Blaming Moscow: The Power of the Anti-Russia Lobby

Andrei P. Tsygankov is a professor in the departments of international relations and political science at San Francisco State University. He is the author of Russophobia: Anti-Russian Lobby and American Foreign Policy (Palgrave, 2009).

 

 

The Russia–Georgia war of August 2008 has reflected the failure of the existing international system to maintain peace and stability in the Caucasus. All parties—Georgia, Russia and the West—are responsible for the crisis, albeit in varying degrees.

 

Besides the roles played by the governments of Georgia, South Ossetia, Russia, and the United States, that of non-governmental organisations must not be overlooked. Influential groups within the American establishment favoured the military hegemony of the United States and the triumph of American-style democracy in the Caucasus. In response to the policy vacuum in Washington after 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, these groups have promoted a tough stand against Russia, representing it as a threat to US values and interests. The five-day war in the Caucasus has become a crucial test of the power of the anti-Russian groups in the US establishment to influence Russia’s official course. Moscow has insisted that it has important interests in the Caucasus and has vigorously opposed Georgia’s rapprochement with the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO).

 

Although the anti-Russia lobby failed to achieve its main objective of isolating Moscow from the West, it has greatly contributed to the growing perception of Russia as a resurgent, unpredictable, potentially dangerous power that is prone to bullying its neighbours. Suffice it to recall the White House’s initial response to the Georgia crisis, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice comparing Russia’s actions to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Vice-President Dick Cheney vowing to punish Russia for its “aggression”.

 

The interests of Russia and the United States in the Caucasus are different, but they are not incompatible. To Washington, Georgia is a potential ally as a transit territory for non-Russian energy pipelines from the Caspian Sea to Europe. Bordering Russia and close to Iran and Turkey, Georgia also has geostrategic significance in Washington’s eyes. To Moscow, Georgia is a land with strong historical and cultural ties to Russia that once sought the tsar’s protection against hostile Persian influences. Ever since Russia won some decisive battles against Persian, Turkish and British forces in the Caucasus during the nineteenth century, the Kremlin has insisted on safeguarding its economic, cultural and security interests in the region. In the post–Cold War world, there is the potential for US–Russian co-operation in the Caucasus, notably in the spheres of political stabilisation, counter-terrorism, demilitarisation and energy security. 

Russia’s Caucasus Concerns 

Moscow does not seek to establish its hegemony and imperial control in the Caucasus. Instead, it wants to see the area as a stable and secure environment conducive to promoting Russian economic and cultural interests. There are several obstacles to such stabilisation. They include secessionism, the expansion of Western military infrastructure, the militarisation of Caucasian countries, and great-power rivalry over energy.

 

Before Russia’s post-war recognition of the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the Kremlin’s position regarding secessionism was to develop joint security guarantees with Georgia in exchange for its signing a non-aggression pact with its secessionist territories. Tbilisi’s refusal to sign such a pact with its provinces as well as the lack of sufficient trust between Washington and Moscow blocked any prospects for resolving the issue.

 

As regards security, Russia of course cannot be seriously challenged by Georgia. Yet if Georgia achieved its desire to join NATO, Russia would become more vulnerable from the military standpoint. Since at least the April 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, Moscow has maintained that it will do everything in its power to prevent the expansion of the alliance to include Georgia. Then-president Vladimir Putin stated,

 

We view the appearance of a powerful military bloc on our borders … as a direct threat to the security of our country. The claim that this process is not directed against Russia will not suffice. National security is not based on promises.¹

 

The Russian public, too, is overwhelmingly against NATO’s expansion to include former Soviet states. Seventy-four per cent of Russians polled in March 2008 said that Ukraine’s possible accession to NATO posed a threat to the national security of the Russian Federation, and 77 per cent expressed a similar attitude towards Georgia’s possible membership in the organisation.2 NATO expansion has harmed the chances of resolving other issues, such as secessionism. For instance, in the aftermath of the NATO summit, and of the West’s recognition of Kosovo’s independence (opposed by Moscow), the Kremlin signalled its dissatisfaction with Georgia by extending additional assistance to secessionist South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The message for Georgia was that NATO membership might come only at the expense of its territorial integrity—and following the August 2008 war, Moscow did indeed recognise the independence of the two breakaway areas.

