14.6.Meyer

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Karl E. Meyer served as editor of World Policy Journal from 2000 to 2008. He is the author of 12 books, the most recent, with Shareen Blair Brysac, Kingmakers: The Invention of the Modern Middle East (Norton, 2008).

It is too soon to say for sure who or what ig-nited the August clash between Russia andGeorgia, but already conspiracy scenariosabound, some as dark and convoluted as theinfamous gorges of the Caucasus. To PrimeMinister Vladimir Putin, the true culpritswere most probably the Americans who en-couraged Georgia’s unprovoked attack onbreakaway South Ossetia. As evidence,Putin cites the close ties between Senator

John McCain and Georgian PresidentMikheil Saakashvili, implying that the GOP

hopeful may have recklessly fanned the crisisto further his own election.

The Kremlin duly produced a militaryspokesman who claimed Russian troops inGeorgia discovered a U.S. passport belong-ing to one Michael Lee White, an army vet-eran from Texas, thereby proving Americancomplicity “together with Georgian com-mandos is a fact.” Well, not so fast. It devel-ops that White is an itinerant English-lan-guage teacher, most recently in China. Heinsists he has never been to Georgia, andthat his military service in 1992–97 consist-ed of driving oil trucks and fueling helicop-ters at air bases in Kentucky, Germany, andBosnia, where he momentarily worked withpeacekeepers.

For their part, Georgia’s defenders re-verse this sequence, affirming that the true

culprits are thuggish South Ossetian mili-tias, acting in collusion with Russia, whosemembers precipitated the conflict by firingon Georgian villagers and peacekeepers onAugust 6 in violation of a 1994 armisticeagreement. Already poised Russian troopsthen burst across the border beforeSaakashvili ordered Georgian troops intoSouth Ossetia (pop. 80,000) on August 7.Therefore (in this version) Moscow, not

Tbilisi, triggered hostilities two days beforethe conveniently distracting opening cere-monies for the Beijing Olympics.

So what should one make of it? Possiblyboth versions are partly true—that Georgia’smacho president mistook expressions of American solidarity for a serious commit-ment to intervene, and leaped at the bait byoverreacting—just as the Kremlin hoped hewould, when Russia’s so-called peacekeepersstood by as loutish local militias misbehavedwithin and beyond the borders of South Os-setia. More interesting by far was theworld’s stunned astonishment over a broadlypredictable, thoroughly old-fashioned reaf-firmation of big stick intervention, meant todemonstrate the renewed vigor of a long-hu-miliated, now-prospering great power domi-nated by an ice-blooded, fiercely ambitiousleader, i.e., someone very like VladimirPutin.

© W ld li i

After Georgia: Back to the Future

Karl E. Meyer

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Over the past quarter century, the pagesof World Policy Journal have chronicled ahost of colossal missteps and a modicum of successes by world leaders and charlatans,heroes and rogues of all stripes. In my eight

years at the helm, we watched as the Ameri-can military burst into Iraq in a misguidedadventure, yet at the same time maintainedpeace and a degree of order in the Balkans.We chronicled the horrors of 9/11 and thewar on terror, not to mention the corrosiveeffects of an impending global environmen-tal catastrophe. We watched as some majorpowers stumbled and others climbed up-ward, but through it all only the willfully

innocent could have been shocked at themyopia and reflexive hypocrisy so often dis-played by the world’s rulers—leavened,mercifully, by occasional bursts of decencyand candor. Georgia’s agony is a case inpoint.

Great Power Behavior 101From ancient times to the present, greatpowers have jealously sought to enforce

their regional supremacy and expel rivalsfrom their neighborhood. America’s MonroeDoctrine, proclaimed in 1823, conformed tothis practice by unilaterally decreeing thatthe Western Hemisphere was no longer sub-ject to further European colonization or in-terference. We tend to forget how robustlythe doctrine was enforced and expanded,and how popular it proved domestically. In1895, during a dispute over the frontiersbetween Venezuela and British Guiana,President Grover Cleveland demanded thatGreat Britain submit the issue to arbitra-tion—which it did, amid triumphant criesthat America was “practically sovereign” inthe entire hemisphere.

In 1920, Franklin Roosevelt boastedthat he wrote Haiti’s “pretty good” constitu-tion while serving as Woodrow Wilson’s as-sistant secretary of the Navy. Creditably, onbecoming president, FDR had second

thoughts about intervention and inaugurat-ed a long overdue “Good Neighbor” policy,which in turn was succeeded by a fresheruption of interventions under Johnson,Nixon, and Reagan.

