Thomas Friedmanin’nin NY Times daki makalesini entersan buldum, benim daha evvel bu mevzuda gonderdigim bir analizle paralleligi var. Atilla Bektore [bektorea@bellsouth.net]
August 20, 2008
OP-ED COLUMNIST
What Did We Expect?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
If the conflict in Georgia were an Olympic event, the gold medal for brutish stupidity would go to the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin. The silver medal for bone-headed recklessness would go to Georgia’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili, and the bronze medal for rank short-sightedness would go to the Clinton and Bush foreign policy teams.
Let’s start with us. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, I was among the group — led by George Kennan, the father of “containment” theory, Senator Sam Nunn and the foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum — that argued against expanding NATO, at that time.
It seemed to us that since we had finally brought down Soviet communism and seen the birth of democracy in Russia the most important thing to do was to help Russian democracy take root and integrate Russia into Europe. Wasn’t that why we fought the cold war — to give young Russians the same chance at freedom and integration with the West as young Czechs, Georgians and Poles? Wasn’t consolidating a democratic Russia more important than bringing the Czech Navy into NATO?
All of this was especially true because, we argued, there was no big problem on the world stage that we could effectively address without Russia — particularly Iran or Iraq. Russia wasn’t about to reinvade Europe. And the Eastern Europeans would be integrated into the West via membership in the European Union.
No, said the Clinton foreign policy team, we’re going to cram NATO expansion down the Russians’ throats, because Moscow is weak and, by the way, they’ll get used to it. Message to Russians: We expect you to behave like Western democrats, but we’re going to treat you like you’re still the Soviet Union. The cold war is over for you, but not for us.
“The Clinton and Bush foreign policy teams acted on the basis of two false premises,” said Mandelbaum. “One was that Russia is innately aggressive and that the end of the cold war could not possibly change this, so we had to expand our military alliance up to its borders. Despite all the pious blather about using NATO to promote democracy, the belief in Russia’s eternal aggressiveness is the only basis on which NATO expansion ever made sense — especially when you consider that the Russians were told they could not join. The other premise was that Russia would always be too weak to endanger any new NATO members, so we would never have to commit troops to defend them. It would cost us nothing. They were wrong on both counts.”
The humiliation that NATO expansion bred in Russia was critical in fueling Putin’s rise after Boris Yeltsin moved on. And America’s addiction to oil helped push up energy prices to a level that gave Putin the power to act on that humiliation. This is crucial backdrop.
Nevertheless, today we must support all diplomatic efforts to roll back the Russian invasion of Georgia. Georgia is a nascent free-market democracy, and we can’t just watch it get crushed. But we also can’t refrain from noting that Saakashvili’s decision to push his troops into Tskhinvali, the heart of Georgia’s semiautonomous pro-Russian enclave of South Ossetia, gave Putin an easy excuse to exercise his iron fist.
As The Washington Post’s longtime Russia watcher Michael Dobbs noted: “On the night of Aug. 7 …, Saakashvili ordered an artillery barrage against Tskhinvali and sent an armored column to occupy the town. He apparently hoped that Western support would protect Georgia from major Russian retaliation, even though Russian ‘peacekeepers’ were almost certainly killed or wounded in the Georgian assault. It was a huge miscalculation.”
And as The Economist magazine also wrote, “Saakashvili is an impetuous nationalist.” His thrust into South Ossetia “was foolish and possibly criminal. But unlike Putin, he has led his country in a broadly democratic direction, curbed corruption and presided over rapid economic growth that has not relied, as Russia’s mostly does, on high oil and gas prices.”
That is why the gold medal for brutishness goes to Putin. Yes, NATO expansion was foolish. Putin exploited it to choke Russian democracy. But now, petro-power-grabbing has gone to his head — whether it’s invading Georgia, bullying Western financiers and oil companies working in Russia, or using Russia’s gas supplies to intimidate its neighbors.
