What Russia Wants

The recent blowup between Russia and Georgia has ruffled feathers in Washington. Condi Rice has threatened a new cold war and warned that Russia will see itself isolated from the world community. Here is a great analysis of what this brouhaha is all about.

Moscow is not bent on world domination, just regional influence.
By Ted Galen Carpenter

Russia’s military intervention in Georgia has provoked a storm of negative reactions in the United States and Europe. To most Americans—and apparently to spluttering Bush administration officials—Moscow’s actions came as an unpleasant surprise. Pundits and policy experts immediately began to speculate about the Kremlin’s motives in Georgia and beyond.

The argument that Russia is a malignantly expansionist power is now common fare across the political spectrum. The perspective of the Washington Post and such Democratic luminaries as Madeleine Albright and Zbigniew Brzezinski is not substantially different from the views of neoconservatives such as William Kristol and Robert Kagan—or GOP presidential nominee John McCain.

Contrary to such alarmism, it is more likely that Russia’s strategic aims are modest, largely confined to its own neighborhood, and typical for a major power. Moscow’s actions also appear to be more defensive than offensive—a belated reaction to clumsy, arrogant policies that the United States and its NATO allies have pursued for more than a decade.

Moscow is also increasingly angry at the West’s repeated disdain for Russian policy preferences—indeed, core Russian interests—in Europe. The insensitivity of the United States and its allies was already apparent in the mid-1990s, with the effort to expand NATO by adding Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. That move violated assurances given to the Kremlin when Mikhail Gorbachev’s government agreed to the reunification of Germany and continued German membership in NATO. Secretary of State James Baker assured Russian officials that the alliance would not expand eastward from Germany.

Not content with that provocation, in 2004 the U.S. pushed through NATO’s incorporation of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, entities that had been part of the Soviet Union. And NATO expansion is not the only manifestation of contempt for Russia’s interests. So is Western policy in the Balkans, traditionally a key region for Moscow. In 1995, NATO forces intervened in Bosnia’s civil war to undermine the Serbs, Russia’s coreligionists and longstanding political allies. Then in 1999, the United States and its allies waged an air war against Serbia, ultimately wrenching away its province of Kosovo. They bypassed the UN Security Council to do so, thereby evading a Russian veto.

At least in part, Russia’s actions in Georgia amount to payback for the West’s refusal to respect even the most basic Russian interests and an emphatic reassertion of its sphere of influence. Moscow appears to want two things: pre-eminence in its own region and treatment by the United States and NATO as a serious power whose wishes must be respected. Using military force as it did in Georgia is a crude way to make those points, but they were made effectively. The Bush administration’s vocal support for Saakashvili proved to be devoid of substance. Moscow demonstrated that it could coerce a small U.S. ally on its border, and Washington’s response was impotent. The response of NATO and the European Union reflected the same reality. For all the verbal bluster of those organizations, the Europeans, cognizant of their dependence on Russia for energy supplies (among other considerations), do not want a hostile relationship with Moscow.
http://www.amconmag.com/article/2008/sep/22/00006/