COMMENTARY
by Gordon Hahn
Several events this week prompt a reconsideration of a potential deal breaker in the U.S.-Russian ‘reset’ or thaw, and the failed policy of NATO expansion without Russia which was adopted by the Clinton Administration in the mid-1990s.
First, the anniversary of the Five-Day August 2008 Georgian-Russian War passed with Georgia still deprived of 30 percent of its perceived territory––and Abkhazia and South Ossetiya set on a long road to real independence. This was the price Georgia paid for its own hubris and the West’s clumsy interference in a region it poorly understands. That interference was driven by the policy of NATO expansion, which militarized American and Western democracy-promotion efforts and piqued Russian resistance to them.
In addition, American policy was driven in large part by the anti-Russian biases of many U.S. post-sovietologists, analysts, and journalists when it comes to assessing Russia’s relations with its own minorities and former Soviet nationalities. Often, these relations are caricatured on the model of the white hats and the black hats. The Russians are cast as the nasty black-hated nationalistic imperialists, while the peoples like Georgians and their nationalist leaders are cast as the good guys, ‘beacons of democracy.’
This caricature was a useful portrayal to justify NATO expansion without Russia. This simplistic assessment overlaid a situation on the ground which boiled over with inter-ethnic hatreds and mistrust prompted by the collapse of the USSR and the reversion to nationalism by many post-Soviet republic leaders. Georgia’s former president Zviad Gamsakhurdia and his ultra-nationalist oppression of Georgia’s minority Abkhaz, Ossetiyans, Ajars, and others, drove these minorities to secessionism and rely on Russia for protection. To the peril of Tbilisi, Washington, and Moscow, this part was ignored by American policymakers and observers. In short, the U.S. and NATO had stepped into an inter-ethnic cauldron which heated to boiling point. Biases and ignorance in Washington and Brussels inevitably raised the temperature, with the all too well-known results.
The distorted perceptual prism, purveyed by U.S. mainstream media and seemingly serious analysts, misinformed and sometimes disinformed Western governments. Their perceptions of the Georgian-Russian war and its causes, screenplayed as ‘Russia’s invasion of Georgia, colored the environment.’
It took a year-long EU commission investigation to conclude that the five day war in 2008 was created by nationalist Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili, who escalated small-scale tit-for-tat exchanges of fire between Georgian troops and Ossetiyan irregulars. It became a full-scale war with an intense and indiscriminate bombardment of South Ossetiya’s capitol, Tskhinvali, that killed dozens and perhaps hundreds of civilians and Russian peacekeeping troops during the night of August 7, 2008. This atrocity prompted Russia’s response – its ‘invasion’ of Georgia. To be sure, Russians, Ossetiyans, Georgians, and the West alike engaged in provocations that pushed tensions to the brink of war, but it was Saakashvili who was the leading provocateur and who went over the edge so there was no turning back.
Overlooked in Russia’s response was that Moscow had no choice, and the world may be better off for it. Had Moscow delayed or refrained entirely from intervention, Ossetiyans from Russia’s North Ossetiya would have made their way south to defend their compatriots sparking a long guerilla war. The same would have happened in Abkhaziya, whose natives are the ethnic kin of Russia’s Circassian ethnic groups – the Kabards, Cherkess, and Adygs – living in Russia’s republics of Kabardino-Balkariya, Karachaevo-Cherkessiya, and Adygeya located in the already jihad-plagued North Caucasus. Indeed, the infamous Chechen jihadi terrorist Shamil Basayev, who planted the seed of Al Qa`ida and the global jihad in the Caucasus, saw his first combat leading a volunteer battalion of Abkhaz and Circassian fighting against Georgians in the 1992 Georgian-Abkhazian war sparked by Gamsakhurdia’s repression of the Abkhaz.
In addition to the specter of a larger, more pan-Caucasus war that could have drawn in Russia and other great powers later, Russia’s hold over the North Caucasus and positions in Armenia, the entire Caucasus, and the CIS would have been severely undermined. So in many ways, NATO’s foray into Georgia was bound to end in a military confrontation with Moscow.
The second event of note this week is the trial of recently arrested former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yuliya Tymoshenko. Tymoshenko is charged with inflicting a 1.5-billion-hryvnia ($190-million) loss on Ukraine in 2009 when she signed a gas deal with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin that resolved a disruption of deliveries that also affected Europe. At the time, NATO question was also polarizing Ukrainian politics already tense because of the contest between President Viktor Yushchenko, Tymoshenko, and to a lesser extent Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich for control over gas revenues to fund their presidential bids and backers. (Yanukovich’s backers and coffers derived from oligarchic industrial interests). Moreover, President Yushchenko’s push toward NATO and his anti-Russian language and history policies, respectively, were bitterly opposed by a slim majority of Ukraine’s population and were driving a wedge between ethnic Russians and ethnic Ukrainians.
