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Milanovic: From Global Trade to Global War

Editorial note from HC: In the piece I had in the CSM last Friday about the current, Georgia-revealed shifts in global power balances, I argued that the many economic interdependencies among the world’s major power centers will act as a powerful brake on their going to war against each other. Afterwards, I received an intriguing critique of this position from none other than Branko Milanovic, an economist on global inequality whose work I admire a lot. (Indeed, I used this recent book of his quite a bit in my Re-engage! book.)
So although Milanovic’s conclusions are very different from mine– or rather, precisely because they are so different from mine– I am very happy to publish the short argument he has composed on this subject, so we can have a good exploration of these issues.

From Global Trade to Global War
by Branko Milanovic, August 26, 2008
Openness to trade and globalization lead to interdependence and cooperation and hence to global peace. There is a venerable school of thought, beginning with Montesquieu and Kant, that argues more or less exactly this. Less famously, the same point was made in Norman Angell bestseller that had the misfortune of being published just a few years before the vaunted cooperation and interdependence transmuted into the worst carnage the world had ever seen up to that date (1914). But there is another school of school to whom the carnage of the Great War did not come unexpected. It belongs to the Marxist and semi-Marxist tradition, starting from Hobson and continuing with Lenin and Rosa Luxembourg. It viewed the war as inevitable as capitalists from different countries clashed when dividing up the globe, and then manipulated the public and used their nations’ armies to further own interests.
And indeed the unease with the standard (“peaceful globalization”) version of events is evident even today. In one of globalization cheerleading bestsellers Martin Wolf (“Why globalization works?”) shows a singular difficulty explaining how apparently benign global capitalist competition resulted in the disaster of 1914. His explanation is to lay blame on “German militarism”. But German militarism was only special because it was a late-comer’s militarism: once most of Asia and Africa was divided (not always without conflict; witness Fashoda) between the French and British capitalists, the up and coming German capitalists wanted a slice of the pie too. So, it is the very nature of global capitalism, not some unique “German militarism,” that is to blame.
Why does it matter today, exactly 100 years from the run-up to World War I (the Tangier crisis which almost led to a direct clash between the French and the Germans) and just short of the World War I centennial? Because the same forces are at work again. Consider the following. The three most important countries, US, China and Russia have a nicely balanced division of assets among them: US has capital and technology, China labor, and Russia land and natural resources. But to make more money, US capital needs control of as many natural resources as possible. A glance at the map shows that the sparsely populated and natural resource-rich Siberia and Central Asia are the prime candidates for their lucrative control. After the break up of the Soviet Union, it seemed, all too briefly, that the US and Western capitalists had all this wealth within their reach. The Yeltsin regime was engaged in a fire sale where multi-billion plants and oil-fields were being sold for a song. But already by the time the second Yeltsin administration, the rules of the game started changing. In the swindle that has since become known as “loans for shares”, Russian big capitalists (known as the “oligarchs”) figured out that they did not need to share all these riches with foreigners. Instead, why not keep them for themselves?
This trend accelerated under the two Putin terms. The division of spoils was limited to a restricted circle of cronies and secret agents who suddenly developed an acumen for business deals. The agreements with foreign capitalists were rescinded or revised (most famously, the British Petroleum Tyumen oil field deal). Oligarchs who did not accept the new rules of the game, and who wanted to build pipelines with foreigners (Khodorovsky) were stripped of their assets and sent to jail.
Thus today the struggle between the West and Russia that threatens the world with not only another cold, but rather hot, war is between the two bands of greedy men, and it involves the riches of the Eurasian heartland (“the world island”) east of the Urals. It is an implacable fight because it is a zero-sum game. In contrast, the nature of the Sino-US rivalry is different because of complementarily which exists between capital and labor. Both are needed to produce toys and micro chips. But when it comes to natural resources, it is either you or I who control it.
No less an admirer of global capitalism than Keynes saw its Achilles’ heel in greed that at times becomes so irrational that it works against person’s own interests. Lenin agreed: he thought that a capitalist would sell the rope with which he would be hanged. They might still be right. Halliburtons and Gazproms of this world, rather than ushering an era of universal peace, may bring us World War III.

