And another thing about Finland

23 thoughts on “And another thing about Finland”

1. Thank you for the suggestion. Anything that helps us not fall into the intellectual trap of either/or alternatives: either Russia gets its Caspian sea port, or the US gets its advanced NATO outpost in Georgia. This is merely political rhetoric, not the way to think about real history.

2. Helena
   This from Stratfor tends to counter your piece on Imperial Overstretch.
   http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/united_states_troop_availability_and_window_opportunity
   In sum, especially in the wake of the manpower-intensive surge to Iraq, the window of opportunity remains very much wide open. But the confluence of the impending drawdown in Iraq and the expansion under way (which Stratfor has not included in the above calculations) means that this dynamic is in its final days. The window will not inch closed over the course of five years. It will close much faster.
   Far from being burdened with the Iraq war (though Afghanistan will remain a real challenge), the next U.S. president will find himself taking command of a battle-hardened military accustomed to a high operational tempo. Employable BCTs will soon outnumber commitments — reversing the current dynamic — and in numbers sufficient to sustain a constant presence elsewhere in the world if necessary.
   This hardly means that the United States will suddenly have the capacity to surge multiple divisions of troops across the Russian periphery in the next year. But it does mean that the White House’s room to maneuver militarily on the ground overseas is once again expanding — and the lack of spare capacity is quickly becoming a thing of the past.
   In 2010, as the cumulative number of forces committed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continues to decline, the trend in available forces will only rise further, as six additional Army BCTs and a Marine infantry regiment begin to come on line. Though Washington remains constrained in terms of large-scale division-level troop deployments, the U.S. military’s ranks of employable combat forces will be immense by the early years of the next decade.

3. Thanks for the link, but what utter garbage.
   Ah, but what should we expect from a hardball neoconsource? Ah, but no doubt such comedy will soon show up in WINEP writings, a la the cake-walk all over the world.

4. gee Frank, self-correction — you provided us a link only to a pay source and then gave us a maddening snippet. Not helpful

5. Will
   Do you subscribe to lebanonwire? the full article is there.

6. NATO Freedom Consolidation Act of 2007
   endorses the vision of further enlargement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization articulated by President George W. Bush on June 15, 2001, and by former President William J. Clinton on October 22, 1996, and urges our allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to work with the United States to realize a role for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in promoting global security, including continued support for enlargement to include qualified candidate states, specifically by entering into a Membership Action Plan with Georgia and recognizing the progress toward meeting the responsibilities and obligations of NATO membership by Albania, Croatia, Georgia, Macedonia (FYROM), and Ukraine.
   http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=110_cong_bills&docid=f:s494enr.txt.pdf

7. What window of opportunity that’s closing is stratfor talking about? And I love the part about “battle-hardened military accustomed to a high operational tempo” describing a military which has largely failed to achieve “victory” in the occupation (hardly a high tempo) of two piddling countries and is riddled with soldiers effected with PTSD as well as officers who are leaving the combat arms (when they can) in record numbers.

8. A succinct summing up of the our relationship with Russia:
   http://antiwar.com/pat/index_pat.html
   And a view of Afghanistan:
   http://www.stiftungleostrauss.com/bunker/?p=362

9. Buchanan: There is no way America can fight a war with Russia in the Caucasus with our army tied down in Afghanistan and Iraq.
   The truth is, that there is no way America can fight a direct war with Russia that would not escalate into a nuclear war. During the Cold War everyone understood that very well (the nuclear doctrine during the Cold War was “Mutual Assured Destruction”, M.A.D.). Today it wouldn’t be different. The warheads are still in place. The fact that many people seem to have forgotten this is quite worrying.

10. Chaps
    is the Jerusalem Post a serious newspaper?
    We have more from the Thoughts of Caroline
    http://www.lebanonwire.com/0808MLN1/0808180108JP.asp
    Russia’s blitzkrieg in Georgia this week was not simply an act of aggression against a small, weak democracy. It was an assault on vital Western security interests. Since it achieved independence in 1990, Georgia has been the only obstacle in Russia’s path to exerting full control over oil supplies from Central Asia to the West. And now, in the aftermath of Russia’s conquest of Georgia, that obstacle has been set aside.
    Georgia has several oil and gas pipelines that traverse its territory from Azerbaijan to Turkey, the main one being the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline. Together they transport more than 1 percent of global oil supplies from east to west. In response to the Russian invasion, British Petroleum, which owns the pipelines, announced that it will close them.
    This means that Russia has won. In the future that same oil and gas will either be shipped through Russia, or it will be shipped through Georgia under the benevolent control of Russian “peacekeeping” forces permanently stationed in Gori. The West now has no option other than appeasing Russia if it wishes to receive its oil from the Caucasus.
    Russian control of these oil arteries represents as significant a threat to Western strategic interests as Saddam Hussein’s conquest of Kuwait and his threat to invade Saudi Arabia in 1990. Like Saddam’s aggression then, Russia’s takeover of Georgia threatens the stability of the international economy.
    …..
    If nothing else comes of it, the West’s response to the rape of Georgia should end that delusion. Georgia did almost everything right. And like Israel was, for its actions Georgia was celebrated in the West with platitudes of enduring friendship and empty promises of alliances that were discarded the moment Russia invaded.
    Georgia only made one mistake, and for that mistake it will pay an enormous price. As it steadily built alliances, it forgot to build an army. Israel has an army. It has just forgotten why its survival depends on our willingness to use it.
    If we are unwilling to use our military to defeat our enemies, we will lose everything. This is the basic, enduring truth of international affairs that we have ignored at our peril. No matter what we do, it will always be the case. For this is the nature of world affairs, and the nature of man.
    and then we have a piece that might be considered biting the hand that feeds you.
    http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1218710408403&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
    Germany has supplied the submarines that stratfor suggests carry nuclear tipped cruise missiles.