While Americans justly condemnMoscow’s unilateral recognition of break-away provinces like South Ossetia andAbkhazia as sovereign entities, Washingtonhas used the same tool to further its per-ceived vital interests. On November 3,1903, a small revolt was mounted inPanama City just as, coincidentally, navalforces of the United States appeared off-shore. Within days, Washington formally

recognized Panama’s independence fromColombia, to which it had long belonged.Within a fortnight, a treaty materializedauthorizing the construction of a PanamaCanal, signed by Philippe Bunau-Varilla, alobbyist for a French canal company, whoovernight was accredited as Panama’s envoy.Today, this Panama caper is rarely men-tioned in American schoolbooks but stillwidely recalled in Latin America.

Russia’s Way in the Caucasu sLet it be clear that this soiled linen in noway mitigates, condones, or excuses Russia’sbrutal excesses in Georgia. It is heartbreak-ing to witness via cable news the agingGeorgian couples driven from their shat-tered homes by swaggering Russians glee-fully reasserting Moscow’s regional hegemo-ny. From their first conquests in the earlynineteenth century, the Russians have pur-sued a cynically divisive strategy for domi-nating the Caucasus, a craggy isthmus be-tween the Black and Caspian Seas, with nofewer than 43 peaks exceeding 14,000 feet.In these valleys emerged the two earliestChristian kingdoms, Georgia and Armenia,squeezed between Islam’s two quarrelingflocks, Sunni and Shia, amid what Arabslong ago called a “mountain of languages.”Early Western travelers reported that as

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many as 70 different languages could beheard in Tbilisi’s markets, employing fivedistinct alphabets: Cyrillic, Armenian,Georgian, Arabic, and Latin.

It was but a matter of time before tradi-

tional Russian concerns and strategies resur-faced after the Soviet Union dissolved. In itsearly post-Sovietyears, the Russianeconomy was in tur-moil, President BorisYeltsin was erraticand tipsy, and manyAmericans truly sawthemselves as masters

of a unipolar world.At the same time, un-der President BillClinton, the North Atlantic Treaty Organi-zation (NATO) expanded organically as East-ern European and Baltic republics joined thealliance. Moscow protested impotently in1998 when a U.S.-led NATO coalitionbombed and invaded Serbia, a traditionalRussian ally, opening the way for Kosovo’s

independence. America’s pro-democracy andfree-market hawks claimed vindicationwhen the Russian bear did nothing.

What Moscow viewed as affronts werecompounded when George W. Bush, havinggazed into Putin’s eyes, said he liked whathe saw. As we observed in the pages of World Policy Journal , Bush proceeded to 1)scuttle an anti-ballistic missile treaty his fa-ther had favored; 2) wave aside, without re-ally addressing, Russia’s objections to theU.S.-led preemptive invasion of Iraq; 3) en-courage and then recognize Kosovo’s inde-pendence despite Russia’s categorical oppo-sition; 4) embolden Georgia’s defiance of Moscow by training its armed forces and fa-voring its fast-track accession to NATO; and5) visit Tbilisi to take part in a rhapsodicrally, thereby demonstrating his personalsupport for a pro-Western, American-schooled Georgian president.

Many of us may have forgotten, butduring the 1980s, Leonid Brezhnev’s ges-tures of solidarity with Nicaragua’s leftistregime were less overt, but neverthelesscaused President Reagan to circumvent a

congressional ban and fuel a Contra rebel-lion, violate world law by mining

Nicaragua’s harbor, and authorize an illegalarms-for-hostage swap with Iran in order tochannel covert aid to the Contras. ImagineWashington’s response had Brezhnev him-self taken part in a rally in Managua to an-nounce that Nicaragua would be welcomedas a new member of the Warsaw Pact, and

then offered the equivalent of a billion dol-lars to stiffen Sandinista resolve.Given Washington’s embrace of

Saakashvili, at some point, there was boundto be a robust Russian counterstroke, bothas a message to other post-Soviet republics(notably Ukraine) and as a warning towhichever candidate prevails in America’sNovember election. Bolstered by rocketingoil prices, Western Europe’s dependence onRussian natural gas, America’s distractionsin Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, Putinresourcefully turned tables this year by step-ping down as president, hand-picking hisprotégé as his successor, then virtually nam-ing himself prime minister, his powers en-hanced by orchestrated applause in an au-thoritarian society. And now, after Georgia,the world has seemingly moved back tothe future under a constellation of rivalpowers—Russia, America, the European

The triumphal vision of a globedominated by a single superpowerhas faded, and our next president willhave to recruit, energize, and inspire

allies, rather than command.

