Ukraine results not so bad

There's been a certain amount of handwringing over the fact that Viktor Yanukovych, generally considered the most pro-Russian of the candidates, won election as president Of Ukraine. It's hard for me to get worked up. There was certainly excitement surrounding the 2004 Orange Revolution when Yanukovych was prevented from stealing the election. But Viktor Yuschenko, who was elected then, proved to be something of a dud, and the Ukrainians dismissed him in the first round of voting.

It is also the case that Russia has traditionally been concerned with what it calls its "near abroad," whether it has sought to incorporate neighboring states into the empire (as the Soviets and to some extent the czars did), and it's not hard to understand. As this Register editorial explains, Napoleon and Hitler both invaded Russia through the flat plains of Poland and the Baltic countries, which offer no geographical barriers to invasion. Extending NATO after the Soviet Union collapsed was a huge mistake in that it made the Russians more paranoid than usual without accomplishing anything useful. NATO should have been disassembled instead. With Ukraine apparentoy in the Russian camp now -- or at least unlikely to cause Russia grief -- Russia might even be a bit less bellicose.

Russian-Ukrainian gas dispute has geopolitical aspect

I guess there's a tentative agreement between Ukraine (with implications for Central and Western Europe) over gas pricing and flow to Western Europe, involving international monitors. So the crisis (if it really deserves that moniker) may be over -- for now. I think most people understand there are geopolitical aspects to the dispute that may well trump the economic aspects (though with the world financial crisis having hit energy prices and Russia's economy pretty hard the economic aspect is not trivial). As this Register editorial explains, Russia's desire to remind Ukraine of its energy dependence is tied to deep-rooted Russian fears about invasion, tied to the knowledge that its borders are not well protected by topography, and what it sees, as in the Bush administration push to admit Ukraine to NATO (which most European countries now oppose, in no small part because of a similar gas cut-off three years ago), as U.S. messing about in what has traditionally been known as the "near abroad," which Russia considers vital to its security. If the push for Ukrainian NATO membership continues, expect more of what might be considered as Russian nastiness toward Ukraine.

I wrote about the gas cut-off back in 2006, for Antiwar.com, explaining the geopolitical aspects in more detail than I want to do in a blog post. Here's a link.

Venezuelan bluster

Russian and Venezuelan naval ships participated in j0oint exercises beginning yesterday, raising concerns about an incipient anti-American alliance. Is a new cold war imminent and is Venezuela this decade's version of Cuba as a Russian ally in the hemisphere. This Register editorial downplays the potential danger. The action is meant to tweak Uncle Sam's nose, to be sure, but both Russia and Venezuela are states with economies reliant to an unhealthy extent on petroleum products, and the global decrease in oil prices has made both of them weaker. Sure, Russia has showed that if the U.S. can play in its back yard( Georgia), Russia can play in ours (the Caribbean). Geopolitically, however, it doesn't mean all that much . . . yet . . . unless the U.S. keeps trying to pretend it's a unipolar world as its own economic underpinning weakens.

Obama's plate

When Joe Biden said that Barack Obama would likely be confronted with some sort of international crisis within months of assuming office it was widely treated as a gaffe, but it more closely resembled the usual statement the political class regards as a gaffe: an inadvertent piece of truth most people in the ruling class would rather didn't get out. Of course Obama would be challeneged. McCain would have been too.

Few expected, however, that reminders of the messiness of the world outside our borders would come so quickly, long before he even took office, with Russia announcing it would plant some missiles near Poland if the U.S. went ahead with putting anti-missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic, Afghan puppet Hamid Karzai trying to break his strings by protesting about the U.S. bombing weddings (the nerve!) and North Korea releasing photos purporting to show that Kim Jong-Il is really alive and well. Heaven knows what will be in the cards when he actually takes office.

OK, those aren't really major crises, and they're not Obama's to deal with yet. But one dubts that the timing was strictly coincidental. Here's the Register's editorial today on some of the things we already knew the new president would have to face: two wars, a financial crisis, a Democratic Congress eager to tax and regulate, and other aftermaths of the years of a dysfunctional administration. He may have little choice but to have a modest agenda and govern "from the center," whatever that means.

Silver lining to the financial crisis?

Here's a link to my most recent piece for Antiwar.com. It argues that if there is a bright side to the world financial crisis, it is the falling price of oil, which means that several countries that have amassed petrodollars and used them to make mischief in the world at large -- notably Iran, Russia and Venezuela -- will have less money available and thus less capacity to create problems for others.

The Register ran an editorial today that made a similar argument. Coincidence? I think not. I'm afraid my former colleague John Seiler misunderstood the import of the editorial and attacked it in his own blog. We ran the editorial in part to undercut the idea that the United States needs to be actively interventionist overseas to counter these countries, because the threats are petering out of their own accord -- not only because of the falling price of oil but because that falling price exposes some inherent weaknesses in the economies of those countries. I agree with almost everything John wrote, in fact, except for the part where he said the Register had become economic nationalists, for heaven's sake. John and I will remain friends, of course.