 

Russia also wants to be sure that the Pankisi Gorge and several other parts of Georgia near the border with Chechnya are never used by international terrorists as transit points to the north Caucasus, as has occurred in the past. The region remains plagued by the weakness of political institutions, instability, and ethnic separatism, with terrorist attacks and jihadist networks spreading across Dagestan, Ingushetia, North Ossetia, and Karachai-Cherkessia.

 

Another issue waiting to be addressed is the growing militarisation of the Caucasus, with the United States continuing to arm Azerbaijan and Georgia, and Russia providing military assistance to Armenia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Last but not least, the Kremlin wants to protect its energy pipelines, particularly that stretching through Dagestan to Novorossiysk. Energy remains the largest part of Russia’s exports, and trade with Europe accounts for around 50 per cent of Russia’s foreign trade. So far from exercising its “imperial power” in the region, Moscow is struggling to compete with growing attempts by Washington to develop a unilateral advantage in exploiting Caspian Sea energy reserves. 

The Anti-Russia Lobby 

Russophobia may be defined as a fear of Russia’s political system on the grounds that it is incompatible with the interests and values of the West in general and the United States in particular. This fear finds expression in various forms of criticism of Russia that are unbalanced and distorted. No matter which independent actions Moscow may pursue, they are sure to be perceived by the anti-Russia lobby (henceforth “the Lobby”) as reflecting Russia’s expansionist instincts, not as a legitimate pursuit of national interests.

 

The Lobby in American politics emerged in the early twentieth century and was consolidated during the Cold War. It represented a loose coalition of several influential groups, the most important of which included military hawks or advocates of US hegemony who fought the Cold War not to contain the Soviet enemy, but to destroy it by all means available. At least some of these hawks were fully aware that their real target was Russia, not the communist regime. An important part of this group formed the core of the “Committee on the Present Danger” and “Team B”, which produced a highly inflated assessment of the Soviet threat in the mid-1970s.

 

A second group included liberal hawks or organisations that had been created after the Second World War with an agenda of protecting freedom and human rights internationally. Over time, however, the initial agenda of such agencies as Freedom House and Human Rights Watch was partly transformed into a tool for opposing the Soviets.

 

A third group consisted of eastern European nationalists who had fled from the Warsaw Pact countries and now dreamed of destroying the Soviet Union as the ultimate way of gaining independence for their peoples.

 

The Lobby has viewed Russia’s activities in the Caucasus as a direct threat to US interests and values. For example, President Jimmy Carter’s former national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and the Harvard historian, Richard Pipes, insisted that in militarily opposing the secession of Chechnya, the Kremlin was acting in an imperialist and expansionist manner, even though the region is a legitimate part of Russia.

 

The post-Soviet Russia of the 1990s represented a sorry state of affairs: an impoverished population, a shambolic economy, and leaders desperate for Western advice and assistance. Yet many in the Lobby were worried about a Russian revival and argued against co-operation with Moscow. When Putin was elected president in 2000, a number of anti-Russian analysts confidently predicted that the war in Chechnya would never end and that Russia would soon invade Georgia. Since then the Chechnya war has ended, and the republic is more stable than at any time during the last twenty years. As for Georgia, it was actually Tbilisi that on 7–8 August 2008 attacked the South Ossetian capital Tskhinvali in attempting to restore control over the breakaway republic. Russia’s intervention stopped Georgia’s offensive that killed ten Russian peacekeepers and inflicted heavy civilian casualties on South Ossetia.

 

Despite the lack of US public support for its hegemonic and anti-Russian agenda, the Lobby has had considerable influence on the making of foreign policy in the United States. Although Russophobia is not in the US national interest, the Lobby has managed to feed the media the image of Russia as a country with a well-consolidated and increasingly dangerous regime. For example, there are thousands of articles in the mainstream US press that implicate the Kremlin and Putin personally in the murder of opposition journalists and defectors, as opposed to only a handful of pieces in less prominent outlets that question such allegations.

 

The Lobby has also achieved a high degree of ideological cohesion among diverse groups by pushing a tough stance against Russia in joint conferences and public-letter campaigns. Organisations such as the Project for a New American Century, the Committee for Peace in the Caucasus, Freedom House, and the Center for Security Policy all advocate US hegemony in various ways, and they invariably portray Russia as a major threat.