The return of geography

Some of the commentary on the whole Russia-Georgia affair has talked about the “return” of history, in somewhat post-Fukuyaman terms. (Though Fukyama himself has denied that what is underway now is a simple return to the older Cold War dynamics.)
But it strikes me what is happening these days is much more a “return” of geography to world affairs than a return of history.
Not that the hard facts of geography ever went away, any more than the ongoing dynamic of history. But Tom Friedman was only one of many western-bubble commentators who saw the world as a sort of endlessly level playing field in which the factor of distance (whether physical or cultural) had lost most of its salience.
In a geography-free world, it might have seemed quite “natural” that just one set of values and global priorities, which oh, by a remarkable coincidence happened to be those of the US-dominated west, would always prevail and indeed would necessarily be desired and recognized as superior by all the world’s (increasingly homogenous) people. In a geography-free world it seemed natural– or indeed, actively laudable– that a handful of western-educated lawyers in a courtroom in the wealthy and well-ordered city of The Hague would “know what is best” for millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa reeling from the blows of IMF-imposed pauperization, the widespread destruction of their lives and livelihoods, and the existential disorder of the civil wars that were thereby fueled.
In a geography-free world, it must have seemed just as doable and justifiable to many Americans to engage in military forms of “regime change” in distant Asia as it has long seemed to be in Central America.
But now, geography is back. It has come back most noticeably, perhaps, in the form of huge increases in fuel prices in recent months. But even without those fuel price hikes Americans would already, by this point, have been starting seriously to notice the cost of continuing to sustain the country’s massive military deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.
For the US to maintain a military unit of any particular size in Iraq is, it turns out, considerably more expensive than maintaining a unit of the same size in Guatemala. (Who knew?) It is even more expensive than it is for Russia to maintain a unit of that size in Georgia, which is right next door.
Back in January 2003, when I went with a bunch of fellow peace activists here in Charlottesville, Virginia, to persuade the city council to declare our town a “city of peace”, I made a fairly short argument about how– based on my 30 years of experience as a student of Middle East strategic affairs– I saw that the imminent invasion of Iraq was most likely not going to be the promised cakewalk; that the US troops would likely find themselves bogged down in distant Iraq for several years; and that the sheer cost of sustaining this deployment would reverberate down through every sector of the US economy, including to the level of budgets for the states and cities.
I pointed out too– there, and in some of my writings at the time– that after Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, within three years the cost of sustaining the post-invasion occupation had sent inflation in Israel sky-rocketing and brought Israel’s economy to its knees. And Iraq, I pointed out, was considerably further away from the US homeland than Lebanon was from Israel… Therefore, the longterm cost of sustaining the post-invasion occupation would likely be even higher.
Well, for various other reasons, we haven’t had Israeli-style hyper-inflation here (yet.) But the costs of the post-invasion occupation have proven to be just as damaging to the longterm health of our economy as I feared.
It’s largely about geography, you see.
And if you think the geography of maintaining a military presence in Iraq is high, well, just think about doing the same in the landlocked massifs of Afghanistan… There, even the Soviets– some of whom lived right next door– couldn’t afford to maintain the level of occupation force that would have been needed to quell the anti-Moscow insurgency of the 1980s.
The “return of geography” will have a number of deep ramifications in all the different dimensions of world affairs: strategic, socio-political, economic, and cultural. Most likely, geography-based “spheres of influence” will make a comeback. (Of those, of course, the US’s own Monroe Doctrine, which covers the whole of North and South America, is by far the longest established.) The specificities of human geography will be strengthened, too, as against the claims put forward by bubble-dwelling values universalists who made the ill-founded claim that their universalism was quite “culture-neutral.”
Does this mean we are doomed to revert to the formation of competing blocs, international arms races, and war? I say no. Just because there will be spheres of influence and a re-emergence of “cultural difference” doesn’t mean that all conversation is suddenly ended. Indeed, the existence– and more importantly, the recognition– of difference can and should be seen as an invitation to globe-circling conversations about these matters. That, it seems to me, is the biggest difference between today and the 19th century. Today, citizens of just about all the world’s countries have the ability to engage in unmediated, level-playing-field conversations across national borders, about all the matters that concern us. That has never happened before.
If we can open ourselves up to having these conversations, in a respectful and egalitarian spirit, there is so much we can learn about the world, about each other, and therefore about ourselves! (That’s one of the things I love about the blogosphere, and the main reason I keep coming back here.)
We can also start to understand the dubious nature of some of the claims made by our own governments.
For example, if the US has a “Monroe Doctrine”, why should Russia not have something similar of its own? Why should what’s sauce for the goose not also be sauce for the gander?
… Just one final point here. Many Americans have a very scant understanding (or appreciation) for the discipline of geography. In the UK, when I grew up and today, young people undertook several years of study of geography in high school and many of them then went on to study geography, as such, at university. Here in the United States there is almost no such systematic study of the subject. It exists in the K-12 curriculum only as small portions within the broader subject known as “Social Studies,” most of which is focused on history and civics. And only a handful of US universities offer undergraduate or graduate degrees in geography.
This always surprised me. Here’s the US– a country with, by British standards, huge amounts of geography and not very much history– and the students were supposed to spend endless amounts of time parsing the minutiae of what one “Founding Father” or another thought about something 230 years ago while ignoring the many opportunities they have, right here, in this extensive and beautiful country, to gain a rich and multi-layered understanding of geography.
Well, guys, geography is back. And nowadays, it’s decidedly global. Let’s figure out how to deal with that.