”

“

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Union, China, and India—somewhat resem-bling the old five-power Concert of Europethat emerged after Napoleon’s defeat atWaterloo. The triumphal vision of a globedominated by a single superpower has fad-

ed, and our next president will have torecruit, energize, and inspire allies, ratherthan command.

The Inscrutable FutureWith hindsight, none of this should havebeen a surprise. Nonetheless, the world’s po-litical elite has been caught off guard, asusually happens when events take a radicalleft or right turn. Few mainstream experts

in America or Europe foresaw pivotal eventsof our own era—the prolonged and disas-trous Great War, the Bolshevik Revolution,the Great Depression, the rise of Hitler, theNazi-Soviet Pact, Hiroshima, the post-World War II baby boom, the triumph of Iran’s ayatollahs, the collapse of the SovietUnion, 9/11, and the challenge of radicalIslam.

It is chastening, for example, to look

afresh at Herman Kahn and Anthony J.Wiener’s futurist manifesto, The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (1967). There was nomore seemingly tough-minded realist thanKahn, reputedly a model for StanleyKubrick’s character, Dr. Strangelove. Bothfiguratively and literally, he loomed as anoutsize prophet. He was America’s most cel-ebrated nuclear strategist, the intellectualprogenitor of MAD (mutual assured destruc-tion) and author of Thinking the Unthinkableand On Nuclear War. In his effort to map theshape of things to come, Kahn was assistedby the brilliant, dedicated staff of the Hud-son Institute, which along with RAND wasthen America’s most influential strategicthink-tank.

Yet, if you search the subject index of The Year 2000 you will find no entries forthe following problems and places: oil, pe-

troleum, energy, pipelines, weather, climatechange, environment, Islam, Middle East,Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Syria, media, infor-mation technology, computer, torture, insur-gency, and terrorism—the key words one

hears nightly today in every primetimenewscast. Kahn was assisted by the U.S. in-telligence community, and with its help hecompiled a list of countries most likely toequal America’s then-current per capitagross national product (GNP). The first fourwere Sweden, Canada, West Germany, andEast Germany, which itself was expected tomatch U.S. per capita output within 17years. Instead, the German Democratic

Republic vanished entirely in 22 years.So why did Herman Kahn & Co. get somuch wrong? Why did he and his col-leagues assume the continued availability of cheap oil (or its ready substitution from oth-er energy sources), the permanence of Sovietpower, the ongoing pervasiveness of secular-ism in an irreversible global quest for mate-rial progress, American-style? I would ven-ture two reasons: neglect of Orwell’s Law

and the human stain.Of George Orwell’s many essays, myown candidate for compulsory rereading is“Second Thoughts on James Burnham,”written shortly after the end of World WarII. In it, he reviews Burnham’s influentialThe Managerial Revolution, which establishedthe Chicago-born academic’s global reputa-tion. Its argument is that capitalism wasdisappearing, but would not be replaced bysocialism. Instead, a new kind of societywould arise that was neither capitalist nordemocratic but a centralized state ruled by anew breed of business executive, technicians,bureaucrats, and soldiers, which Burnhamcollectively calls “managers.”

Orwell finds some merit in this analy-sis, which anticipated and influenced hisown dark vision in 1984. “But curiouslyenough,” he adds, “when one examines thepredictions which Burnham has based on his

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general theory, one finds that in so far asthey are verifiable, they have been falsified.”In successive years, Orwell points out, Burn-ham’s predictions change. In 1940, he tooka German victory for granted, dismissing

the British as decadent and concluding thatEurope’s integration under the Nazis was ir-reversible. He further predicted that Ger-many would not attack Russia until afterthe defeat of Britain, and that subsequentlythe Soviet Union was bound to be defeated.But by 1944, Burn-ham was writingthat Russia wouldgang up with Japan

against the UnitedStates, and indeedthat the SovietUnion—dismissedas a sure loser fouryears earlier—wasnow destined to control all Eurasia, a verita-ble recreation of the old Mongol empire.

Orwell observes: “It will be seen that ateach point Burnham is predicting a continu-

ation of the thing that is happening. Now thetendency to do this is not simply a badhabit, like inaccuracy or exaggeration,which one can correct by taking thought. Itis a major mental disease, and its roots liepartly in cowardice and partly in the wor-ship of power, which is not fully separablefrom cowardice.... Power worship blurs po-litical judgment because it leads, almost un-avoidably, to the belief that present trendswill continue. Whoever is winning at themoment will always seem invincible.”