 

Lastly, the Lobby has succeeded in persuading leading members of the US political class to adopt the Russia-threat approach. Influential members of Congress and policymakers in the White House have been sympathetic to the Lobby’s agenda and are prone to use Russophobic rhetoric. 

Demonising Russia 

Even though US interests in the Caucasus include a stable Russia, the Lobby has worked to undermine Russia’s position in the region. When in 1999 Russia began a counter-offensive in Chechnya after a military incursion into its territory by Chechen terrorists led by Shamil Basaev, conservative US writers, such as Robert Kaplan of the Atlantic Monthly, portrayed Russia’s actions as part of a drive by Moscow to restore its imperial rule in the Caucasus, and they voiced a wish for Russia’s military defeat. Zbigniew Brzezinski was among those warning that success for the Kremlin held dangers for the West. At the December 1999 Washington conference, “Geopolitics of Energy into the Twenty-First Century”, organised by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Brzezinski argued that if the Russian offensive in Chechnya succeeded, “the neocolonial thinkers” in Moscow would be encouraged to try and destabilise Georgia, and that would threaten the east–west energy corridor from the Caspian Sea to Turkey. Both Kaplan and Brzezinski viewed Chechnya merely as a useful device for promoting America’s world power, and said nothing about the fact that international Islamist radicals had actually attacked Russia in Dagestan, and that the Dagestani people were fully behind Moscow’s military response.

 

Meanwhile, more liberal-minded US observers and activists concentrated on bashing the Russian army for war atrocities, insisting on accusing Moscow of carrying out “genocide” in Chechnya. The US media provided highly negative coverage of the actions of the Russian military, but played down violence by Chechen militants. Such coverage was greatly influenced by the stance of Human Rights Watch, which published at least six reports on Chechnya between March 2000 and May 2001. These reports documented killing, arson, rape and looting by Russian forces, as well as the disappearances and torture of individuals in Russian custody. The watchdog group urged that Russia be sued in the European Court of Human Rights and that Western states exert tougher pressure on Moscow. But its reports failed to provide a balanced account by documenting the brutalities perpetrated by Chechen terrorists or by acknowledging the suffering caused by their activities in Chechnya.

 

Whatever the Kremlin did—showing reluctance to dismantle its military bases in Georgia, its counter-offensive in Chechnya, or pledging to use preventive military force outside Russian territory in response to terrorist threats—was construed by the Lobby as imperialism incompatible with Western objectives and Russia’s own international treaty obligations. Whatever instability persisted in the region was blamed on the Kremlin’s failings or deliberate manipulations.

 

Outside Chechnya, the Lobby sought to present Russia as unreliable in the US-declared “war on terror” and even alleged the Kremlin’s connection to global Islamist terrorism. Thus, on 20 February 2003, the neo-conservative think-tank, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), held a conference entitled “Dangerous Liaisons: Russia and the Axis of Evil”. Michael Ledeen of the AEI, in statements reminiscent of Cold War thinking, maintained that global terrorism was the result of a Kremlin conspiracy to destabilise the United States. Similarly, in October 2001, George Friedman, director of the private US intelligence agency Stratfor, argued against US–Russia co-operation in Afghanistan, insisting that it would pave the way for Russia’s future anti-Western resurgence.3 Georgia, on the other hand, was viewed as an important ally, partly because Tbilisi fully endorsed the US war on terror and provided a sizable (per capita) military contingent in support of the US occupation in Iraq. 

Backing Georgia’s NATO quest 

Getting Georgia into NATO was one of the Lobby’s most important objectives, the general rationale for which was articulated as early as the mid-1990s. As Russia was accused of “imperialist intentions” in the former Soviet space, NATO’s expansion was deemed necessary to assist the United States in controlling the Eurasian continent because it has most of the world’s energy resources and because “all the historical pretenders to global power originated in Eurasia”.⁴

 

The power-based arguments were supplemented by culturally essentialist ones that presented Russia as incompatible with a civilisation of European and Western origins. The Eurasia Daily Monitor, published by the right-wing Jamestown Foundation, and a number of other US media outlets and think-tanks are covering the issue of NATO’s expansion from the perspective of the need to buttress the traditional unity of Euro-Atlantic civilisation against Russia. In Georgia, members of the political class also tend to view their pro-NATO choice in terms of their “democratic” opposition to the “anti-Western” civilisational values of Russia. Lastly, liberal Russophobes, while not necessarily sharing the belief in the geopolitical and cultural preponderance of the United States and other Western nations, provide their own rationale for expanding NATO. To them, the expansion is mainly about democracy and Western-style political freedoms. As the Washington Post put it, because of “Moscow’s ambition to destroy those countries’ [Ukraine and Georgia’s] freedom and independence” the United States should continue to push for NATO’s expansion, without fearing to offend Russia.⁵