Still no US-Iraq security agreement (yawn)

Alert readers of JWN will have noticed that I haven’t posted much recently. A number of reasons for that, among them the desire to sit around with the spouse watching the Olympics many evenings. But also, heck, I so much called it on the US’s waning ability to impose its terms on Iraq in the all-important ‘security’ sphere– ever since back in early June, and most recently here— that the subsequent development of the story kind of lost its interest for me.
Apart from the still-horrendous living conditions being endured by Iraq’s remarkably hardy people. Suicide bomber story here. Nearly 3,000 cases of measles story here. Nearly a billion litres of raw sewage still– 65 months after the US invasion– being pumped into Iraq’s waterways: lengthy and well reported story here.
That degree of human misery is only to be expected in a river-system country in which the central mechanisms of regulation and public order have broken down– or, as in Iraq’s case, been wilfully destroyed by a foreign occupying power. In this respect, Iraq is very different from a mountain-dominated country like, say, Lebanon or Georgia. In those countries, people can get along more or less okay without a functioning central government, since they have many more of the inputs for basic self-sufficiency and are not reliant on orderly administration of vulnerable central water systems.
Anyway, in Iraq, it looks as if the national population is already adjusting itself to a very imminent (or, actually, already underway) retraction of US power.
Which, as I’ve noted elsewhere, is being fueled primarily by Washington’s own very urgent force-planning considerations.
I’ve been trying to ponder why it is has proved to be the case in Iraq that the standard kinds of US blandishments and bribes seem not to have “worked” by persuading PM Maliki and his coterie of close advisers to sign off on the US-proposed security agreements. I’ve come up with a number of possible hypotheses. One is that the stand blandishments and bribes– such as promises of large amounts of money deposited in foreign banks, sweetheart business deals for close relatives, or “scholarships” for numerous children and relatives at nice US universities– may somehow not have the appeal for these people that they would have for, say, an Ahmed Chalabi or a Mohamed Dahlan. Another might be that the Iranians could actually outbid the Americans in terms of blandishments and bribes that would actually be valued by Maliki and his circle. Another might be that these men are true Iraqi patriots. These three explanations are not mutually exclusive, at all.
Also, though I’ve written about “bribes and blandishments”, obviously these are part of a broader spectrum of activities that outside powers might engage in, which could be broadly described as “structuring the incentives” for these men. That would include threats as well as bribes. The US, at an earlier point in the negotiations was “threatening” to hold onto a large chunk of Iraq’s oil revenue unless it could get the security agreement it wanted out of Maliki. But even that threat appeared not to work.
An interesting world we live in.

Iraq-US: More disagreement than ‘Agreement’

