Editor's Note

In August 2008, Russia and Georgia fought a brief war whose repercussions are still being felt today and whose implications, regional and global, remain uncertain. Did the conflict presage a new Cold War, a bid by Russia to regain its superpower status, challenge the United States around the world, and eventually recover territories relinquished during the Soviet collapse? Or are Moscow’s aims are much less ambitious—merely to reassert Russia’s influence and protect its interests in its “near abroad”, without implying any territorial designs or grand strategic goals?

If Russia has essentially set its face against rapprochement and co-operation with the West, where does the blame primarily lie for this strategic shift—with a revanchist Kremlin newly emboldened by its oil wealth, or with a United States that hubristically treated Russia as a defeated Cold War enemy instead of as a potential partner, and that recklessly expanded the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation to Russia’s borders? Has NATO in any case now been halted in its tracks, the August 2008 war demonstrating the sheer impracticability of the alliance’s further eastwards expansion to include Georgia and Ukraine?

These and other questions raised by the Russia–Georgia war are considered in the present issue of Global Dialogue. In our opening contribution, Nicolai N. Petro of the University of Rhode Island puts the war into historical context and subjects popular explanations of why it erupted when it did to searching scrutiny. Was Georgia provoked by Russia into launching its attack on South Ossetia, or was its assault the outcome of a long-premeditated plan? Did Russia fall into a trap of Washington’s making in responding so vigorously to Georgia’s actions? Petro addresses these problems through a detailed examination of the lead-up to the war, and he concludes with some suggestions as to how the West might repair its relations with Russia.

South Ossetia was at the eye of the storm in August 2008. Yet the war also had momentous consequences for another separatist enclave in Georgia, Abkhazia, whose independence was recognised by Moscow after the conflict. George Hewitt of London University surveys the long and troubled history of Abkhazia’s interactions with Georgia.

Russia’s use of military force against Georgia had alarming implications for another West-leaning former Soviet republic—Ukraine. Tor Bukkvoll of the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) in Oslo assesses the war’s impact on Kiev’s relations with Moscow, on Ukraine’s domestic political stability and cohesion, and on the country’s aspirations to join the European Union and NATO.

Our discussion then broadens out from a consideration of the war’s impact in the former Soviet space to its significance for Russia’s dealings with the West. What sort of polity was it that repulsed Georgia’s assault on South Ossetia? What sort of polity is it that the West must now do business with? Ian Bremmer of the World Policy Institute in New York argues that Russia today is very far from being the chaotic post-Soviet entity it was in the 1990s. Rather, it is an increasingly self-confident “revisionist” state, one that means to re-establish a zone of political and economic influence that extends across former Soviet territory and to become again a central player in international politics. The Russian leadership’s determination to challenge the geopolitical status quo, Bremmer adds, will force the Obama administration to balance resolute defence of US interests where necessary with a pragmatic focus on partnership where possible.

The Georgia war could mark the beginning of a new era in relations between Russia and the West, argues journalist Eric Walberg, one in which Moscow is courted rather than needlessly confronted and recklessly provoked. The aftermath of that conflict saw the European Union slowly return to its traditional role of mediator between Washington and Moscow after a period of impotence following its expansion into eastern Europe, which left it as junior partner to the United States because of the new EU members’ anti-Russian stance. In this context, the Russian proposal for a new European security structure could be a midwife to the eventual demise of NATO, which has long outlived its Cold War raison d’être.

If ties are to improve, stresses Robert D. English of the University of Southern California, then due consideration must be given to the numerous long-standing causes Russians have had for disillusionment with and alienation from the US-led West. English details the grounds for Russian resentment. No “reset” in relations can be expected unless the evolution of Russia’s current antagonism to the West is understood, beginning not with the recent Bush presidency but that of Bill Clinton and, before it, the first Bush administration.

A formidable barrier to any such improved understanding is the anti-Russia lobby in the United States. The Georgia war was seized on by the lobby to bolster its claim that Russia is a resurgent, unpredictable, potentially dangerous power that is prone to bullying its neighbours. Andrei P. Tsygankov of San Francisco State University examines the origins, composition and influence of a body that has done much to obstruct the co-operation warranted by the significant convergence of US and Russian interests in the Caucasus.

NATO figures centrally in the two articles that follow. Flush with their triumph in the Cold War, US and other Western leaders hailed NATO as a “permanent alliance”, refusing to disband the organisation, seeking to add new members, and allowing it to undertake non-defensive military operations outside western Europe. As Stanley Kober of the Cato Institute, Washington, D.C., notes, this perpetuation and extension of NATO’s mission have landed the alliance in severe difficulties, highlighted by the Georgia war, which cruelly exposed the gap between NATO’s reach and its grasp.

Alexander Cooley of Barnard College, New York, describes the consequences of Washington’s championing of NATO entry for Georgia, its candidacy receiving US support despite the democratic shortcomings of President Mikheil Saakashvili. This setting aside of the usual conditions for alliance membership has only confirmed Moscow in its belief that the US espousal of “democracy promotion” and other much-trumpeted “Western values” is a form of power politics, a geopolitical tool for extending Western might and influence into Russia’s near abroad. The Georgia war is the starkest expression yet of Russia’s determination to resist what it regards as a Western attempt at containment and encirclement.

Arguably the gravest threat Russia faces is posed not by hostile foreign powers or military alliances, but by the country’s internal domestic circumstances. Russia is in the grip of an acute demographic crisis, with rising death rates, falling birth rates and reduced life expectancy. Graeme P. Herd of the Geneva Centre for Security Policy and Grace Allen of the University of Miami in Oxford bring our examination of Russian affairs to a close with an appraisal of the human costs and strategic dangers of this crisis.

Our concluding article reviews the situation in Pakistan, which is in turmoil as a result of the extension to its territory of the US military campaign in neighbouring Afghanistan. Varun Vira, a Chicago-based writer on international affairs, profiles the chief Islamist militant groups operating in Pakistan—including the Pakistani Taliban—and describes the mixed motives of Pakistan’s powerful Army in confronting the extremists. The wisdom of President Barack Obama’s “Af–Pak” strategy is assessed, and some suggestions are made as to how Pakistan might best counter the instability that besets it.

Paul Theodoulou

Winter/Spring 2009