 

The Lobby has succeeded in recruiting prominent members of the US political establishment to promote its objectives. For example, writing in the Wall Street Journal in March 2008, the former secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, argued for expanding NATO’s mission by inviting and training new members, including Georgia and Ukraine, in order to deter a threatening Russia that “recently suggested it might turn its nuclear arsenal on Ukraine or incite civil disorder in Georgia”. Postponement of Membership Action Plans for the new NATO aspirants, he continued, would amount to appeasement, serving as a “green light to Russia to continue the tired rhetoric of the Cold War”.6 The deterrence and appeasement arguments were, of course, well-tested rhetorical tools that Rumsfeld and others had successfully applied previously to rally US support against the Soviet Union, as well as Yugoslavia and Iraq.

 

Even more prominent was the role played by Senator John McCain in advocating NATO membership for Georgia and disrupting the tiny nation’s relations with Russia. McCain backed the future president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, during Georgia’s “Rose Revolution” in 2003 and convinced then-president Eduard Shevardnadze to relinquish power in Saakashvili’s favour. Along with other US and Western organisations, such as the National Democratic Institute, Freedom House, and the George Soros Foundation, the McCain-led International Republican Institute (IRI), an international wing of the National Endowment for Democracy, was involved in training and financing the revolutionary opposition to Shevardnadze. After helping to bring Saakashvili to power, McCain became a leading voice in urging Georgia’s membership of NATO—against Russia’s objections. Along with other anti-Russian lobbyists and politicians, McCain saw NATO’s purpose as being to contain Russia and promote US domination of the geopolitically crucial Eurasian region, with its vast energy resources.

 

Lobbying for NATO aspirants is also financially lucrative: in recent years, McCain’s adviser Randy Scheunemann and his partner Mike Mitchell were paid more than $2 million by Georgia, Latvia, Romania and Macedonia for advocating their membership in NATO. According to records at the Justice Department’s foreign agents registration office, Georgia alone paid the lobbyists over $830,000 for their services. To boost its entry bid, tiny Georgia also sent the third-largest military contingent to Iraq in support of the US occupation of that country.

 

Most importantly, however, Saakashvili expected the West not to oppose Tbilisi’s use of force against its secessionist territories. For example, Saakashvili first used force against South Ossetia in August 2004, attempting to win control over the strategic Djava district. In the autumn of the same year, Saakashvili also rejected Russia’s offer of a good-neighbour treaty, instead seeking to resolve Georgia’s territorial disputes with Abkhazia and South Ossetia by relying on political support from the United States. Washington acted as if it were sympathetic to Saakashvili’s policies by providing Tbilisi with $1.2 billion in aid over the past decade and deploying military advisers in Georgia, officially to train and equip forces to eradicate terrorism from the lawless Pankisi Gorge. In early 2005, Senator John McCain and Senator Hillary Clinton “rewarded” Saakashvili for his strategic choice by suggesting that he and Ukraine’s Viktor Yushchenko be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for “leading freedom movements in their respective countries” and winning “popular support for the universal values of democracy, individual liberty, and civil rights”.7 Emboldened, Saakashvili became even more anti-Russian in his stance.

 

The Lobby’s ability to enlist the support of the US political elite is evident also in the testimonies of members of the House of Representatives who made their case for ignoring Russia’s concerns about NATO enlargement. For example, all witnesses to the hearing on “NATO Enlargement and the Bucharest Summit”, organised by the Commission on Security and Co-operation in Europe on 4 March 2008, supported continued expansion of the alliance and endorsed Membership Action Plans for Georgia and Ukraine. In addition to senators John McCain and Joe Biden, a prominent voice of support was the influential Republican senator, Richard Lugar, who initiated a Senate bill in favour of Georgia and Ukraine’s joining NATO, arguing that their entry would “enable Europe, the United States, and NATO to expand the zone of freedom and security”.⁸ The bill provided $10 million in assistance in the fiscal year of 2008 for Georgia’s membership preparations. On 6 March 2008, a similar bill was passed by the House of Representatives. 