Yesterday, the news from Baghdad was that the visiting Condi Rice was very close to nailing the longer-term security agreement with the ‘government’ of Iraq that the Bush administration has been aiming for for a long while now. But the longer term news looks much more like that of mounting disagreements between the governments in Washington and Baghdad, than increasing levels of agreement.
Disagreement is clear over two key issues: the status of the negotiations over the US-Iraqi security pact, and government policy toward the mainly-Sunni ‘Awakening’ councils that have been a main pillar of the US political strategy since early fall 2006.
Regarding the security pact negotiations, the transcript of the press conference Rice held with Iraq ‘Foreign Minister’ Hoshyar Zebari yesterday shows that, while neither Rice nor Zebari claimed that they had finished the negotiations, Rice was actually more guarded than Zebari in claiming they were getting close to finalization.
Regarding the content of what they were discussing, Rice made clear that she was still talking only about timetables– in the plural– for troop withdrawal that were both conditions-based, and “aspirational.”
For his part, Zebari could not even bring himself to say the word “timetable.” (Perhaps the prospect gives his ardently Kurdish heart some palpitations?) All he managed to talk about was “time horizon.”
That is so much last month’s meme-of-choice.
Today, the evidence of disagreement over the security ‘agreement’ continued. AFP reported that Mohammed al-Haj Mahmoud, described as “the top official in the Iraqi [SOFA-negotiating] team, told them that negotiators had, “finalised a deal which will see the complete withdrawal of US troops from Iraq by 2011, ending an eight-year occupation…”
So he was claiming the negotiation had been finished. But even he made clear that what was being referred to was a considerably less-than-total withdrawal, since he specified it would only be from the cities.
AFP also added that White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe “said the deal was yet to be finalised.… ‘It’s not done until it’s done.'”
It strikes me there is an air of unreality to this whole story of “negotiations” over the terms of a longterm bilateral security pact. Urgent troop planning considerations that have nothing to do with the situation in Iraq are going to be forcing the Pentagon to implement a pretty deep and rapid drawdown of the US troop presence from there over the next 12 months, regardless of whether there is a “SOFA”, an “oil agreement”, “provincial elections”, or any of those other things the US has set as its current political goals in Iraq. The “best” scenario they can hope to achieve at this point is something far more modest than any of those ambitious political goals. It is a drawdown/pullout of US troops that is less rather then more chaotic for the troops involved and that leaves the country and the region in a less rather than more unstable state.
A cynic might ask, “What do the Bush administration folks care about whether the region goes up in flames behind them as they leave?” My answer is that if the region is going up in flames it is certainly not good for the US– either for the oil companies or the citizenry. Plus, this conflagration would not happening only “behind” the departing troops but might also, with a high degree of probability, catch many of the departing troops in its fires, too… As I’ve argued for many years now, the possibility of implementing an “orderly”– i.e. not fired-upon– troop withdrawal is directly linked to ensuring in some way that the Iraqis have a decent chance of reaching their own internal entente as the US troops pull out.
And right now, things don’t seem to be heading in that direction (to say the very least.) The US-installed and -supported Iraqi “government” seems to be seriously feeling its oats these days, doing a number of things that Washington isn’t happy about at all. Notable among these is the campaign it is now mounting directly against the US-incubated “Awakening Councils”
Patrick Cockburn reports from Baghdad today that,

but may not be able to defend its Sunni allies from a largely Shia government and army.

He also writes,

for the first time since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi government is confident that it can survive without US military support.

Richard Oppel of the NYT has a longer version of the same story about the government turning strongly against the Sahwa (Awakening Councils.). It is all unbelievably tragic; yet another twist in the ghastly tale of how the US occupation authorities have aggressively pursued a divide and rule policy throughout the country, in a way that has involved inflaming sectarian and ethnic tensions while pumping additional quantities of armies into beleaguered Iraqi communities.
Washington’s Iraq policy looks poised on the brink of a serious disaster. The Bushites will doubtless do everything they can to prevent it going over the cliff before the U.S. election, November 4. But if Barack Obama wins the election, there may be some in the outgoing administration who wouldn’t be too concerned about the prospect of a disaster occurring in Iraq, say, some time after next January.
I just hope we can rely on Defense Secretary Gates and the leaders of Centcom to act with wisdom and statesmanship during those crucial transition weeks…

NATO’s supply lines in Afghanistan

… First of all, they’re incredibly long. That makes sustaining the troops in the field there incredibly expensive. Another way of looking at that, in the present hyper-privatized era of US public life, could be: Lots of nice fat contracts and opportunities for fraud, payoffs, and payroll padding for the logistics companies! Yum, yum, yum! (For them.)
But here, basically, are the options. (A thought: Maybe we should call the present era that of the Return of Geography, rather than– or in addition to– the Return of History?):

Well, for now, you can forget about numbers 3 and 4– as far as NATO goes. Both Iran and China have decent working and economic relations with Hamid Karzai’s government in Kabul. But they, um, don’t really have them with NATO.
So that leaves Pakistan– currently in a state of continuing or perhaps even escalating political turmoil… And Russia.
Oops. Our “friend” Saakashvili put a bit of a spanner in the works on that, didn’t he? Well, maybe yes, and maybe no. But evidently, as the western nations and Russia proceed with their negotiations over a more durable settlement for Georgia, NATO’s non-trivial reliance on Russia’s cooperation for the ISAF mission in Afghanistan will be another big factor in the talks, along with the reliance of Germany and much of the rest of Europe on hydrocarbons from Russia.
The NATO-Russia Council has been in existence since 2002. On this handy info page that they publish you can learn what it is they do. (Or, what it is they don’t mind you knowing about they do.) Just last March the two sides established the basis for “facilitating transit though the Russian territory of non military freight from NATO, NATO members and non-NATO ISAF contributors in support of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, in accordance with UNSCR 1386.”
I guess that’s what the Russian ambassador to NATO Dmitry Rogozin was referring to when he told Reuters yesterday,

NATO and Russia have a very good and trusting relationship.

