Clumsy Russia
[Opinion] The bully bear should butt out of Georgia

There should be no mincing of words. Georgia's military assault on Tskhinvali on Aug. 7 was ill timed, ill advised and plain dumb.

But that does not excuse Russia's reprehensible follow-on actions. Whether Kremlin bigwigs like it or not, there are international norms for dealing with cross-border affairs where international and sovereign frontiers are concerned.

By entering Georgia proper, Russia has gone way beyond its ostensible peacekeeping role in South Ossetia and begun to act in a manner more befitting of an over-armed gangster state than of a self-respecting world power.

That some South Ossetians hold Russian passports no more equip Russia morally to move the entire 58th army into Georgia than concern about migrant conditions might justify a Mexican penetration into Texas. The legal reality is that the international community considers both South Ossetia and Abkhazia as part of Georgia.

Russia's actions have not led to an improvement in the humanitarian conditions in the region, and increasingly appear to be aimed at punishing the civilians of Georgia for the sins of their government. This is both geopolitically unsound and morally hideous.

No doubt, cynical Putin is happy exploiting cheap analogies with the 2003 Iraq invasion and is probably relishing the comical sideshows ongoing in the United Nations chamber, but around the globe few people are laughing with him.

When the story comes to be written in the not too distant future, the historians of the time will call Russia's current action one of the biggest blunders the neo-tsarist state ever committed in its drive to reassert its erstwhile global and regional influence.

The decision to pour fuel over the ethnic fires of the Caucasus -- pitching Sarmatian sentiment against Balto-Slavic resentment -- will rebound adversely on Russia's own volatile bid to becalm the testy waters of Caucasian nationalism.


Russia's intolerance of Georgia's territorial jitteriness is profoundly hypocritical considering the former's own less than illustrious conduct in Chechnya and elsewhere.

But as I said before, as far as the regional politics are concerned, Russia has shot itself in the foot. The ill-judged invasion of Georgia is just the spark the mounting fodder of Baltic and Slavonic unease has been waiting for to ignite the slow process of the creation of an anti-Russian political order in Eurasia. Rumor has it that even Belarus and Uzbekistan (members of the shabby Collective Security Treaty Organization) are unsettled!

Rather than undermine the Georgian bid to join NATO, the Russian invasion should actually reinforce the logic behind it. The apparent disquiet of Ukraine over Russia's behavior provides clear evidence of the diplomatic cesspool the neo-tsarists' military adventurism is spawning in the region. Given internal political dynamics in Ukraine, which nowadays, to put it simply, operate in the direction of placating Russia most of the time, Kiev's courageous stance that it might prevent Russia's Black Sea ships from returning to their Sevastopol docks could only have resulted from a deep disaffection for the soviet-style aggression then in evidence: aerial, naval and diplomatic blockades in a manner reminiscent of the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

There are of course the broader contexts of this senseless war. Russia's personality disorder, stemming from anxiety over its fear that Europe does not consider it European enough, is but the most abstract of a number of deep roots for the neo-tsarist state's reckless showmanship on the world stage. The grittier geopolitics of oil on the other hand offers a rather dull but strongly tangible backdrop to assess Moscow's style.

This is a "superpower" with nearly zero ideological, cultural or transformative influence in the world. A superpower that continues to lag behind in the new knowledge economy, and refuses to undertake much needed liberalization so its services industry can catch up with upstart rivals in Eastern Europe and Latin America, and by so doing help reinvigorate a countryside withering from the decimation of unproductive heavy industry.

Like every badly run empire with a thirst for unearned power since the fall of Rome, Russia and its leaders have evolved a mercantilist view of international political economy pivoted on oil. A Soviet-style "grab while you can" oil development policy means that the country's leaders have chronically neglected technological enhancements to its oil development policy and embraced the greedy short-termism of rampant exploration. "Control the supply" has become the mantra.

Thus, I am growing increasingly warm to the fringe -- and somewhat simplistic -- notion that all the cacophonous rattling of T-7Zs and Sukhovs could be about fear over Georgia's growing role as a potential alternative conduit of Caspian oil to Europe. Oil is all that remains in the imperial spire of the house Stalin built; God forbid that his heirs will loosen their grip on it!