Taking Sides 

In this context of promoting Georgia and bashing Russia, it is hardly surprising that Moscow’s response to Tbilisi’s use force against its rebellious provinces met with almost uniform condemnation in the mainstream US media. Immediately following the war, many US observers sought to highlight the allegedly negative role of Russia and downplay Georgia’s responsibility for the crisis. Even though it was Georgia that attacked South Ossetia on 7–8 August 2008, the first instincts of a number of prominent journalists and politicians in the United States were again to blame Russia, presenting it as a revisionist power that remained obsessed with restoring imperial domains. Besides printing editorials hostile to Moscow, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal carried articles by Georgian leaders and US anti-Russian activists, such as Anne Applebaum, Ronald Asmus, Richard Holbrooke, Robert Kagan, and William Kristol, all urging a strong defence of Georgia against Russia. Only some two months after the war did more balanced accounts of the conflict find their way into the mainstream press.

 

Political support, too, for Georgia was considerable. When in November 2007 Saakashvili used force against his domestic opponents, McCain’s voice wasn’t among those criticising Georgia. However, when Russia intervened to stop the Georgian military attack on South Ossetia, the American senator was loud in his condemnations of the Kremlin. He urged Western governments to be tough with Russia and called for its expulsion from the G8. So close was McCain’s involvement with Saakashvili during the crisis that the two talked over the phone several times a day. As Saakashvili said of his American friend, “he spends less time on his presidential campaign these days and lots of time on Georgia.” For his part, McCain somewhat presumptuously remarked, “I told him that I know I speak for every American when I said to him, today, we are all Georgians.”9 Holding anti-Russian political beliefs, some American activists and politicians saw no conflict with US national interests in their championing of Tbilisi. Yet the NATO entry for Georgia which they advocated entailed highly questionable security guarantees against Russia and inevitably angered Moscow. The quid pro quo was Tbilisi’s full backing of even more dubious US policies, such as the US-led invasion of Iraq.

 

Neither can the official US reaction to the Russia–Georgia war be considered a balanced one. In addition to rhetoric about Russia’s “aggression” and comparisons of its intervention in Georgia to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, several NATO naval vessels entered the Black Sea—officially to distribute humanitarian aid, but in reality to intimidate Russia. With the latter’s determination to secure its presence in the Caucasus by recognising the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the former Soviet space became a cordon sanitaire separating Russia and the Western powers. Events were developing in a manner similar to that after the Second World War, when the two sides found themselves locked in a race to secure Europe on their own terms. Russia and the West again find themselves teetering on the verge of war in areas where their perceived interests clash. If Western leaders continue to push for NATO entry for Georgia and Ukraine by offering them Membership Action Plans, confrontation with Russia is sure to escalate.

 

The anti-Russian pressures at the time of the Georgia war were so great that then-presidential candidate Barak Obama decided to position himself as hawkish on Russia, not differentiating himself from his opponent McCain. What to McCain was a winning strategy based on issues of national security and the notion of a threatening Russia, to Obama was a perceived political necessity and a device to focus public attention on the economy. Obama had to establish that he was as tough as McCain on Russia otherwise the latter would have made his alleged softness a campaign issue. Only by defusing Russia as a campaign issue in this way could Obama move on to his preferred topic of the economy. As a result, Obama’s statements on Russia and its war with Georgia were not significantly different from those of McCain in condemning a “resurgent” Russia and indicating strong support for Georgia’s NATO entry. Had it not been for the global economic crisis, the campaign dynamics might have remained unchanged and McCain might have become the US president, ready to confront Russia as a strategic threat. 

The Lobby’s Baleful Influence 

The Lobby has failed to bring Georgia into NATO or to convince the White House to provide fully fledged military assistance to Tbilisi for the purpose of “deterring” Russia. Nor did the Lobby succeed in wholly isolating Russia from the West. If anything, Moscow is now listened to more attentively than before the war in the Caucasus. After a few months of frozen ties, NATO has resumed its relations with Russia. Just as in 1855 British Russophobes led by the war secretary, Lord Palmerston, failed to convince their own government and allies to continue the Crimean War, so today the American Russophobes have failed to secure a US policy of confrontation with Russia. The United States is now eager to press the “reset button” in relations with Russia and engage the Kremlin in co-operation on Afghanistan, on the threat of nuclear proliferation, and on other critical issues. Although before the Georgia war, the United States worked to prop up Saakashvili’s regime and ignored Russia’s concerns, Washington is now signalling its willingness to re-engage Moscow.

