of current Russian politics, both foreign and domestic. Like the bulk of “expert opinion” on Russia in mainstream media and Washington’s think tanks, the article ignores both the American role in the downturn and some important positive trends. A focus on the latter would have avoided the pitfall of unfairly apportioning blame for tensions to Russia alone.
Despite negative trends, Russia still does not want to be an enemy of the West, considered a rogue state, or a ‘Soviet-style’ dictatorship. However, if one-sided analyses are all the expert community produces, and politics follow their lead, then catastrophic outcomes will come to pass, to the detriment of the whole world.
Dr. Aron asserts that in Moscow, “Russia’s integration into the family of Western capitalist democracies is no longer accepted even as a distant goal.” This is not true, and if it were, it would be little wonder, considering Russia’s treatment over the past several years.
After the end of the Cold War, NATO and the EU rejected Russian membership in these signature Western institutions. In their place, Washington and Brussels offered symbolic forms of integration the NATO-Russian Council and PACE membership, for example. These appear to have been cover for the West’s efforts to take advantage of Moscow’s post-Soviet weakness to expand its own sphere of influence at the expense of Moscow’s interests.
Where there was once a promise that NATO would not expand beyond a united Germany, there is NATO expansion all along Russia’s borders with military equipment being planted on the territory of new member-states. Washington was deeply engaged with Moscow in the 1990s; now it is focused entirely on wars in the Middle East, ignoring an obvious common bond with Moscow and its similar jihadist challenges. Today Washington relegates diplomacy with Moscow to putting out the increasingly frequent fires that NATO expansion and similarly foolish policies are sparking.
Furthermore, Aron’s claim that Moscow no longer seeks integration cannot be taken seriously since Russian president Dmitry Medvedev’s ambitious proposal to convene an all-European summit to negotiate a new all-European security architecture and treaty proves differently. Western hardliners have characterized Medvedev’s initiative as an attempt to weaken NATO, marginalize the OSCE, and divide and dominate the U.S. and Europe.
It’s safe to say if every Russian initiative is regarded as a sinister move to undermine the West, then naturally there will be no meeting of Russian and Western minds. It should be remembered that Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms, described by Aron as “brilliant,” were seen by hawkish elements in the sovietological world of the time, as just “a sinister KGB plot.” When I was a doctoral candidate, I can recall one of my own professors stating that the fall of the Berlin Wall was actually part of such a KGB plot.
Medvedev’s initiative could be intended to find a way out of the new division of Europe that NATO and EU expansion without Russia have wrought. With proper quid pro quos from Moscow, a recognition of the West’s mistakes in its treatment of Russia during the 1990s, an acceptance of an offer to convene the summit proposed by Moscow, and an expression of willingness to compromise on at least one or two of the issues that most singe Moscow, would be an appropriate starting place.
This combination would go a long way towards removing Russia-West tensions. A carefully prepared northern hemisphere security summit convened to address the most contentious issues could help overcome the current Russian-Western deadlock over NATO expansion, ballistic missile defense, arms control, Kosovo and even Georgia. Working groups could be established in order to institutionalize the negotiating process. At worst, such a process could expose any insincerity that exists in Medvedev’s statements that Russia seeks to overcome its differences with the West.
Dr. Aron is correct in pointing out that then President Vladimir Putin’s February 2007 Munich speech was a clear signal that Russia had become a “revisionist power.” This was long in coming. Moscow was shut out of a West intent on expanding NATO and the EU without Russia and insensitive to reducing Russia’s influence within NATO’s new ‘zone of security’ and ‘community of capitalist democracies.’ So Russia was doomed to become revisionist or settle into irrelevance in its own backyard. There are few regional powers, no less former superpowers in history, that would settle for such a downgrade without a fight.
Noting that months later Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov blamed the Munich watershed on “unspecified ‘major problems’” regarding NATO, the OSCE, and the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty, Aron makes it appear that the Russians were quite irrational. In fact, the Russian leadership has been specifying in great and logical detail the manifold problems it has with these instruments’ strategies. One has either to be disingenuous, uninformed, or forgetful on an Alzheimerian level, not to acknowledge this level of duplicity.
Moscow is said to be “most eager to reclaim hegemony over the territory of the former Soviet Union.” No evidence is offered to support this claim, and there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. During the August five-day South Ossetian war, Russian troops were not much farther from Georgia’s capitol Tbilisi than Alexandria is from the White House, but Moscow did not move on Tbilisi, and the configuration of the invasion force suggests it had no such plans. Even if there are a few elements within or around the Kremlin who might want to retake Georgia, they could not convince any rational Russian leader that military expansion should be considered, when Moscow is still battling a serious jihadi insurgency in the North Caucasus. Yet, according to Aron, Moscow is now set to start another military adventure in Ukraine’s Crimea.