Translation: “Nice little supply line system we’re running there to Afghanistan. Wouldn’t want anything to happen to that now, would we?”
Rogozin expressed some (perhaps understandable?) confidence that the present, Georgia-related tensions in the NATO-Russia relationship would not last very long…

He also warned that “NATO rearming Georgia after all that has happened would be… cynical and illegitimate.”
Bernhard over at Moon of Alabama has been doing some great blogging about the tough logistical challenges NATO/ISAF faces in Afghanistan. See e.g. here.
Peter Marton of the [My] State Failure Blog gave some important background as to why NATO felt the need to reach out to Russia for the supply line agreement back in March. Basically, the Taliban had just torched a convoy of 100 ISAF-bound fuel tankers as they waited at the border-crossing between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Between 40 and 50 of the tankers were reported destroyed and several people killed. He adds:

If one counts with 44,000 liters as a possible standard payload of fuel for each tanker (I’m taking that figure from a news report about a previous attack), that’s 1,760,000 to 2,200,000 liters of fuel lost in the attack. Big fireball, big loss.

Christian, at “Ghosts of Alexander” has a handy map of the Uzbekistan rail system, which could be (or perhaps already is?) used to transport (non-military) goods for ISAF in from Europe– via Russia and Kazakhstan– to the Termez border point between Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. It looks like passenger service takes three days from Moscow to Tashkent and maybe 18 hours from Tashkent to Termez. (Ah. Helena needs to get her ferrophilia back under control here a bit.)
… Right now, the UN Security Council is starting to see some preliminary diplomacy developing around the project to reach agreement on a durable political settlement of the Georgia-Russia crisis. Basically, two drafts are circulating. Russia submitted Sarkozy’s ceasefire plan of last week– which has been signed by both sides– to win the SC’s imprimatur of support for it. A draft resolution that France submitted yesterday, that apparently has US support, expresses support for the existing ceasefire but also calls for immediate Russian withdrawal and the “return of Georgia’s forces to their bases.”
As I noted in my CSM piece, now up on the web already though it’s dated tomorrow, if there is to be an un-vetoed resolution, then it will have to represent a negotiated consensus that all the Permanent Members can support. In these negotiations, Russia is not without its own leverage in the realms of both hard and (as Kishore Mahbubani noted) soft power. Let’s see how the negotiations proceed.

My CSM piece on the big-picture implications of Georgia

I worked pretty intensively on this earlier this week. It’s here.

Mahbubani on western hypocrisy, etc.

Longtime JWN readers will know that I’m quite a fan of Kishore Mahbubani, an extremely smart strategic thinker who was Singapore’s ambassador to the UN until a couple of years ago. Yesterday, he had a great piece of commentary in the Financial Times on “the meaning of the Georgian war.” (HT to Bernhard of MoA.)
Mahbubani writes:

The End of History

Before long, other forces will do the same.

In reality, most support Russia against the bullying west. The gap between the western narrative and the rest of the world could not be greater.

The fourth paragraph there describes something that “westerners” crucially need to be able to understand. Westerners do not monopolize either humankind’s smarts, or its sensibilities, or its way(s) of looking at the world. Indeed they (we) are in a distinct minority, and badly need to understand that.
Especially given that one of our bedrock values in the world is that of the equality of all human persons…. Well, it still is, isn’t it?
Mahbubani has a lot more there, too. Including this:

this stance is a geopolitical gift to China.

There is no doubt China was the bigger winner of 9/11. It has stabilised its neighbourhood, while the US has been distracted.

it is at last possible to create a safer world order.

* I guess my only criticism of this analysis is over Mahbubani’s argument that “Western thinkers must decide where the real long-term challenge is,” with the choice presented being a strictly dyadic one between it being “the Islamic world” and it being China. Actually, I don’t think the choice is anywhere near as dyadic as this implies (and anyway, the policies that he prescribes for either choice are broadly similar.)
But here’s the deeper problem: he is still in the mindset at that point of arguing that the “west” needs to identify a main enemy– or as he says, a “real long-term challenge”– that is another state or bloc of states. But then, in the last paragraph he goes against that thinking– certainly, with respect to China– when he underlines that China, like India, wants to work with the US and west. And here’s an addendum to that: so do most governments in “the Islamic world”, and so, indeed do most Muslims… provided this cooperation with the US and the west is on a basis of mutual respect and fair cooperation.
Neither China nor the vast majority of members of “the Islamic world” want to overthrow any western governments and dominate their countries, which is what, for a period of time, the Soviet Union aspired to do.
So where is the real “long-term challenge” that the west faces? I believe it is the challenge, for Americans, of starting to see themselves (ourselves) as co-equal members of the world community rather than standard-bearers in some kind of existential, life-or-death contest with enemy states that requires us to bear the huge costs of maintaining our bloated military and using it to “keep order” right around the world: 360 degrees, 24/7.
And then, oh yes, there are plenty of other, very serious long-term challenges that we and the rest of the world community all face together. Challenges like dealing with:

climate change;
global inequality and the suffering of our brothers and sisters in the low-income world;
weapons proliferation;
the occurrence of conflict-driven atrocities;
the anti-humane violence perpetrated by Islamist extremists and others…

