UPDATE: Why Russia’s New Foreign Policy is a Real Threat

This is an update on my earlier post.

The New York Times appears to have gotten its hands on cell phone recordings (and has authenticated them) that show that Russian troops had moved into position in and around South Ossetia a full day before the Georgian troops made their ill-fated move to restore control over their separatist region.

As I said, the Russian invasion was planned well in advance.

Why Russia’s New Foreign Policy Is A Real Threat

Russia is back.

Not twenty years after the rest of the world breathed a sigh of relief at the collapse of the totalitarian Soviet Empire and at the end of the Russian dictatorship of world affairs, Russian tanks once again rolled into free countries on Russia’s borders, Russian soldiers once more are formally being accused of ethnically cleansing the villages of those who dare resist them, and Russian diplomats once again blame it all not on their own belligerence, but on the old propaganda staple, American Imperialism – that is, the threat of a reign of freedom and democracy on their borders, much like the East Germans tried in 1953, the Hungarians tried in 1956, and the Czechs tried in 1968, just to equally be crushed by soldiers and tanks for failing to see that Moscow knows best.

It all seems so familiar that it’s almost refreshing. What is less refreshing is the reaction from the two presidential candidates.

Of course, Barack Obama and John McCain both condemned the Russian attack on Georgia. McCain warned Americans that Russia was entering a new, aggressive phase in its foreign policy. He said the West should “have no doubt about Russian ambitions in this area,” and that the Russians wanted “to send a signal to any country that chooses to associate with the West” to think twice about doing so. The West, he said, must react. Obama went even further and declared, “Now is the time for action – not just words.”

But both candidates have been remarkably vague about just what those reactions should be. The most forceful ones that either one seems to have been able to come up with so far has been the largely symbolic dismissal of Russia from the G8 and the naïvely patronizing gesture of sending aid packages to the defeated ally, Georgian. That is hardly enough from the future leader of the Free World.

This failure of leadership suggests that neither of has understood the gravity Russia’s actions, which Stephen Blank of the U.S. Army War College described as a combination of “drunken Russian soldiers looting the population, false claims about Georgian genocide and war crimes that may yet be counterbalanced by truer accounts of bad Russian behavior – beyond that, Russia is threatening everyone in sight to show that it is a great power even if they send humanitarian aid to Georgia. In other words, the Russian line is one of mendacity, provocation, aggression, belligerence, and undisciplined raiding.”

What we saw in Georgia is not the first gambit in a new round of geopolitical chess the Russians intend to play with the West. Those came earlier, when the Russians cut off the natural gas supply to the Western-oriented Ukraine and launched a concerted cyber-attack against Estonia, a member of both NATO and the EU. The move in Georgia is just the first one the West really noticed, because tanks rolled.

The Russian government insists that its military just happened to be hanging around the border with peace on its mind when the Georgians suddenly attacked hapless South Ossetian separatists. The Russians didn’t plan to crush the Georgians with such an impressive use of force, they say. Their army really just is that good and that quick.

This is a lie, and it’s part of the game the Russians are playing.

Far from being spontaneous, the Russian invasion had long been planned. Russian officials issued Russian passports to South Ossetians well in advance so that they could claim to be rushing to the defense of their own citizens when the Georgian forces entered the breakaway region. Russia had steadily increased its troops on the border to Georgia for months before the conflict, Russian anti-aircraft missiles had shot down unmanned Georgian drones over Georgian territory, and Russian military jets had repeatedly violated Georgian airspace – all actions intended to eventually provoke a reaction from Georgia. The Georgian defeat, too, was a foregone conclusion. Russia had intended all along to humiliate a U.S. ally and show everyone that nothing would stop a Russian invasion.

Russian president Dmitri Medvedev announced soon afterwards that all countries on its borders from now on were to consider themselves in the Russian sphere of influence – including European Union members Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. The same applied, so Medvedev, to Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, which Europe had turned to in order to alleviate its oil and gas dependency on an increasingly sinister Russia. A week later, Medvedev’s bluster at the presence of U.S. warships in the Black Sea that were delivering humanitarian aid to Georgia further suggested that Russia now considers the entire Black Sea region its thralldom, including the pro-Western Ukraine with its strategic ports.