11. Don
    In 2006, Stratfor argued that the number of military units committed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan so consumed the United States’ deployable forces that a “window of opportunity” for other global players — like Russia — had emerged. This window gave these other players a chance to move more aggressively to achieve their goals abroad. This dynamic certainly held through the U.S. troop surge in 2007 and into 2008. Stratfor re-examines this dynamic in light of several emerging trends — namely, the reduction of troop levels in Iraq and the expansion of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps.

12. The Stratford piece builds on the premise that there will be a significant drawdown in Afghanistan. Recent news seem to indicate the opposite. And again, why is there no mention anywhere on the impact Georgia and the coming conflict will have on the supply situation to Afghanistan? If the russians close the railway link that had just been negotiated, the western forces will have to rely solely on Pakistans goodwill. And that is not a sure bet.

13. Mikhail Gorbachev’s Op-Ed in the New York Times:
    THE acute phase of the crisis provoked by the Georgian forces’ assault on Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, is now behind us. But how can one erase from memory the horrifying scenes of the nighttime rocket attack on a peaceful town, the razing of entire city blocks, the deaths of people taking cover in basements, the destruction of ancient monuments and ancestral graves?
    continued here

14. well spotted fnord.
    you also need to keep an eye on Manas
    http://www.jamestown.org/edm/article.php?article_id=2373192

15. Who Started Cold War II?
    by Patrick J. Buchanan
    The American people should be eternally grateful to Old Europe for having spiked the Bush-McCain plan to bring Georgia into NATO.
    Had Georgia been in NATO when Mikheil Saakashvili invaded South Ossetia, we would be eyeball to eyeball with Russia, facing war in the Caucasus, where Moscow’s superiority is as great as U.S. superiority in the Caribbean during the Cuban missile crisis.
    If the Russia-Georgia war proves nothing else, it is the insanity of giving erratic hotheads in volatile nations the power to drag the United States into war.
    From Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, U.S. presidents have sought to avoid shooting wars with Russia, even when the Bear was at its most beastly.
    Truman refused to use force to break Stalin’s Berlin blockade. Ike refused to intervene when the Butcher of Budapest drowned the Hungarian Revolution in blood. LBJ sat impotent as Leonid Brezhnev’s tanks crushed the Prague Spring. Jimmy Carter’s response to Brezhnev’s invasion of Afghanistan was to boycott the Moscow Olympics. When Brezhnev ordered his Warsaw satraps to crush Solidarity and shot down a South Korean airliner killing scores of U.S. citizens, including a congressman, Reagan did – nothing.
    These presidents were not cowards. They simply would not go to war when no vital U.S. interest was at risk to justify a war. Yet, had George W. Bush prevailed and were Georgia in NATO, U.S. Marines could be fighting Russian troops over whose flag should fly over a province of 70,000 South Ossetians who prefer Russians to Georgians.
    The arrogant folly of the architects of U.S. post-Cold War policy is today on display. By bringing three ex-Soviet republics into NATO, we have moved the U.S. red line for war from the Elbe almost to within artillery range of the old Leningrad.
    Should America admit Ukraine into NATO, Yalta, vacation resort of the czars, will be a NATO port and Sevastopol, traditional home of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, will become a naval base for the U.S. Sixth Fleet. This is altogether a bridge too far.
    And can we not understand how a Russian patriot like Vladimir Putin would be incensed by this U.S. encirclement after Russia shed its empire and sought our friendship? How would Andy Jackson have reacted to such crowding by the British Empire?
    As of 1991, the oil of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan belonged to Moscow. Can we not understand why Putin would smolder as avaricious Yankees built pipelines to siphon the oil and gas of the Caspian Basin through breakaway Georgia to the West?
    For a dozen years, Putin & Co. watched as U.S. agents helped to dump over regimes in Ukraine and Georgia that were friendly to Moscow.
    If Cold War II is coming, who started it, if not us?
    The swift and decisive action of Putin’s army in running the Georgian forces out of South Ossetia in 24 hours after Saakashvili began his barrage and invasion suggests Putin knew exactly what Saakashvili was up to and dropped the hammer on him.
    What did we know? Did we know Georgia was about to walk into Putin’s trap? Did we not see the Russians lying in wait north of the border? Did we give Saakashvili a green light?
    Joe Biden ought to be conducting public hearings on who caused this U.S. humiliation.
    The war in Georgia has exposed the dangerous overextension of U.S. power. There is no way America can fight a war with Russia in the Caucasus with our army tied down in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nor should we. Hence, it is demented to be offering, as John McCain and Barack Obama are, NATO membership to Tbilisi.
    The United States must decide whether it wants a partner in a flawed Russia or a second Cold War. For if we want another Cold War, we are, by cutting Russia out of the oil of the Caspian and pushing NATO into her face, going about it exactly the right way.
    Vladimir Putin is no Stalin. He is a nationalist determined, as ruler of a proud and powerful country, to assert his nation’s primacy in its own sphere, just as U.S. presidents from James Monroe to Bush have done on our side of the Atlantic.
    A resurgent Russia is no threat to any vital interests of the United States. It is a threat to an American Empire that presumes some God-given right to plant U.S. military power in the backyard or on the front porch of Mother Russia.
    Who rules Abkhazia and South Ossetia is none of our business. And after this madcap adventure of Saakashvili, why not let the people of these provinces decide their own future in plebiscites conducted by the United Nations or the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe?
    As for Saakashvili, he’s probably toast in Tbilisi after this stunt. Let the neocons find him an endowed chair at the American Enterprise Institute.