It is claimed that “The political and economic aspirations of the former Soviet republics have been recast by the Kremlin into a zero-sum game, in which Russia automatically loses whenever Western influence or institutions take root.” The problem is that Western influence brings with it NATO’s entrance into the region. The reader will note that in elaborating on this point and listing some of the specific Western policies exacerbating the Kremlin, the author slips in NATO expansion. Need I point out that a military alliance is an animal far different from ‘political and economic aspirations.’
Moreover, one wonders whether Washington would sanguinely regard a Russian military alliance with Central and South American countries, including bordering Mexico, as a plus or a wash? Indeed, Russia’s flirtations with Venezuela are already interpreted by most Western observers as a sign of Russian aggression the old zero-sum game. This type of Western self-contradiction gave rise to the Russians’ obsession with “Western double standards.” Why should Russia forego relations with, and arms sales (remember Moscow loses arms markets with each round of NATO expansion) to countries near the U.S. like Cuba and Venezuela because they have bad relations with the U.S. if Washington develops full-fledged military alliances with countries having bad relations with Russia and on its very borders?
Dr. Aron asserts that the Putin-Medvedev “Doctrine” supplements the Kremlin's pursuit of “regional hegemony” by “threats and energy blackmail” with “military aggression.” This would be true except for the fact that Moscow has not used force in any situation unless a Western-backed country used force first. Therefore, instead of Russia's regional use of military force, we have one case where military action was sparked by the Georgian government.
Surely, some weight must be given, regarding the causation of the S. Ossetian war, to the fact that it was instigated by the U.S.-backed Georgian regime. Georgia radically escalated the S. Ossetian-Georgian tit-for-tat exchanges of small arms fire and light artillery, by a massive heavy artillery bombardment and invasion of Tskhinvali on August 7. That attack immediately killed several Russian peacekeeping soldiers and tens, if not hundreds of civilians, in the first nighttime hours of the invasion of S. Ossetia. Moscow may have been ready for such a development and may have even wanted it, but that is a long way from an expansionist invasion. Washington and NATO expansion wittingly, or unwittingly, bolstered Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili's inclination towards military aggression. Surely, this must be included in any fair assessment of Aron's assertions regarding the Putin-Medvedev “Doctrine”.
This gets to the heart of the most dangerous trend in the West’s Russia analysis: the tendency to look at Russian actions in a virtual vacuum. As if Russian leaders live in solitary confinement, receive no inputs, and simply lash out based on totally manufactured “Westophobic’ impulses which they cannot control. Careful reading of Russian political elite reveals they ingest world media daily and understand well what is happening inside and outside of Russia. They understood the fact that Georgia attacked South Ossetia on a massive scale first bears no weight in analysis of the war, its implications, and how the West ought to respond to it.
The author parses Medvedev’s supposedly carefully chosen rationale regarding Russia’s “unqualified priority” to protect the life and dignity of its citizens wherever they might be. He author emphasizes that the “nebulousness” of the words “dignity” and “wherever they might be” gives the Kremlin the opportunity for “the widest and (wildest) interpretations” to justify, as it is implied, further expansionist forays not just in pursuit of regional hegemony, but across the globe. After such bluster, Aron was restrained enough to only speculate that this may have implications for nearby Moldova’s Transdniestr Republic (with its 100,000 ethnic Russians), if Kishinev, like Tbilisi, attempts to resolve its ‘frozen conflict’ by force. The fact is that, Medvedev’s rationale was not a legal document; it imposes no obligations on Russian decision-makers, and will not drive Russian foreign policy. It was simply his way of reminding that Russian lives had been lost and Russia feels a responsibility to protect its people.
The author claims vindication for those who previously believed that Russia would use force to protect its “privileged interests” in the former Soviet region, because Medvedev spoke of that.
Conversely in the West, Russian leaders’ words are often interpreted in the ‘widest (and wildest)’ way and without comparative perspective in order to sharpen the image of the rogue Russian bear. Question arise: Does not the U.S. claim privileged interests in the Western hemisphere under the Monroe Doctrine? Did not the U.S. invade nearby Grenada when its citizens’ lives were threatened? To keep the game competitive, I could leave out cases like the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, for example, where the U.S. used force on the other side of the globe not to protect its citizens, but rather its allies or “vital interests.” Whereas the U.S. has used violent means in the two mentioned cases (and many others), Medvedev did not mention anything about the means Russia would use. He did not speak about the use of ‘any and all means’ that he could have invoked. To be sure, Moscow used military force abroad in August for the first time in nearly two decades.
