“Vacuum is over. It’s an end of an epoch. Short term consequences will be bad, many threats, tough talking. But long term prospects and consequences will be good as the West will now have to take Moscow’s interests into consideration and listen to Russia. Nobody wants confrontation with Russia”. Vyacheslav Nikonov, President of Polity Foundation.
Over a week ago, as Russia celebrated a crushing military victory over its small neighbor, little seemed to deter Moscow from cementing its expansion in the political arena. Having humiliated Georgia, Russian troops were expected to pull out and use the existing bicephalie between Putin and Medvedev for an old style bad cop/good cop exercise in dividing the Western allies and undermining further their somewhat schizophrenic Ostpolitik.
But then, an extraordinary thing happened. Moscow decided to alienate not only Western Europe and Israel, but even China. Quite why the Kremlin managed to squander the political capital offered by the military victory remains a mystery. Populist hubris? Internal divisions? Misreading the resonance of alarm bells that its military adventurism kept ringing even in distant capitals?
OK, YOU SHOT A LOT. IS YOUR FOOT HURTING NOW?
One by one, Russia’s escalation ruled out a diplomatic qui pro quod and achieved the impossible by solidifying the fractious Western alliance, whose moves are always defined by the lowest common denominator. With no sign of withdrawal, Russia’s artillery batteries dug in around the Georgian port of Poti. Its army has continued to control Georgia’s east-west transportation axis. It repeatedly turned away Georgian police forces which were moving north to resume its routine responsibilities for the maintenance of law and order throughout the country. In Poti, the Russian army stole US-owned Humvees filled with electronic warfare equipment, including satellite information and sensitive encryption codes. Moscow has thus far refused to return the vehicles. On Tuesday, in direct contravention to the existing UN resolutions, President Medvedev snubbed Chancellor Angela Merkel by signing Duma’s demand to recognize the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. On Wednesday, Canada’s Prime Minister Harper admitted that Russia “had been testing Canadian airspace”. Shortly afterwards, Russia’s foreign minister Lavrov, in an unusually acerbic statement, labeled his French counterpart as suffering from “sick imagination”. Then Russia’s Agriculture Minister Alexei Gordeyev slapped sanctions against US chicken and pork exports, suddenly claiming that the products had high levels of salmonella, arsenic and intestinal bacteria. To top it off, Medvedev boasted that Russia was “not afraid of a (…) cold war”. He then declared that the presence of NATO military in Georgia would be considered ‘a declaration of war’ and threatened a military response to Polish and Czech agreement to station anti-missile defense batteries and radar. And all along, rumors were flying around Ukraine that Russians were illegally distributing passports to the Russophone minority in the Crimea, potentially planting seeds for another Hitler-style intervention “in defense of its own citizens” several years from now, if not sooner.
As Western Europeans were scratching their heads in disbelief, the biggest threat loomed on Friday morning, when Daily Telegraph announced that Russian oil producer Lukoil was being advised to cut oil supplies on time for Monday’s EU emergency meeting in Brussels. While such rumors could prove unsubstantiated, Czech officials admitted that supplies through the Druzhba pipeline had fallen 40% in July, after Prague signed the agreement with the US to install the anti-missile radar. In light of such growing unpredictability, the French foreign minister has now politely backpedaled on his earlier proposal for anti-Moscow sanctions. His imagination is probably now recovering from “sickness”. Mr Lavrov was unnecessarily concerned.
OF BACKYARDS, FRONTYARDS AND MORE DISTANT YARDS
Many people in the so-called “West” are bemused by the whole ‘Georgian’ affair. After all, this is all happening in the “Russian backyard”, and little could be done to prevent Russia from exercising its imperial “right” to near-border. And yet, Russia’s ‘backyard’ also happens to be someone else’s ‘front yard’. Russia’s actions in Georgia and Ukraine increase, rather than decrease the sense of insecurity in Europe. And as much as Western Europeans have long lost the capacity to think in geostrategic terms, Eastern Europeans still do. Not surprisingly, they understand Russia’s Clausewitzian designs much better. But their supposedly outmoded view of Russia as a traditional, expansionist, bullying power could still be ridiculed in Berlin or Paris. Until two weeks ago, that is.
Despite its geographical expansion into most of Northern Asia, Russia has always looked West, not East. Russia’s ancestral fear of China and its complex underbelly in the predominantly Muslim Central Asia limit Moscow’s geostrategic choices. This week, Shanghai Cooperation talkshop bruised Moscow’s hopes to create a monolithic anti-Western alliance. Iranians are too unpredictable and not necessarily happy with Russia encroaching into Southern Caucasus beyond the borders of Armenia, its only vassal state in the region. Azeris and Kazakhs are too keen to do energy business in the West – and with China – independently of Russia’s meddling. Further south, only natural barriers limited the potential for a Russian-British conflict in the 19th century. It is unlikely to erupt now.