16. Apparently we can conclude, considering the bellicose rhetoric against Russia emanating from all political fronts, that “Finlandization” isn’t a viable option. The US and its NATO go-alongs intend to hold Russia to a higher standard than they hold themselves despite Russia’s pleas for equal treatment.

17. Well, maybe not.
    Some headlines from Canada (the US papers haven’t headlined the story — no surprise):
    *NATO floundering over Georgian crisis*
    *Strong words, no action from NATO*
    NATO statement: “We have determined that we cannot continue with business as usual” with Russia.
    http://www.nato.int/docu/pr/2008/p08-104e.html
    How anemic. It’s a slap in the face to Georgia, and a clear sign that NATO isn’t going to do Washington’s bidding. This kind of leaves McCain and Obama a bit outside the flow, doesn’t it? Especially Obama, with his professed (but not actual) diplomatic urges.

18. well
    at least he is consistent
    http://antiwar.com/pat/?articleid=9906
    October 24, 2006
    Georgia – on Moscow’s Mind
    by Patrick J. Buchanan
    With the failure of the Orange Revolution, Ukraine is being drawn back into Moscow’s orbit. Now, Georgia, another former republic of the old Soviet Union, is finding that ex-colonies of the empire pay a price for becoming estranged from Mother Russia.
    In 2003, Georgia underwent a Rose Revolution that swept Eduard Shevardnadze from power. But in the street demonstrations that raised up Mikhail Saakashvili, Moscow saw the fine hand of Bush’s “democracy project.” Since then, Moscow has seethed, as Saakashvili has pulled his country steadily toward the EU and NATO.
    In late September, Saakashvili went a bridge too far, arresting four Russian officials as spies. President Vladimir Putin denounced the arrests as an “act of state terrorism with hostage-taking,” calling them “a sign of the political legacy of Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria.” Beria, who headed the NKVD secret police under Josef Stalin, had come out of Georgia, as did Stalin.
    To ease the crisis, Georgia released and expelled the Russians. But that failed to satisfy Putin, who recalled Russia’s ambassador, cut air and rail travel and postal lines, ceased to issue visas to Tbilisi, imposed an embargo, began to expel Georgians from Russia, and conducted naval maneuvers in the Black Sea off the coast of Georgia.
    Since the 1990s, Moscow has supported secessionists in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, who wish to break free of Georgia and rejoin Russia. Putin has lately met with the leaders of both regions at the Black Sea resort of Sochi. Moscow also maintains Russian peacekeeping troops in both.
    This confrontation is between unequals. Georgia, a poor country of 5 million, is dependent on Russia not only for the remittances of its sons and daughters who work in Russia, but for the revenue from its exports of wine and mineral water, and for gas and electricity.
    Russians, resentful at perceived Georgian insolence and American meddling in their backyard, support Putin’s cracking of the whip. But Putin may have unleashed a strain of nationalism he could find difficult to contain.
    Says Nikolai Svanidze, a leading Russian TV personality of Georgian heritage, “This anti-Georgian campaign … has led to a wave of xenophobia, which is very dangerous in a multiethnic state.”
    Saakashvili appears wholly dependent upon the restraint of Putin and Moscow. For Georgia’s friends in the European Union and Washington seem impotent or unwilling to take his side. The EU is held hostage by its dependence on Russian oil and gas as winter impends. Bush, beset with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and collisions with Iran and North Korea, has shown no desire to take a stand alongside Tbilisi against Moscow.
    Many believe Putin’s endgame is the overthrow of Saakashvili in a counter-revolution of the kind the Russians believe was engineered in the West to bring him to power. If that is Putin’s goal, there seems little more that the United States could do to prevent it than Russia could do to prevent Bill Clinton’s ouster of the Haitian junta or Bush 41’s ouster of Manuel Noriega.
    What this Tbilisi-Moscow confrontation does reveal, however, is, first, the limits of U.S. power; second, the folly of U.S. meddling in Russia’s “near abroad”; third, the insanity of any decision to bring Georgia into NATO.