So please, while we’re facing serious challenges like those ones, let’s not, as “westerners,” go round the world looking for whole blocs of people and governments to make war on, as well.
Kishore Mahbubani was quite right there, in his last paragraph, when he wrote that few western leaders were prepared to admit that their own flawed thinking has been making the world a more dangerous place. But I think the greatest flaw in the thinking of most westerners has been this need to organize the world, and mobilize one’s own resources and activities, around the definition of a state or bloc of states as our enemies, to be faced down or toppled with our military power. It is that tendency that has made the world more dangerous for everyone– ourselves, along with many, many others. Now, we need to adopt the much more realistic stance of aligning ourselves at the side of the world’s other six billion people, facing the challenges that confront all of us, together.

Condi in Baghdad: YES on a timetable (aspirational)

AP tells us that at a joint appearance with Iraqi “Foreign Minister” Hoshyar Zebari in Baghdad today, Condi Rice agreed that, regarding a troop withdrawal plan,

aspirational timetables

You can bet that with the US/NATO deployment in Afghanistan now in serious trouble and NATO itself in the most severe crisis it’s seen in its 59 years of existence, there will be “timetables” for a US pullout from Iraq.
A linguistic note: An “aspirational timetable” is still not the same as a fixed timetable. But I would say it signals something noticeably more definitive than the “aspirational time horizon” that was the administration’s previous position on this. (With a horizon, the more you try to get close to it the more fades further away from you… )

More on NATO, etc.

The statement issued by the NATO foreign ministers’ meeting yesterday was considerably more sensible than the belligerent, jingoistic rantings that make up much (though thankfully, a decreasing amount) of the commentary in the US MSM. At several points it goes to lengths not to express any strongly anti-Russian judgments. For example, “We deplore all loss of life, civilian casualties, and damage to civilian infrastructure that has resulted from the conflict.” It notably does not make any promise of either immediate or more delayed military aid to Georgia, saying only that NATO has agreed to measures “intended to assist Georgia, a valued and long-standing Partner of NATO, to assess the damage caused by the military action and to help restore critical services necessary for normal public life and economic activity.”
And finally, it seems to go quite a long way toward respecting the leadership in negotiating the political tasks that lie ahead regarding the Georgia crisis to… none other than “the Chairman-in-Office of the OSCE, Finnish Minister of Foreign Affairs Mr. Alexander Stubb.”
This strikes me as extremely realistic, sensible, and helpful. The more they do that, the better. (You can read more on OSCE here.)
The NATO people well understand that the US- and Israeli-trained Georgian armed forces got trounced in the recent fighting. (The US had been training the Georgians mainly to do checkpoint duty in Iraq… And one of the Israeli private companies training the Georgians was headed by Gen. Gal Hirsh, drummed out of the IDF after the troops he’d trained showed in 2006 that they couldn’t do anything effective other than checkpoint duty in the West Bank. H’mmm.)
AP’s Matti Friedman had this account of some interviews he did with US trainers in Tbilisi, who were fairly disparaging about the skills of their trainees. Interestingly, Friedman interviewed these trainers last weekend while they were “on standby at the Sheraton Hotel, unarmed and in civilian clothes.”
From the beginning of the Georgia-Russia conflict, the US military took great pains to keep its own troops far away from any situation in which they might be seen as being involved in the fighting. I also saw a report that, though the US flew the 2,000 Georgians who had been in Iraq back to their country, they disarmed them before they did so, so as not to be accused by the Russians of pumping any more arms into the country during the war.
Despite its sometimes accusatory rhetoric, the actual actions on the ground taken by the Bush administration have been prudent and wise, and I am happy to give them credit for this.
It strikes me there is a huge contrast between the prudence displayed in those actions and the belligerence expressed so many times by McCain.
Journalists and others should ask McCain: “What, actually, would you have done differently? Would you have put US troops into this fight? How would you have supported them there?”
It strikes me that McCain’s rhetoric– including his repeated expressions of strong and completely uncritical support for Pres. Saakashvili– have been irresponsible and incendiary.
Why is Barack Obama not calling him on this?
Why is Obama not putting forward a strong and compelling alternative to the belligerent and dangerous approach espoused by McCain? Surely he can see that the US public doesn’t want another war? (Especially one that it has zero hope of winning.)
I just want to come back, for a moment, to the question of what it is that NATO used to do, back when it still it had a rationale. What it did was deter the Russians from sending their massive ground troops into the industrial heartlands of Western Europe.
NATO succeeded precisely because it succeeded at deterring. It didn’t succeed at fighting, because thanks to the success of the deterrence it never had to fight.
Georgia is not an industrial heartland of Europe. On August 8, Georgia was not a member of NATO. If it had been, NATO’s crisis would have been even sharper and more immediate– because even if it had been a “member” of NATO, very few NATO members would have come to its aid.
But member of NATO or not, the war in Georgia has shown that the old western doctrine of “deterrence” failed on that occasion.
One caveat, though: This was deterrence still at the strictly sub-nuclear level. (And that in itself is also significant. What utility at all do nuclear weapons have today?)
Deterrence, it strikes me, is closely linked to a desire (or, a readiness) to achieve significant strategic goals through “shock and awe.” Yet the whole world has now seen that even “shock and awe” didn’t bring Bush a strategic victory in Iraq, just as it didn’t bring Olmert one in Lebanon.
Military power just ain’t as useful in “foreign” encounters as it used to be. (To be discussed later, not now: the extent to which Ossetia, Abkhazia, and Georgia are actually “foreign” for Russia. Military power did prove “useful” for Russia there; and lack of a working, indigenous national-defense strategy proved disastrous for Saakashvili…)
As of now, Georgia’s military forces have been just about stripped of all their capabilities. I’m sure the Russians have been fascinated to look at all the computers, drone-control systems, naval electronics, and other military hardware and software they’ve been carting home from all the Georgian military bases they’ve over-run in the past ten days.
A question: How many sensitive US or NATO systems have been compromised as a result?
Another, more important question: What will be the outcome of the negotiations that will doubtless occur over the Georgians’ ability to rebuild their military, given that it would be starting, as of now, from somewhere around ground zero?
… Okay, I realize this is a slightly rambly post, but I’m too tired to divide it up better or do any other form of high-level editing on it. I just want to note here, finally, that The National Interest, the uber-Realist mag published by the Nixon Center, has a couple of very good pieces on Georgia/Russia on its website today.
This one is a very well-informed ‘Realist’ take on the whole Russia question, by Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett.
They write:

in reality, today’s Russia is not a resurgent imperial power. In the post-Cold War period, it was Washington, not Moscow, which started the game of acting outside the United Nations Security Council to pursue coercive regime change in problem states and redraw the borders of nominally sovereign countries. In Russian eyes, America’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, including arresting and presiding over the execution of its deposed President, undermined Washington’s standing to criticize others for taking military action in response to perceived threats. And American unilateralism in the Balkans, along with planned deployments of missile defense systems in Eastern Europe and support for “color revolutions” in former Soviet republics, trampled clearly stated Russian redlines.

And this article is an interview with Shalva Natelashvili, the founder and chairman of the Georgian Labor Party, and a veteran leader of the Georgian opposition.
Two key excerpts from that:

He probably had hopes of receiving some kind of external support.

And this:

That sounds realistic and hopeful. I hope we can all hear a lot more from this guy.

NATO’s crisis

… Hint: It isn’t just the organization’s massively long over-reach in Afghanistan, as revealed in the ever-mounting casualties among western forces and the continuing, dire crises of insecurity and pauperization through which the Afghan people are living (or not), now, nearly seven whole years after the US invaded their country…
It’s also the whole range of questions raised about NATO’s purpose and usefulness by the whole Georgia crisis.
Many militarists here in the US have been arguing vociferously (a) that the existing NATO members should now ‘fast-track’ Georgia’s entry into the alliance and (b) that Russia would have been completely deterred from the counter-attack it launched against Georgia if Georgia had already been a member of NATO.
Excuse me?
Imagine if Georgia had already been in NATO on August 7. That was the day Pres. Saakashvili broke an existing ceasefire when he launched a rocket attack against targets in South Ossetia who included Russian peacekeepers serving there under the auspices of OSCE.
Russia’s military response to that can certainly be described as disproportionate (though not nearly as much so as, say, Israel’s assault against Lebanon in 2006.) But it was not completely unjustified… One could also describe it, in the circumstances that prevailed in the region over preceding weeks, as predictable with quite a high level of certitude.
So if Georgia was already a NATO member, would NATO as a whole have come to Saak’s rescue once the Russians counter-attacked? Or failing NATO-as-a-whole, would individual NATO members have sent in enough troops to push the Russians back out and “punish” them?
(NATO’s ground-rules of “all for one and one for all” would indicate that it should be NATO as a whole that responds… But we could look at the other option, too.)
In a word, no.
And that’s the real crisis of NATO. It doesn’t actually seem to have any point any more. And that is probably what has gotten “front-line” states like Poland and the Czech Republic into such a tizzy right now.
A good part of the reason that NATO wouldn’t have come to Saak’s aid even if Georgia were already in it is that it couldn’t have done so effectively because of the deep bleeding of its lifeblood and capabilities over Iraq and Afghanistan. The US military is the absolutely necessary backbone of NATO. But now, US ground forces are stretched to break-point. US military airlift, sealift, global recon capabilities, and long-distance attack platforms are all just about fully tied up trying to keep the Iraq and Afghanistan missions going.
And no, no-one in the US– as far as I know– was about to launch a nuclear first strike against Russia over Ossetia.
Nor should we forget that the political infrastructure of NATO– the web of relationships among its members– was rent in two by Bush’s decision to invade Iraq and remains in very bad shape because of the demands placed by Bush regarding Afghanistan…
So the Bush administration’s decisions to (a) invade Iraq and (b) frog-march as many NATO members as possible into the mission in Afghanistan have caused NATO’s crisis to manifest itself with particular sharpness right now.
