Georgia: will Russia’s tactical victory lead to its strategic defeat? Richard Gowan
August 22, 2008 | More on Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia, North America | No comments
With each day that passes, members of the commentariat out-bid each other with explanations of how events in Georgia signify the decline of the West. Comparisons to the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechosolvakia abound. And South Vietnam, obviously. It takes a brave skeptic to argue that this is not the start of “Cold War II”. So I expect to be consigned to the “insane” file when I say this: Russia has fought a successful, rather classical, limited war and won a tactical victory that may yet turn into a strategic defeat for Moscow.
I’m not saying that’s certain, but it’s a real possibility. To see why, it’s necessary to get past the images of Russian armor grinding up Georgian roads. There’s no doubt that the war went Moscow’s way. But remember: in 1968, nearly 200,000 Soviet and Warsaw pact troops poured into Czechoslovakia. Today, we worry because Russia may leave 2,000 soldiers on Georgian soil. That’s 2,000 too many, but the imagery shouldn’t obscure the numbers. This was a small war.
And a small war that hasn’t necessarily ended exactly as Russia hoped. Mikhail Saakashvili is still in office. He is receiving a stream of visitors: Rice, Cameron, etc. Now think back. In 1968, Alexander Dubček didn’t get to meet a similar cast of characters – as you ask, the equivalents would have been Dean Rusk and Edward Heath. He got flown to Moscow (in fairness, the last leader of South Vietnam was allowed to return home and grow orchids).
So what we’ve discovered over the last weeks is that Russia can conduct a small victorious war on its immediate border, but that the West is still able to project enough political influence to prevent a total rout there. By itself, this puts Russia into a similar league to Rwanda, which can destabilize the eastern Congo all it likes but still has to put up with U.S. and UN meddling there. Go the Red Army!
This point is not lost on the Russians. They are making it themselves. From the West, this looks like an attack on the West. From Russia, it’s Grenada. I don’t deny that this is not only a tragedy for Georgia, but also a shock to the (post-Cold War) system. But will the long-term effects on that system necessarily favor Russia? Here are two reasons to think that they might not.
Reason #1 is that Russia has compounded growing Western business mistrust. That hurts. Daniel Drezner excerpts the following from the FT:
Investors pulled their money out of Russia in the wake of the Georgia conflict at the fastest rate since the 1998 rouble crisis. Russian debt and equity markets have also suffered sharp falls since the conflict began on August 8, with yields on domestic rouble bonds increasing by up to 150 basis points in the last month.
Alexei Kudrin, finance minister, said the capital flight had largely subsided and would be more than made up for by projected inflows. Russia’s foreign currency reserves, at $581bn, are the world’s third largest. But the ebbing of foreign investor confidence will make it harder for Russian companies to raise debt and equity finance since foreign sources account for a disproportionate share of long-term capital for Russian corporate borrowers. “The market is vulnerable to foreign capital flight,” said Kingsmill Bond at Troika Dialogue, the investment bank. “The major Achilles heel of the Russian market is that there is very little domestic long-term capital.”
Of course, Russia is an energy superpower and all that, but the idea that it is now immune from foreign financial forces is overstated. Reason #2 for thinking all may not be going Moscow’s way is geopolitical. U.S. commentators are reviving the Vietnam-era domino theory with a Eurasian twist: after Georgia, Ukraine will be next, then the ’stans and so on. Maybe so, but again it’s not inevitable. The BBC notes that many former Soviet states have shown support for Georgia (or at least the West) or stayed quiet during the crisis. That’s not just Ukraine. It’s Belarus:
Only a few years ago Russia was such a close ally, there was talk of the two countries merging, so one might have expected [Belarusian mini-Stalin President Lukashenko] to back Russia’s action in the Caucasus. But Belarus has had a series of bad-tempered rows with Russia over energy supplies and has recently shown more interest in improving Western contacts.
The initial response from Minsk to Russia’s intervention in Georgia was decidedly ambivalent – so much so, that the Russian ambassador there even publicly expressed his displeasure. President Lukashenko travelled to Sochi to reassure President Medvedev that Moscow’s military operation had been conducted “calmly, wisely and beautifully”.
But he took steps to clear the way for better relations with the US and Europe. In the last few days the final three political prisoners in Belarus have been suddenly released – the beneficiaries, it seems, of an unexpected presidential pardon.
One has hallucinatory visions of McCain’s International Freedom Express steaming into Minsk in 2009, with Son of Liberty Lukashenko offering anti-missile facilities…
OK, it’s unlikely. But it’s striking that Russia’s neighbors and investors aren’t all buying into the “New Russian Dawn” rhetoric pervading the op-ed pages. The real question is whether Western governments are ready to take advantage of these openings to gain strategic leverage over Russia, or whether they’ll pass. Over on the ECFR website, Daniel offers the hawkish take. Russia’s actions have “made the West’s embrace of both Georgian and Ukraine more rather than less likely.” I’m not so sure. But the essential point is that Georgia was only a tactical win for Russia: like France in 1940 for the Germans, and Iraq in 2003 for the U.S., a quick victory involving lots of tanks may invite longer-term failure.
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