If it persists, this behavior will push every Russian neighbor to seek protection from Moscow and will push the Europeans to redouble their efforts to find alternatives to Russian oil and gas. This won’t happen overnight, but in time it will stretch Russia’s defenses and lead it to become more isolated, more insecure and less wealthy.
For all these reasons, Russia would be wise to reconsider Putin’s Georgia gambit. If it does, we would be wise to reconsider where our NATO/Russia policy is taking us — and whether we really want to spend the 21st century containing Russia the same way we spent much of the 20th containing the Soviet Union.
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YORUM BY ATILLA BEKTORE
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the article by George Friedman regarding the Russo-Georgian conflict.
The points indicated in the the article “The Russo-Georgian War and the Balance of Power” regarding
the latest Russo–Georgian conflict are well taken.
And here is somewhat shortened view on the conflict from my perspective:
North Atlantic Treaty was signed in Washington,_D.C. on 4 April 19949. It included Netherlands, Luxembourg, France,
United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark and Iceland. And the treaty stated that:
The Parties of NATO agreed that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.
Consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defense will assist the Party or Parties being attacked, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.
Whom were they afraid of? Certainly not Germany or Japan who were already totally defeated in 1945. The new threat was the Soviet Union (a member of the Alliance defeating Hitler) which at the occupied almost all the Eastern Europe including Eastern Germany. It was feared that her influence would tilt the post-war governments to be formed in parts of the the Western Europe towards socialism. In April of 1949 with the help of CIA Italy barely escaped from the clutches of the Communist Party of Italy. The so called “Cold War” was beginning and the so called “containment” of the Soviet Union was being put into effect. The direct application of it was realized when in 1952 Greece and Turkey became members of NATO ( the Democratic Party government under premiership of Adnan Menderes was in power at the time). What has Turkey had to do with North Atlantic? Black Sea or Mediterranean Alliances maybe, but certainly not North Atlantic. It did not really matter. The Soviet Union had to be contained, and Turkey could be instrumental in blocking its path to warm waters of the Mediterranean. American military aid poured into Turkey. But that was not all. American bases with nuclear tipped missiles were established in Eastern Turkey aimed at the Soviet Union (those missiles were later removed from Turkey by a secrete agreement between by J.F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev in Oct. of 1962, following the Cuban Missile crisis, in exchange for removal of the Soviet missiles from Cuba, but American bases stayed).
Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, by its own weight. As a nuclear power in competition with the United State, the military budgets of the country at times approached 80% of the total at the expense of civilian needs. Long lines for the ordinary items did not really disappear from the old days, when I was growing up as a kid in the Soviet Union. USSR (Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics) dissolved and transformed itself into the Commonwealth of the Independent Republics (Georgia, Russia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan) the largest of them Russian Federation became today’s Russia. Michail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin were instrumental in this transformation.
What precipitated Russia’s latest anger towards Saakashvili resulting in military action in breakaway South Ossetia area of Georgia was not primarily his treatment of South Ossetians, but his application for the Membership of NATO – supported by the US – and urging Ukraine to do so, and his recent declaration that Georgia will leave the Commonwealth of the Independent Republics.
NATO is a defensive military alliance supported by military-industrial enterprises. Defense against whom one might ask? Its original formation was based against the threat of the Soviet Union against Western Europe. It is no more, but Russians think it is still aimed against them. That is why they cannot tolerate Georgia at their southern border between Caspian and Black seas armed with NATO’s weapons. It is that simple. US by invoking The Monroe Doctrine – which, on December 2, 1823, proclaimed that European powers were no longer to colonize or interfere with the affairs of the newly independent nations of the Americas– brought the successful removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba in 1962, but US to this day ostracizes Cuba by maintaining an economic embargo on the island located only 90 miles from the US. Could we call it a double standard? The world needs respite from the military alliances, and the tensions and economic hardships it creates. Enough already.
Respectfully,
Atilla Bektore