So Russia’s focus will be Europe and Western Eurasia. Russian politicians are still deploring “the loss of Ukraine, the cradle of Russian civilization”. Russian intelligentsia has been so enamored with Polish culture and Polish ‘Europeanness’ that Warsaw’s escape from the embrace was always considered a case of high treason. Now, despite all the divisions between the “orange” and “blue” Ukraine and the asymmetric relationship that these movements have with their Western neighbor, Russia’s belligerence is again pushing these two countries into each others’ arms.
Russian occupation of northern Georgia certainly emboldens opportunists – Ossetian militias may continue their looting and intimidation, nuclear traffickers will benefit from the collapse of the international program to monitor Georgia’s borders. But what are Russia’s other designs in the region? Moscow is certainly intent on controlling the Georgian pipelines, which are in the hands of Azeri, Kazakh, Turkish and British investors. Such a move would spell the end to Turkish dreams of turning Ceyhan terminal into a new refining hub in Europe that would rival Rotterdam. Here the stakes for the West are more immediate than Saakashvili’s survival. The loss of Georgian and Azeri independence would cut Europe from direct access to Turkmen gas and Kazakh oil. Indeed, Russia never quite reconciled itself with the opening of BTC pipeline in 2006, which broke Moscow’s monopoly over Caspian oil exports. And when Russia cut off gas supplies to Georgia the same year, Azerbaijan saw a commercial opportunity in opening the spigot to Tbilissi. Undoubtedly, bringing Baku under the Russian boot would be Putin’s ultimate prize, compounding the recent successes in monopolizing gas supplies (Iran, Italy, Algeria, Kyrgyzstan).
According to the most outlandish conspiracy theory I heard over the last three weeks, the Israeli advisors actually pushed Saakashvili to react to Russian provocation in the hope that Moscow’s retaliation would finally seal the deal between Washington and Warsaw to station anti-ballistic missile shields in Poland and defang Iran’s putatively intercontinental threat. In the event, Washington, rather than Warsaw, made the necessary concessions that closed the 18-month long negotiations. But by drawing one more line in the sand and failing to extract a response from the US, Moscow was, once again, “humiliated” in the process. And if Israel was, indeed, involved in Tbilissi, then Russia’s allegedly commercial decision to time its weapon sales to Syria could also reignite the old East/West rivalry in the Middle East. So do Gazprom’s deals in Iran in the wake of Total’s departure. Needless to add, Russia’s sales of S-300 defensive systems to Tehran raised fewer passions in Moscow than the Polish-US shield deal.
But the relations between Moscow and Tel Aviv are complicated by the weight with which racist Russian émigrés led by Avigor Lieberman dominate ultranationalist extremism in Israel. Under a scenario in which American neocons and their erstwhile allies from right-wing pro-Israeli lobbies lose some of their leverage under Barrack Obama’s administration, Moscow could well reposition its chess game in the Middle East. It is, however, a low-probability scenario, given the pervasive influence that these lobbies wield in Washington, focusing US foreign policy almost exclusively on the Middle East and away from much more serious, long-term geostrategic challenges in Europe and Asia-Pacific.
It is in Central Asia that Russian and American interests still meet. For all the grandstanding last week, Moscow would loathe to cut NATO’s northern access to Afghanistan. Russia’s “Afghan syndrome” is akin to America’s “Vietnam syndrome” and the Kremlin is all too happy to see French or Canadian, rather than Russian soldiers die in the lawless mountain desert. This vestige of the past cooperation between Russia and NATO is there to stay, for now.
THE PERILS OF THE LAND. THE BEAUTY OF THE SEA.
Empires come and go and when they fall, the humiliations are aplenty. The big difference between Russia and most Western empires is that Muscovite behemoth has always pursued a land strategy.
The last par excellence “landmass power” in Europe’s West and South was Rome. Ever since, any European ruler who tried to extend his control over neighboring landmasses eventually failed – with the French and Germans paying the highest price for their grand misadventures. Instead, the Portuguese, Spaniards, the Dutch and the British projected their power overseas. The sea strategy of the UK meant that the land positions were temporary and the fertility effort of lesser importance. Military powers of the ocean are elusive and mobile, but unstable. Still, the costs of eventual losses are lower. The threat of destruction afflicts only the military capacity, not the metropole. US, one of only a dozen major countries with access to two oceans has always pursued a sea strategy and its colonization of island nations after the 1898 war with Spain was rather accidental.