Georgia on our . . . tab

President Bush has vowed to send $1 billion in disaster-relief and economic aid to the small country of Georgia, showing once again his tendency to conduct foreign policy by emotion and puffing up his chest (with our money; the deficits are apparently not big enough), even when it is painfully apparent that there is really not much at all that he can do to protect Georgia if Russia is truly determined to dominate it, as it has for most of the time since about 1800. Here's the Register's editorial arguing that it's not our fight, that a smart country picks fights it has a chance of winning instead of money pits. Probably the best we can hope for is is that Russia will be content to neutralize Georgia (that's why it destroyed or immobilized so much of its military equipment). The best way to get there is through quiet diplomacy, not courting confrontation.

Bluffing on a bad hand

Here's the Register's editorial on the current Georgian crisis. Essentially, the U.S> and Western Europe got outsmarted by Russia, which is feeling its oats now that the high price of oil has pumped so much money into the state sector. It was utterly predictable -- anybody with even a sense of Russia history knew it and many predicted it -- that Russia would want to control the countries in what has been called the "near abroad" since czarist times. Simple geography: its frontier is flat plains and subject to invasion (Napoleon, Hitler) so it wants its neighbors friendly or vassals. Russia interpreted NATO expansion as a threat, so it took Georgia down a couple of pegs when Bush tried to push Georgia into NATO. Putin did it at a time when the U.S. could do nothing -- nothing -- effective to stop him. If the U.S. had wanted to do something (not that who rules South Ossetia is one of our core interests, by a long shot) it should have been through quiet behind-the-scenes diplomacy rather than blister, preaching and self-righteousness that the whole world knows we can't back up.

In the process I had a nice talk with my old friend Tom Henriksen at the Hoover Institution. He's got a new book out, "American Power After the Berlin Wall," the first comprehensive history of how the U.S. has used its power, that I think is intended as a college text and is definitely worth reading.

Lust for the Cold War

It appears, though reports as of this moment suggest the possibility of continuing fighting, that a cease-fire will end the Russian-Georgian conflict, at least for now. The Russians even say they agree to French president Sarkozy's proposal of returning to the troop positions before the conflict, with Medvedev saying it's enough to have punished Georgia and more or less decimated its military. But I doubt if we've seen the last of repercussions.

Perhaps the most striking thing about this conflict is the extent to which it has unleashed nostalgia for the Cold War, with Russia as the easily identified, easily demonized enemy again. From the Wall Street Journal to the Heritage Foundation to AEI to Bob Kagan writing in the WaPo. the calls to "do something" about the evil Russians' aggressions against a valued democratic ally issued plaintively.

Trouble is, as this Register editorial outlines briefly, it isn't all that clear who the bad guys or aggressors were here. Just as Georgia sees Russia as the neighborhood bully, the smaller separatist provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia see Georgia as the neighborhood bully, and for reasons rooted in history and ethnicity among other factors they prefer (at least significant majorities do) to be more closely associated with Russia, perhaps even to be part of Russia.

The timing was surprising, but the conflict wasn't. Russia felt (and was) dissed when it was weak and chaotic in the 1990s, but now that it's waxing fat on oil money and has a canny autocrat at the helm, it's worrying about the "near abroad," as Russian regimes have for hundreds of years. It's not necessarily necessary, but Russia has always wanted only neighbors who are friendly or vassals on its border, and the prospect of a state longing to be in NATO, with Saakashvili talking constantly about eventually "retaking" the two provinces that have been de facto independent and allied to Russia (which made all residents Russian citizens was predictably too much for Russians eager to flex their geopolitical muscles a bit to bear. However it started, the Russians were better prepared (probably have war-gamed it a hundred ways).

However, who rules South Ossetia is hardly a core U.S. interest, so there was no sensible reason for the U.S. to intervene -- and besides it had no way to do so. All the blustering without any concrete way to punish Russia only made Bush and McCain (and to some extent Obama) look silly and exposed how helpless a giant the overstretched imperial power is. And to have the invader of Iraq moralizing about invading sovereign countries? I suspect Bush is so self-righteous he didn't even notice a contradiction.

Russian hockey players going home

This is one of those signs-of-the-times stories that demonstrates how globalization and the growth of economies that are not traditionally considered "advanced" is opening opportunities for people that simply weren't available even a few years ago. Russians who have come to America to play in the National Hockey League are starting to return to Russia to help build professional leagues there. Some of them are past their best playing days and even they aren't making the kind of money they could make in the States. But they can still make the kind of money that puts them in the economic elite back home, and they're at home, which is something of a comfort level.

To be sure, the availability of enough money to attract people who have pulled down American money in professional sports has more to do with the high price of oil than with sensible economic policies, but for whatever the reason, the money is there. It's too bad all that oil wealth is bolstering Putin (though there doesn't seem to be much demand for real democracy in Russia) and there's the constant danger in a single-resource economy (though Russia isn't quite that) that it will bolster authoritarianism, as it has in almost every oil-rich country.

Putin goes for the gusto

Is anybody surprised that Vladimir Putin is suggesting that maybe he'll become prime minister when his term runs out (he can't run for president again). The man is hardly anything other than a born authoritarian, but he would probably win in a reasonably fair election (though his minions will make sure it doesn't give serious opposition a chance if there's any question) and he thinks he's destined to return Russia to its rightful status as a Great Power. Speculation has been rife that whoever he designates as his successor will be his puppet anyway.