Sol Sanders Archive

The move against Georgia, a small but vibrant enclave even in the years of Soviet Occupation, was seen by many inside and out as the first attempt in reimposing colonial rule on the periphery of the Great Russian heartland. For the moment, Putin appears to have turned Georgia into the Finland of the early World War II years, crushed by a clumsy but overwhelming military force, but not yet devoid of its identity and nationalist passion.

It remains to be seen if Washington – even without much help from its European NATO allies – can turn Georgia 2008 into the West Berlin of 1948-49. That was when American power was used to throw an air bridge over the Soviet-Occupied sector of a defeated Germany to a beleaguered population threatened by Moscow with total isolation. It’s important to remember that then as now there was a widespread belief that it wouldn’t work. And, of course, there was a price to pay: seventy-seven American airmen lost their lives in an airlift that lasted over 15 months and cost a quarter billion 1948 dollars.

A different world, a different time, of course. American power is stretched in two wars far from its shores and the industrial heartland of the West in Europe. And for whatever reason, a fat and fickle Western Europe isn’t likely to be all that much help. The new supposedly new style French President Nikolas Sarkozy as head of the European Union reawakened memories of Munich as he rushed to Moscow to sign an unenforceable ceasefire. It is to be remarked that the Germans almost let the 50th Berlin Airlift anniversary go unheralded. And already the Turks – who it must be remembered sat out World War II often aiding the Nazis – have already thrown a monkey wrench into an effort to get two hospital ships to Georgian ports through the Bosporus strait, the Sea of Marmara and the Dardanelles strait, connecting the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, which Ankara controls by a multinational treaty.

Short term it looks like the Kremlin has won a tactical if not strategic victory. Georgian prestige as a model for representative government and a market economy in one of the old Soviet appendages has been crippled. Putin is simply invoking the old principal of possession is nine-tenths of the law in the once acknowledged autonomous areas of Georgia. There has been a good dose of ethnic cleansing making it harder even if and when legality is restored to put the old internationally recognized Georgian state back together.

But unlike his idols in the Soviet past, including the monstrous Josef Stalin, the new Russian tsar, does not preside over a command economy. State-owned companies and his coterie of favorite oligarchs and a new generation of KGB agents have put together an economic order based as much as anything else on intimidation of its domestic competition and handicapping foreign participation. And while they have carefully hoarded the world’s third largest foreign exchange reserves, those holdings are based almost wholly on hydrocarbon exports in a worldwide spiked energy market. That has been enough to feather the nests of a “new class” in Russia’s major cities. But no one has turned their hand to the long series of reforms that was necessary to remake the old Soviet Union into a “normal” society as its old underground critics used to demand. So average male longeitivy continues to fall and the Russian countryside is still the disaster Stalin’s man-made famines made it in the 1930s.

Already the Russian stock market has crashed, capital is taking wing even faster than earlier, some $20 billion had to be thrown into the currency markets in the first few days of fighting, Russian billionaires are moving to London, and the foreign investment flow with its attendant technology that the economy so badly needs, increasingly hesitant before, has backed off at least temporarily.

Moscow got another inkling of its growing isolation when the annual meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Forum in late August in Dushanbe, Tajikstan. This is a grouping of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kirghizia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, originally organized to fight the Muslim extremism flowing out of Afghanistan. That threat was common to all the old Soviet appratchiks ruling in Central Asia, to the Chinese among its Muslim Uighurs in Singkiang.

More recently the Russians and the Chinese have tried to turn the Shanghai group into an answer to American and NATO influence in the region. Even some Western observers have speculated that the organization might become the cornerstone of an anti-American alliance, not quite the old Warsaw Pact but something approaching it.

Trooping that note, Moscow had hoped to get an endorsement of its actions in Georgia at this year’s conclave in mid-August. But, instead, it got a communiqué which put the emphasis on respect for international frontiers. Neither there nor in any other venue have the Chinese been willing to endorse Moscow’s action nor accord recognition of the two contested Georgian areas an independent states, apparently Moscow’s candidates for absorption in the Russian Federation.

Nor was the leadership collected Dushanbe, Tajistan – including Chinese President Hu Jintao as well as Russian President Dmitry Medvedev – able to move on issues connected with the organization itself, the persistent requests of the Iranian mullahs, Pakistan, and India to join up.

Semi-official Russian reports on the meeting acknowledged one of the obstacles: “According to a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Qin Gang, his country understands the complexity of the situation in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Apparently, this is because China is confronted with similar problems having to deal with Taiwan, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous District and Tibet.” The reasons for the coolness of the Central Asian Muslim states is even more obvious: while they have respect for Russian might, they do not want to see Georgia used as a model to bring themselves back under their 100-year subservience to the European Russian Slavic boot.

So the final communiqué retreated to the original concept, a center for intelligence exchange, in order “to combat international terrorism, the drug threat and trans-border crime and in enhancing mutually beneficial social, economic and humanitarian cooperation.” And while the mullahs, along with India and Pakistan, had “observers” for the goings-on, Teheran [nor New Delhi nor Islamabad] got no invitation to join up.

Again we get a demonstration of the complexities of the present world situation and how Moscow has only stumbled into them, not cleared any of them away. Neither Moscow [nor for that matter Beijing] wants to see Teheran’s influence grow among the Central Asians. The mullahs, after all, are peddling their own kind of Islamic terror. But perhaps even more important, Iran could be “the natural” gateway to world markets for the growing exploitation of Central Asian hydrocarbons in an increasingly competitive energy market. Even the Chinese with their industrial heartland thousands of miles away hope to exploit Central Asian gas reserves with expensive and inordinately long pipelines.

Certainly one of Moscow’s aims in its attack on Georgia was to imperil “the energy corridor” which Washington has been trying to construct for Caspian Basin and other hydrocarbon reserves in the region to world markets. Not only would it increase the total fungible pool of world energy, but it would provide an alternate route to the hammerlock Moscow has had on these inland areas. Putin’s claims for a return to world power status is based on Russia’s ability to blackmail an increasingly dependent Europe while collecting hefty transit fees from them and the Central Asian producers over its pipeline networks. Even that gimmick may be in jeopardy with the Russians overcommitted for gas deliveries and their oil production declining, in no small part because of a lack of reinvestment in infrastructure and prospecting.

It’s significant that by late August the Baku-Tiblis-Ceyhan pipeline delivering Azerbajan oil to world markets at the Mediterranean through Turkey was back functioning again. That is at the heart of Wasington’s initiative to put Georgia front and center as a transit point for the hydrocarbon riches of Central Asia. Whether, as the Georgians charged, Russian planes really did try to take it out – it was not functioning because of sabotage and a fire on the Turkish link – is probably moot. Destruction of the Georgian infrastructure [the Russians did take out a railroad bridge imperiling another oil route through the country] was certainly part of the strategic intent of Moscow’s aggression. In the interim, it might be noted, the Azeris were redirecting some of their crude to Iran with whom they have a swap agreement [oil delivered to northern Iran and Tehran in exchange for deliveries to Baku’s customers on the Persian Gulf].

It’s still early in the game. But Putin’s short cut to his chosen role of Peter the Great is still a long way from fulfillment. He stirred the pot of world politics, but so far he has a mess of porridge, not a good steaming bowl of borscht.