It especially bothers Aron that, in the aftermath of the Ossetian war, Moscow “seemed” “almost” to welcome “its retreat from the ‘civilized world.’” What Medvedev is really being taken to task for is daring to reject “illusions of partnership with NATO.” By now, almost every objective observer has noted that the NATO-Russian Council has been a failure. At its sessions, Russia sits in the audience while NATO members, many of them intensely anti-Russian, make decisions that impinge on Russia’s interests and security.
Moscow should indeed feel relief from no longer having to appeal and hope in vain as it has for over a decade, that Washington and Brussels might take its interests into account. NATO gets much more from its relationship with Russia than Russia gets from NATO. An example is Russia’s willingness to permit NATO overflight of Russian territory to resupply its troops in Afghanistan. The West may soon get a sense of what it means to have one’s interests ignored. If Moscow succeeds (and most likely will) in getting the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to prod Kyrgyzstan into terminating NATO’s lease on the Manas military base, NATO’s main resupply platform in the region for Afghanistan will be gone. After all, Washington’s push for Ukraine’s membership in NATO hurts Moscow, which must find a new naval base for its Black Sea Fleet. What is good for the goose is good for the gander. What else could be expected?
The author seems shocked that Moscow now seems content to live in “only rarely intersecting planes,” in “different systems of coordinates,” as Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov put it. The fact is that this is hardly something new for Russia. Moscow, as the result of blackballing by the West (primarily the U.S.) is not in NATO, the EU, or the WTO. Moscow has gotten little and even lost much from its acquiescence to the West’s monopoly on the interpretation of how much each side’s interests and security should be protected. In this case, Moscow’s response is quite rational. Washington’s retention of the Jackson-Vanik amendments against Russia, and Georgia’s clearly politically-motivated obstruction of Russia’s entry into the WTO are passed over in silence in the article, while Russia is criticized for using energy supplies to Europe and blocking U.S. poultry imports for political ends.
To be sure, Russian state media’s mounting anti-Americanism and Putin’s portrayal of the S.Ossetian war as part of a ‘wag the dog’ scenario is outrageous. Unfortunately, Western mainstream media, both state-tied and private, show about the same degree of journalistic standards. U.S. government-tied think tanks and media outlets produce similarly outrageous interpretations of current Russian events, equating Moscow’s “invasion” of Georgia with Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism, after accusing Russia for initiating the invasion. Russian claims that U.S. forces fought on Tbilisi’s side were pure fabrications, or at least wishful thinking of a sort, but the over one hundred U.S. military advisors working in Georgia most likely knew something of Tbilisi’s war planning. U.S. and its allies’ political-military support, including significant Ukrainian arms sales to Georgia are practically a casus belli.
Aron deletes from mention Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s rather significant arrival to Tbilisi coinciding with joint U.S.-Georgian military maneuvers, which began on the same day Russia military maneuvers north of the Georgian-North Ossetian border began. By this point, both sides were playing a dangerous game of chicken in a war of provocations, political and military, that helped spark this war.
Aron devotes special attention to a Russian TV documentary claiming that 9/11 was an inside job. This is indeed obnoxious, but it also is mimicking in order to exact revenge. Western, including U.S. government-tied media, NGOs, and think tanks report but single versions of similar Russian tragedies. Putin, the Kremlin and/or the FSB are depicted as behind or to blame for each of the following: Chechen jihadis’ Dubrovka theater and Beslan school hostage-takings and massacres, the radiological murder of former KGB agent Aleksandr Litvinenko, and the murder of almost any journalist in Russia, in particular that of courageous Novaya gazeta reporter, Anna Politkovskaya. These ‘objective’ institutions never entertain any other scenarios for these crimes, even though criminals and radical jihadists were close to the victims or actually perpetrated the events.
The article’s next two sections are weak. “The ‘Fateful August’” quotes a few opposition analysts to little effect. The section on “Silencing Opposition” notes that Putin “berated” Ekho Moskvy radio’s Aleksei Venediktov on television, and for a month thereafter several opposition analysts were declared a “fifth column” and could not appear on television. The source for this claim is the same undocumented claim in David Remnick’s “Echo in the Dark,” (The New Yorker , September 22, 2008.)