 

Nevertheless, the Lobby’s Russophobic activities have done much to damage US–Russian relations. Besides feeding to the general public the highly distorted image of Russia as a power that is relentlessly autocratic, has no regard for civilian life, and is interested only in restoring its domination in the Caucasus, the anti-Russian groups have contributed to a hardening of official US policy on Russia. “Nuances”—such as Russia’s security interests and essentially defensive behaviour in the region—get lost in this picture, and the United States’ official position clearly reflects anti-Russian biases.

 

This relative success of the Lobby was possible because the White House—by the way it defined America’s interests in the world—was already predisposed to mistrust Russia’s intentions, and because the Lobby demonstrated considerable tactical skill in promoting its vision. That skill included the ability to reach out to important members of the US political establishment, to orchestrate public campaigns against Russia when it was especially vulnerable, and to represent the Caucasus as being part of a broader package of foreign-policy concerns that include energy security and the Iranian nuclear programme. The success of the Lobby also became possible because of the absence of strong opposition to its highly distorted depiction of Russia. Some commentators opposed the chorus of anti-Russian voices, but they were not nearly as organised as the Lobby and were unable to form the public perception of Russia or influence US policy on it.

 

The Lobby also succeeded in further alienating Russia from the United States; as a result, some of its prophecies about the Caucasus have become closer to being self-fulfilling. Moscow is now more determined to defend its interests in the region as it sees fit, without assistance from or consultation with the United States. Many Russian commentators with government ties express the conviction that Washington’s single objective in the Caucasus is to push Russia out of the region, and that the Kremlin must act alone by confronting US policies vis-à-vis Chechnya, Georgia and Azerbaijan—for example, by recognising separatist territories in the former Soviet states and strengthening Russia’s military presence there. Russia was prepared to go it alone over Georgia because its security interests in the Caucasus are the last thing the Kremlin is ready to give up.

 

Because Russophobia is partly the product of a global power struggle, rather than merely a cultural dislike of Russia’s political system, a stronger Russia will continue to provoke powerfully negative reactions from those advocating America’s global hegemony. Since the end of the Cold War, many within the US establishment have grown accustomed to meeting little resistance to their grand designs, and keeping Russia weak remains essential for extracting from Moscow important concessions on energy resources and political mastery in Eurasia.

 

US interests are best served by developing a better understanding of Russia’s interests in the complex and violence-prone region that is the Caucasus. Instead of single-mindedly expanding US and Western military power up to Russia’s borders or trying to derail Moscow’s policies, Washington would do well to develop a joint assessment with Russia of military and energy risks in the Caucasus. Rather than accusing Russia of causing problems, it is essential to find ways of working with the Kremlin to stabilise the strategically important region.

 

 

Endnotes

 

 

1. Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations in Geneva, “Press Statement and Answers of President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin to Journalists’ Questions following a Meeting of the Russia–NATO Council (Bucharest, April 4, 2008)” [http://www.geneva.mid.ru/press/e_2008_13.html].

 

2. “Poll Shows Russians See NATO Membership for Ukraine, Georgia as Threat”, Interfax (Moscow), 1 April 2008.

 

3. See David Foglesong and Gordon M. Hahn, “Ten Myths about Russia”, Problems of Post-Communism 49, no. 6 (November/December 2002), p. 10.

 

4. Zbigniew Brzezinski, “A Geostrategy for Eurasia”, Foreign Affairs 76, no 5 (September/October 1997), p. 50.

 

5. “NATO’s European Mission” (editorial), Washington Post, 8 March 2008.

 

6. Donald Rumsfeld, “NATO Expansion Should Continue”, Wall Street Journal, 28 March 2008.

 

7. Salome Asatiani, “Colored Revolutions: High Hopes and Broken Promises”, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 21 November 2007.

 

8. Viktor Volodin et al., “America Will Help Them” (in Russian), Vremya Novostei (Moscow), 19 March 2007.

 

9. Dan Eggen and Robert Barnes, “McCain Giving Utmost Attention to Georgia”, Washington Post, 15 August 2008.