But there are deeper problems, too… Mainly those connected with the phenomena of mission creep and/or mission dissolution. (Often linked phenomena in troubled organizations, I note.)
NATO was founded in 1949. Its founding goal– as its first Secretary-General, Lord Ismay, once famously said– was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” (I got the attribution on that great quote from Wikipedia, whose entry on NATO is pretty good.)
So what do you do, if you’re a western leader, in 1991-93, when first the Warsaw Pact and then the Soviet Union itself collapses?
Do you hold a victory party, dissolve NATO, and then work with Russia and all the former WP/Soviet states to build a new, much better set of relationships among all these countries? (You might call that the Abraham Lincoln approach.)
You could have used OSCE as the main framework for this, given its significant history and its broad, trans-Eurasian and even transatlantic reach.
Or there were those, back in the early 1990s, who proposed inviting Russia (and presumably all the other formerly -Soviet countries) to join NATO.
Andrew Meier reminds us that that idea aroused significant interest from Boris Yeltsin, who in 1991 described it as his “long-term political aim.” Also, that even Vladimir Putin, during his first few days in office in March 2000, still expressed support for that aim.
But Presidents GHW Bush, Clinton, and GW Bush have never been able to get their heads around that idea of Russian integration into the transatlantic system on the “equal” basis that both Yeltsin and Putin insisted on. Indeed, they and the vast majority of the US political elite seem, even after the fall of the Soviet Union, to have stuck rigidly to the idea that the idea of NATO is “to keep the Russians out” of the system.
But given that the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union had both collapsed, there then arose the tricky political problem of how do you “sell” NATO, and the non-trivial costs involved in keeping the old war-horse going, to its sometimes skeptical non-US members? The watchword in some US circles at the time was that NATO had to either go “out of area”– that is, take on tasks outside its traditional Central European (counter-Russian) area– or it would have to go “out of business.”
As we can see from a glance at the map, Afghanistan is massively “out of area”!
So that’s one of the big differences between NATO and OSCE. NATO’s goal was to keep Russia out while OSCE’s goal, since the very beginning, has been to keep the Russians and their allies well integrated within the transatlantic/Eurasian part of the world system.
The other difference– which is huge, and fundamental– is that NATO is overwhelmingly a military alliance. Military action is its entire raison d’etre. (Hence, the need for ‘enemies’, and the shock with which most NATO leaders view any suspicion that Russia might be included in the membership… After all, if Russia is not an ‘enemy’, what is NATO for? Ah, good question.)
OSCE, by contrast, seeks to use numerous networks of relationships in the non-military sphere to try to keep its 56 member nations together, to build up support for common norms and for the institutions that embody and further them. One key one being the norm of finding nonviolent ways to resolve thorny political problems..
Hence, the role that OSCE’s been playing for the past 17 years– including inside Georgia– in midwifing and monitoring ceasefire and demilitarization agreements among and sometimes within its member states.
So here’s my proposal. Let’s declare the Cold War over? Let’s disband NATO. And rather than looking at ways to further encircle, ‘contain’, or push back Russia, let’s work hard at strengthening the norm of nonviolent conflict resolution across the board, including by seeking stronger roles for the UN, at the global level, and for OSCE, in the areas that it covers.
One good first step: OSCE’s announcement yesterday that it will be increasing the number of unarmed military monitoring officers it has inside Georgia by “up to 100.” Twenty of these monitors should be deployed “immediately.”