The mentioned analysts are on the air weekly and Venediktov airs daily on ‘Ekho Moskvy’ radio, which is funded by Putin’s state-controlled company GazProm. Interestingly, the fact that such figures are continuously in the Russian media is never mentioned by Western NGOs or media, until they no longer appear television for a month. After some time, these analysts will reappear on Russian TV, but Western media will not mention this, unless they again stop appearing. This is not to say that media freedom is not limited in Russia. It is. But it is to say that the Kremlin, in the tradition of Russian ambivalence, preserves some space for free expression, and on occasion, it eliminates parts of that space. In short, this is not a dictatorship, as Yulia Latynina (one of Russian television’s personae non grata referred to above) acknowledges in Remnick’s “Echo in the Dark.” Thankfully, Remnick did not edit this out.
“Resurrecting Soviet Symbols” section of Aron's piece is even weaker. One ‘resurrection’ consists of a Duma committee applauding a proposal to submit a draft law that would bring the statue of Cheka chief Felix Dzerzhinsky back to Lubyanka Square. Please note that this not the Duma’s adoption of a law, nor even its discussion of a law, nor even the committee’s approval to submit to the Duma a draft law. The statue was removed following Russia’s overthrow of the Soviet communist regime in 1991. The second shocking ‘resurrection’ of the Soviet Union consists of a government appropriation for a youth program that will be inaugurated on the date of the founding of the former Soviet Communist Party’s Komsomol (Communist Youth League). Unmentioned is the fact that Western NGOs and media constantly ridicule “neo-fascist Russian youth movements” initiated due to lack of structured activities for Russia’s young people, which the new program is designed to address.
Dr. Aron is correct in pointing out that historically Russian imperialism has been a drag on the country’s economic and democratic development. However, he praises former Russian president Boris Yeltsin for understanding and acting on this “brilliantly.” Interestingly, it was under Boris Yeltsin that the Russian army, North Caucasus ethnic Circassian volunteers, and Abkhazian and Ossetian partisans fought off Georgia’s first post-Soviet attempt to force the respective breakaway republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia back under Tbilisi’s fold. Abkhazia and S. Ossetia declared independence in 1991 after Georgians elected a national chauvinist president Zviad Gamsakhurdia. He promised to build a ‘Georgia for Georgians only’ and then abolished the two republic’s political and cultural autonomy and encouraged Georgian militants to attack the two minority enclaves. This is the source of Russia’s alleged neo-imperialism in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which happened under Boris Yeltsin.
The article then argues that Russian foreign policy is controlled by “the National Leader’ Putin, whose next target will be Ukraine’s Crimea. No one in Russia uses the term ‘national leader’ to describe Prime Minister and former President Vladimir Putin, no less puts in capital letters. The term was floated briefly by a few political analysts more than a year ago as an informal designation for a post-presidential role for the then president akin to Deng Xiaping’s late role in China during the 1980s. However, it does appear true that today’s president, Dmitry Medvedev, does not play the leading role in formulating Russian foreign policy. It could be noted that this is technically a violation of the Russian constitution, even if a hard one to prove. Aron proceeds by claiming that Putin has resurrected Russia’s historically “restless authoritarianism” read imperialism and that Russia’s “next target” is likely to be Ukraine’s Crimea. He shows no way to prove this claim either.
Dr Aron concludes by noting that there is “no easy reversal in sight.” This may be true, if the West continues to expand NATO into Moscow’s backyard. This constitutes intervention into Russia’s greatly diminished version of a western hemisphere its “privileged interests” in the post-Soviet space under Russia’s own Monroe Doctrine.
The real issue is whether the West’s actions will continue encouraging both Russian nationalism across Russia and anti-Russian nationalism in former Soviet states by expanding NATO without Russia (with all the risks for instability and war this entails).
It seems worth considering that it might be more prudent to promote in concert with the Russians, Georgians, Ukrainians and others together an economically vibrant zone of security in Europe and Eurasia, leaving democratization for capitalist middle class development and the respective local populations to resolve with time.
Dr. Gordon M. Hahn Analyst/Consultant, Russia Other Points of View Russia Media Watch; Senior Researcher, Monterey Terrorism Research and Education Program and Visiting Assistant Professor, Graduate School of International Policy Studies, Monterey Institute of International Studies, Monterey, California; and Senior Researcher, Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group. Dr Hahn is author of two well-received books, Russia’s Islamic Threat (Yale University Press, 2007) and Russia’s Revolution From Above (Transaction, 2002), and numerous articles on Russian and Eurasian politics.