The present prosecution of Tymoshenko includes the implication that she agreed to the suspiciously high prices in order to help fund her presidential bid, which failed. She and former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko were the prime leaders of the 2004 Orange ‘Revolution’ - Kiev’s counterpart to Georgia’s and Saakashvili’s 2003 Rose ‘Revolution’. Although orange has not turned to blood yet, Ukraine’s political stability is being tested by the implosion of the orange tandem. After Yushchenko’s resounding defeat in the presidential election last winter to the Orange Revolution’s chief antagonist, former Ukrainian prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich, the latter’s rule has been punctuated by a growing campaign and investigation of the notoriously corrupt Tymoshenko. Her first mentor, former Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko, sits in a U.S. jail on corruption charges. Under his wing, Tymoshenko headed Ukraine’s corrupt gas sector first headed by Lazarenko.
As I wrote during the January 2009 gas crisis, all parties involved on the Ukrainian side appeared to be motivated by the domestic political power struggle, rather than Ukraine’s national interests in provoking a cutoff of Russia gas supplies in which Moscow was blamed almost unanimously in the West for attempting to do exactly the same – play politics with gas by pressuring Ukraine to keep it from turning West and joining NATO. The testimony of Ukraine’s gas industry ministers at the Tymoshenko trial in Kiev have confirmed what I wrote during the gas crisis: that Yushchenko may have scuttled the gas deal with Putin in January 2009 that led to the cutoff of gas supplies in the cold of winter because he and/or those around him had ties to the intermediary company RusUkrEnergo that was to be dismantled under the Putin-Tymoshenko agreement. At the time, Tymoshenko told a press conference that it was Ukrainian politicians tied to Orange Revolution leader and Ukrainian President Yushchenko who were benefiting from the intermediary and that they scuttled the near agreement that led to the cut off talks and of gas to Europe (Gordon M. Hahn, “Response to Washington Post Article ‘Gas issue Points to Ukraine’s Failures’,” Russia – Other Points of View, 19 January 2011). In short, it appears that both of the Orange Revolution’s leaders are as steeped in corruption as opponents like Yanukovich.
Thus, contrary to the U.S. and Western narrative, both the 2003 Rose ‘Revolution and 2004 Orange ‘Revolution’ did not pit democrats against autocrats in a democratic revolution from below, but rather an intra-elite power struggle in which one side, ‘democrats’ – perhaps more willing to cooperate with the West for domestic political strategic purposes than the ‘autocrats’ – chose to temporary mobilize some among the masses to assist and legitimate their seizure of power. Neither party in either ‘revolution’ was particularly democratic or clean of corruption.
The geostrategic upshot of all this is that neither Georgia or Ukraine will be in NATO soon, Russia’s position vis-à-vis both countries has been strengthened, the U.S. has been shown to be unable or unwilling to protect allies in this distant region, and the U.S. and Russia remain at odds over the region’s future, complicating the reset’s long-term viability not to mention its evolution into a strategic partnership.
Across the former Soviet region, Russia remains the pre-eminent power. This is reflected in its popularity across much of the former USSR. Although Russia and its leadership are unpopular in Georgia and the Baltic states, they are approved of by majorities of the population in 8 of the other 9 post-Soviet states in which a recent Gallup survey was conducted (Turkmenistan was not included): Tajikistan (94%), Kyrgyzstan (84%), Uzbekistan (81%), Armenia (75%), Kazakhstan (73%), Ukraine (61%), Moldova (56%), and Azerbaidzhan (54%). Only Belarus disapproved more than approved of Russia’s leadership and Russian policy in the CIS (Julie Ray, “Russia’s Leadership Not Popular Worldwide,” Gallup, 5 August 2011). Thus, Russia maintains a strong position within the CIS despite its often heavy-handed and clumsy foreign policy and Western humanitarian assistance and economic largesse.
The U.S. policy of expanding its influence in the former Soviet Union on the back of NATO has sputtered with the Baltic states’ entry. In sum, it failed as many, including the present author, have been warning since the mid-1990s. Russian ties to Ukraine will block the latter’s entry into NATO. Georgia’s oppression of its minority nationalities and Russia’s consequent support for Abkhazian and South Ossetiyan independence render Georgia a state with a sovereignty problem that precludes NATO membership. Moldova and Azerbaijan are precluded for the same reason, with the Transdniestr and Nagorno-Karabakh issues remaining unresolved.
The Obama Administration appears to have no grand strategy for U.S. Eurasia policy, and the the hard truth remains that there may be none. It is simply a bridge too far, especially in lieu of a strategic partnership with Russia.
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