Thus, in the 1970s and 1980s, when theSoviet Union seemed to stride uncheckedacross the globe, arming client states in theMiddle East, Africa, Central Asia, and theAmericas, Burnham envisioned the suicideof the West, with his despair echoed by aphalanx of American neoconservatives whopredicted the global victory of communism.Typically, in a 1980 manifesto, The Present

Danger: Do We Have the Will to Reverse the Decline of American Power?, Norman Pod-horetz likewise warned that American liber-als were infected by a “culture of appease-ment” that ensured the country’s eventual

subordination “to superior Soviet power.” (Itis worth mentioning that the late SenatorDaniel Patrick Moynihan, once an early allyof neoconservatives, concluded in the 1980sthat Russian power was grossly overrated,noting that the Soviet Union was the only

leading industrial state where the averagelife expectancy of its citizens steadilydeclined.)

When tables turned and the Soviet

Union disintegrated, the same commenta-tors, much in the Burnham tradition, nowglimpsed “an end of history” sealed by thepermanent victory of democracy and marketeconomics in a unipolar world yearning toemulate the American model. So it is per-haps no surprise that after the Russian as-sault on Georgia, which rattled and con-fused Western leaders who need to workwith counterparts in the Kremlin, even asthey fear and distrust them, some foresee anew Cold War pitting the Free Worldagainst a resurgent Russia.

My own conclusion, modestly ventured,is that what a new tenant in the WhiteHouse needs most to cultivate is a capacityfor empathy, which entails making an activeeffort to see ourselves and our institutions asothers see us and them. With reason, manythoughtful foreigners rankle at moralizinglectures by Americans, and our reluctance

What the new tenant in the White

House needs most is a capacity forempathy: to see ourselves and institu-tions as others see us and them.”“

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ever to acknowledge our own sins and blun-ders. I was struck by a passage in formerPresident George Herbert Walker Bush’sjust-published China Diary—a day-by-dayrecord of his service as head of the United

States Liaison Office in Beijing in 1974–75.In his role as interim envoy, he penned theselines in May 1975, “The American peopledo not have any concept of how othersaround the world view America. We thinkwe are good, honorable, decent, freedom-loving. Others are firmly convincedthat…we are embarked on policies that areanathema to them. We have a mammothpublic relations job to do on all this.”

Although Bush’s son, George, spent abrief few weeks visiting his parents in Bei-jing, his presence is barely noted in thesediaries. Not a line appears concerningGeorge W.’s thoughts and experiences dur-ing his days in China, one of the few foreigncountries he visited before assuming officeas America’s chief executive in 2001. His si-lence sadly prefigured a certain lack of cu-riosity that marked his tenure and be-

queathed so confusing and inconsistent alegacy to whichever candidate has to dealnext year with Putin and Saakashvili alike.

The Human StainA final personal reflection. Impersonal forcesassuredly define the limits and opportunitiesconfronting leaders bent on changing thecourse of history. But it is foolish to ignorethe role that human ambition, pride, andaggressiveness so often play in determiningwhich path events may follow. This wasdriven home to me in August 1968, when Iwas an American correspondent in London.The talk of the moment was the Czechoslo-

vak Communist Party leader AlexanderDubcek’s efforts to give socialism a humanface, despite Moscow’s glowering disap-proval. The Prague leaders were summonedto the Kremlin, Soviet forces conspicuously

staged Warsaw Pact maneuvers, and expertsin the West pondered Leonid Brezhnev’snext moves. The consensus among diplo-mats and my press colleagues was that a ne-gotiated settlement would resolve differ-ences, as had happened in Poland after thereform-minded party Wladyslaw Gomulkabecame party leader in 1956.

By chance, Joseph Alsop, the mosthawkish of mainstream columnists, was in

London, and we had lunch. So what did hethink? “Of course the Russians are going toinvade.” Really? On what evidence? “Justlook at the stony faces of the Russian gener-als meeting with their Czech counterparts:they want to eat them alive.” That sameday, I took part in a BBC World Serviceroundtable with other London-based corre-spondents. What did we all think? Im-pressed by Alsop’s vehemence, I was the sole

participant flatly to predict a Soviet inva-sion, which occurred the following week,briefly according me an undeserved reputa-tion as a prophet. (Having managed to ob-tain a visa from the Czechoslovak embassyin London, I was able to fly a few days laterto Prague, where I reported for five weeksfor the Washington Post , after my predecessorthere, Alfred Friendly, had been expelled.)

Whatever Alsop’s other shortcomings,he was a shrewd judge of faces. One canimagine what he might have said about theglacial eyes, rigid smile, and impeccablegrooming of Vladimir Putin.•

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