The New Nation - Internet Edition

Matein Khalid

The self-righteous swagger and reliance on brute force that so suffuses Putin's Russia has more than a passing resemblance to Dick Cheney's neocon hubris after the invasion of Iraq. The Kremlin, having humiliated Mikhail Saakas-hvili and smashed Georgia's armies has no time for the nuances of diplomacy or international law, just like Cheney and his neocon princes of darkness had only contempt for the United Nations as they rolled history's dice in Baghdad in the fateful spring of 2003.

It's a sad commentary on international relations that military prowess has become the ultimate currency of power in Washington and Moscow. But the realist school of international relations should have easily predicted Saakashvili's reckless gamble to rewrite the rules of the game in South Ossetia. Hafizullah Amin tried to accomplish something similar, by negotiating secretly with the Shah of Iran and the CIA station chief in Islamabad to disengage Afghanistan from the Soviet orbit in 1978. His double-dealing triggered the wrath of the Brezhnev Politburo, saw the Red Army invade Afghanistan and a Spetsnaz KGB death squad assassinate Amin in his Kabul fortress palace. As proven by Czechoslovakia in 1968, Hungary in 1956, Poland in 1940, the Russian bear has never failed to growl when faced with secession or treachery in its self-detained imperial orbit.

Vladimir Putin is a lineal heir to the Romanov generals and Soviet commissars who built an empire so vast it straddled nine time zones. After all, the same ex-KGB colonel who hails the secessionists of Abkhazia and Ossetia did not hesitate to bomb the Chechens, who tried to secede from the Russian Federation, into the Stone Age, an act of cynical mass slaughter that cemented his power base in the Kremlin.

The masters of Russia have always been the siloviki the hard man of power without illusion, who act within the spectrum of realpolitik. When Stalin was weak, he allied with Hitler to overrun Poland. When the Red Army fought back the Wehrmacht from the suburbs of Moscow and Leningrad to the ruins of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, Stalin did not hesitate to extend his imperial Iron Curtain across Eastern Europe. Law and morality played no part in his Darwinian world-view. "How many divisions has the Pope?" Stalin enquired after the Vatican condemned the Soviet-Nazi dismemberment of Poland. This was a sentiment that would echo decades later in the geopolitical calculus of Putin, Medvedev, Cheney and Bush.

It was reckless for the United States to arm so autocratic and impulsive a vassal as Sakashvili's Georgia, to promise Tblisi membership of Nato even as Moscow consistently hissed its outrage. Would the United States have allowed Mexico to join the Warsaw Pact during the height of the Cold War? It is a pity that US-Russian relations, so crucial to the preservation of international peace, have now fallen hostage to the rhetorical excesses of the US Presidential election. So McCain compares the Kremlin to Al Qaeda at the Republican convention, champions Georgian membership of Nato, resurrects the chilling language of Reagan's 'evil empire' in the 1980's. If President McCain supplies arms to Georgia, a rupture in Washington - Kremlin relations is inevitable. Thankfully, Barack Obama did not countenance the 'me too' hawkish rhetoric against the Kremlin at Denver. Obama probably grasped that fake bravado would expose the fault lines in the Democratic Party and the EU on the use of American military power abroad, let alone in the historic underbelly of the Russian empire. However, it is no coincidence that the Democrats have also felt compelled to buttress their national security credentials with tough guy interventions of their own - Kennedy's Bay of Pigs in Cuba, Johnson's Gulf of Tonkin, Carter's doomed Delta Force rescue in the Iranian desert, Clinton's bombings of Kosovo and cruise missiles attacks against Afghanistan, Sudan and Baathist Iraq.

Obama's temptation to be more royalist than the king in the debates, to out-hawk McCain, is eminently rational since the Republican nominee is a war hero who spent six years as a POW in a North Vietnamese jail, a former combat pilot who can appeals to the machismo of the frightened and insecure white working class. McCain has impeccable credentials to be commander in chief while America is at war while Obama has not. But if Obama succumbs to chauvinist Republican machismo, the fallout will poison US-Russia relations.

It is imperative that both McCain and Obama remember that President Sakashvili triggered the crisis when he ordered Georgian armies to invade the villages of the South Ossetian enclave. The Russian obligingly led him into a fatal trap and virtually wiped out his US supplied tanks, artillery, radar, missile batteries and armoured vehicles. After all, Medvedev's recognition of South Ossetia and Cheney's trip to Tiblisi only demonstrates that both Moscow and Washington have now decided to escalate their schiom. Inflammatory language, so instinctive to both Putin and Cheney, can be a lethal culdesac in international power politics. To paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt, the Bush White House should speak softly since it does not possess a big stick to deter Russia.

It is ironic that the Israelis, not the Americans, have grasped the new realities of international relations created by Saakashvili's Ossetian gamble. While Mossad had earned millions of dollars selling aerial drones, radar jamming equipment and anti-tank missiles to the Georgians, Israel fears the wrath of Russia in the Middle East. Israel has publicly reassured the Kremlin that Mossad will no longer supply high tech arms to Tblisi.

The Israelis acted in the spirit of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who refused to declare war against Nazi Germany when Hitler's armies entered Prague that went on to become Czechoslovakia, 'a small country of which we know nothing'. But Sarajevo was also a small place of which we knew nothing, in August 1914 no less than in August 1991.