    Were Georgia in NATO today, this crisis would have escalated into a confrontation between Washington and Moscow. For under Article 5 of the NATO treaty, an attack against one member is to be treated as an attack against all. Thus, a collision of Russian forces in South Ossetia with Georgian forces could bring America and Russia to the brink of war.
    Russian leaders contend that Saakashvili has been building up his military to invade and recapture the breakaway regions, and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has implied that Saakashvili ignited the crisis after visits to Washington and NATO headquarters.
    No hard evidence has surfaced to substantiate this charge. But if Saakashvili was put up to creating this crisis by anyone in the United States, it was an act of colossal stupidity. What do we do now?
    There seems little we can do if Putin is determined to bring down Saakashvili. Russia is flush with oil and gas revenue and $250 billion in cash reserves; Moscow is moving closer to China; and Putin is far more popular in his country than Bush and Blair are in theirs.
    Bush bought into the notion that U.S. vital interests required supporting ex-Russian republics against Moscow, which was absurd. Our vital interest was always in maintaining strong U.S.-Russian ties, which have been ravaged by the meddling of neoconservatives mired in Russophobia.
    As for who rules Ukraine or Georgia, for two centuries that was never a vital interest of ours. Thus there is no reason to extend NATO war guarantees to Ukraine, the Caucasus, or Central Asia.
    The destiny of that region will be determined by the dominant powers that reside there: Russia, China, Turkey, Iran. Not by us

19. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/miliband-visit-puts-pressure-on-georgian-leader-903732.html
    The first British government minister to visit Georgia since the Russian invasion made a point of meeting opposition leaders as public discontent over Mikheil Saakashvili’s role in the disaster that has befallen the country began to grow.
    Foreign Secretary David Miliband held breakfast with the main opposition leaders lasting more than an hour during a flying visit to Tbilisi over the crisis in a move which is bound to add pressure on the beleaguered Georgian leader.
    The meeting follows talks between Western diplomats in Georgia and Mr Saakashvili’s rivals in recent days and is seen by observers as the West opening up channels to those who might wrest power in the future.
    Although the governments in the US and Western Europe have made a public showing of backing Mr Saakashvili, there has been increasing questioning of his tactics which had allowed the Russians to score a major strategic victory over Nato. There is also unease at the Georgian leader’s increasingly erratic behaviour in public at press conferences alongside, among others, Condoleezza Rice and Angela Merkel.

20. Speaking of Finland, the current OSCE Chairman-in-Office is Finnish Foreign Minister Alexander Stubb, who yesterday announced an increase in the number of military monitoring officers in the OSCE Mission to Georgia by up to 100.
    http://www.osce.org/item/32607.html

21. “increasingly erratic behaviour”
    You mean, like, eating his tie?
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jb2clcZu9Tg&NR=1

22. How anemic. It’s a slap in the face to Georgia, and a clear sign that NATO isn’t going to do Washington’s bidding. This kind of leaves McCain and Obama a bit outside the flow, doesn’t it? Especially Obama, with his professed (but not actual) diplomatic urges
    Don
    if you have a look at Josh Landis site you will see what kind of a reaction this anaemic statement has provoked.
    http://www.joshualandis.com/blog/
    when all the hullabaloo dies down in a couple of weeks time there will be a reckoning.
    Anyone who has encouraged the Georgians (or had a Georgian lobbyist on his staff) will be wrigling quite vigorously and wishing they hadn’t been quite so forthright.

23. Before anyone gets terribly carried away about the dredging of Tartus port, it is in preparation for turning it into a container port.
    You need a certain depth to accomodate the container ships which are increasing in size in order to redcue cost per move.
    http://www.prlog.org/10014209-mediterranean-container-ports-and-shipping-traffic-growth-versus-terminal-expansion.html

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