Chinese and Russian attempts to carry their expansion onto the oceans have been inconclusive despite the 1400s or 1900s episodes, respectively. China mysteriously lost appetite for overseas adventures after its fleet’s successes in the Indian Ocean and heroic feats such as kidnapping of a Sri Lankan king. Russia has always been hamstrung by limited access to warm ports and its maritime ambitions were durably annihilated by Japan some hundred years ago.
A sea power is more nimble, more mobile and more elusive as a military target. A land power is more vulnerable in its extended borders and, as a consequence, more paranoid about the protection of its interests “in the neighborhood”. The continental military powers are not only costlier and more vulnerable, but also more durable – like China or Russia. The tragic episode of seaborne slavery trade notwithstanding, it was usually the land invasions - Roman, Persian, Arab, Mongolian, Turkish, Chinese, Russian and German – that were more lethal, more destructive and more destabilizing. But land conquests, however destructive, also bring the ultimate reward – control over natural and human resources. Usable water and energy are both more difficult and more costly to extract from the oceans, even at today’s technologies.
It took almost 40 years since the Soviet-Chinese war to finally demarcate the border between the two land powers. The obsession with Russia’s land strategy is not lost on China, now at loggerheads with Moscow over the liturgy of “national sovereignty”. But Russia is also struggling to reinstate its control over the Black Sea. Its occupation of northern Georgia has invited US, Spanish, German and Polish warships through what remains a former lake flooded by the Mediterranean waters after the end of the Ice Age some 8’000 years ago. NATO’s control of Black Sea’s mouth, the tenuous hold of the Montreux Declaration and the unresolved status of post-2017 Russian base in Sevastopol make the Black Sea a treacherous terrain for a standoff between a sea power and a land power. Despite Moscow’s swagger, certainly alimented by the overstretch of US ground forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, Russia’s vulnerability in the Black Sea is evident. No wonder, Moscow has done its utmost to extend the controlled shoreline into Abkhazia and beyond.
The US has now apparently sent USS Mt Whitney into the Black Sea. It is a sophisticated intelligence vessel that will collect real-time data for the 6th Fleet. This has certainly prompted Russian vessels to leave Sevastopol and travel south. However, the solution sought by the West is political, not military. This is not the time to consider building deep trenches inside Georgia, or pulverizing Sevastopol’s Russian fleet, which could potentially ignite murderous passions among viscerally anti-Russian Crimea Tatars.
Western presence in Georgia is important. The times when CIA would foster freedom activity in Tibet, Hungary or Kurdistan and then abandon the failed uprisings are, hopefully, over. By electing a democratic government, curbing corruption and modernizing its economy, the independent country of Georgia has sent an unequivocal signal of desire to belong to international institutions. While Russia’s direct objectives appear open-ended and confusing, there is little doubt that Moscow has been trying to force the regime change in Tbilissi. In the current circumstances, this is unlikely, not only because there is no constitutional lever that could eject Saakashvili. It would simply be very difficult to find a Quisling or another sovietized former official like Shevardnadze in what is an openly democratic and independent country. But Russia has an impressive track record of “liberating” its neighbors of their independence and their freedom. Estonians still shudder at the memory of Kommissar Vishinsky who in 1940 stood on the balcony of 500-year old building in Tallinn announcing that Soviet Union had graciously “accepted” Estonians’ insistent demands to join the USSR.
In this context, the presence of Western military forces supplying Georgia either through Bosphorus or from the navy base in Constanza, could create a division not unlike in the bygone era of West Berlin. Like anything else in the world, this would be a temporary stasis, with no permanent solution until the day when energy prices will throw Putinism into the dustbin filled with historical parentheses.
One more word of caution. The conventional theater of war, comprising land, sea and air spaces, is only one of the possible arenas on which this conflict will play out. 21st century conflicts have other dimensions, notably propaganda war, cyberspace and the outer space. The Kremlin has been proudly proclaiming its indignation over Georgia’s alleged atrocities. This brings back the memories of condescending anti-Baltic propaganda in the 1990s (“these countries certainly have not yet ripened to become EU or NATO members”). This time, Russia’s propagandists went even as far as to forge, ex-ante, documentaries testifying acts of genocide by the Georgian army. Russia’s miscalculations and rhetorical machismo have now marginalized the potential impact of such narratives. But then again, the Madison Avenue spin doctors were equally unsuccessful in the Middle East.
On the other hand, Russia’s current capability to wage the operations in the outer space is unknown. But its intention and capacity to use cyberspace for war games has already been tested in the attacks on another NATO member – Estonia. There surely is more to come.
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