In fact, the next Russian moves are already laid out in plain sight, and the Ukraine is indeed their target. The Ukrainian president, Viktor Yushchenko, who survived a poisoning attempt that many ascribe to Russian agents, recently refused to extend the Soviet-era lease of the Crimean port of Sevastopol to the Russian Black Sea fleet after the lease expires in 2017. In response, Russian politicians questioned the integrity of the Ukraine’s borders, and the vocal Russian minority in Sevastopol staged demonstrations demanding the Crimea’s independence. How long before those demonstrations turn into calculated riots? How long until the Russian government claims that Ukrainian police are no longer restoring order, but harming Russian citizens? How long before Russia sends its troops to occupy the Crimea in response to another crisis Russia provoked?

Something very similar is already going on along the Ukraine’s western border, in the Transdnerstr region of neighboring Moldova. There, the Kremlin has stoked a pro-Russian separatist movement for years. Much like the South Ossetians, those separatists have declared they want to be part of Russia – except that they share no borders with it. How long until Russian “peace keepers” arrive there as well, forming a wedge between Moldova and the Ukraine, and coming ominously close to the Ukrainian port of Odessa?

And there is still more. A European-backed oil pipeline that was just recently modernized ends in the Georgian port of Supsa, just 15 miles from where Russian soldiers still occupy the port of Poti. The country where most of that oil comes from, Kazakhstan, has a Russian minority that makes up nearly a third of its population. How long until the Kremlin arranges a repeat of Georgia there?

Russian president Medvedev and Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin have made clear how deeply many Russian leaders still resent their country’s realistic place in world affairs – the place of a distinctly secondary power. Putin has famously called this decline “the greatest geopolitical disaster of the century;” those millions who after 1989 finally breathed free from Russian jingoism and oppression might disagree. In order to make up for that resentment, Russia’s current government seems resolved to pretend at its former dark might by killing and by stealing from its smaller neighbors and by then loudly demanding respect from the rest of the world that Russia has made no effort to earn.

It is the responsibility of the presidential candidates to make clear now to the Russian government that any future U.S. administration will take concrete and serious actions against a Russia that gambles with the security of entire continents in a misled search for a dead imperial nightmare buried somewhere in the dregs of its largely derelict and rotting army, its current farce of a democracy, and its apparent determination to wear out its welcome in an international community that in the 21st century expects more civilized behavior from a country that wants to be taken seriously.

Moreover, instead of remaining vague, the candidates should not only promise to step up efforts to integrate the Ukraine into NATO as the current administration has started to do, but should also start calling Russia’s bluffs by using Russia’s own logic. If Russia is going to demand the independence of every disgruntled minority in the Caucasus, it will have to do the same with its own minorities yearning to be free – in Chechnya, in Dagestan, in Tatarstan, along the Volga, and in the Siberian provinces.

As to spheres of influence wherever Russia has an adjoining border and anywhere the Russian empire once stretched – it is to be doubted that the Russians would want Germany to suddenly reclaim the Königsberg exclave in the Baltic, which is now safely tucked far into EU territory and nowhere borders on Russia; or that it would accept Japanese claims over the Kuril Islands because those were once part of the Japanese Empire; or that it would do anything but throw a fit if its recently planted flag were uprooted from the seabed at the North Pole when the international commission working on the question confirms that the Pole is indeed part of Greenland and not Russia.

And in any case, even in what it calls its “near abroad” the Russian sphere of influence is a still a myth the Free World can dispel: Last week, a council of former Soviet republics refused to follow Russia’s lead and voted not to recognize the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Those countries still trust 21st century values of freedom and democracy more than they fear the 19th century Russian yawp.

Let’s hear from our presidential candidates how they will keep it that way.