EURASIA INSIGHT
Regis Gente
2/02/10
A EurasiaNet Book Review
Print this article
Email this article
A Little War That Shook the World: Georgia, Russia, and the Future of the West
By Ronald D. Asmus
254pp
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (February 2010)
List Price: $27
Ronald D. Asmus was vacationing at a Black Sea resort town in Bulgaria the day war broke out between Russia and Georgia in August 2008. But in his newly released "A Little War That Shook the World: Georgia, Russia and the Future of the West" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) Asmus, a former United States deputy assistant secretary of state for European affairs, shows that he is no armchair analyst.
Relying heavily on first-hand information, Asmus contends that the five-day conflict "raised some big questions about the future of European [s]ecurity" that require a coordinated response from the United States and Europe.
Asmus, a longtime advocate for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s eastward expansion, argues that the war was a strike "against the West more generally," with the Saakashvili government in the role of "whipping boy for Russian complaints and resentments that had been building for years against the United States, NATO and those countries Moscow saw as giving encouragement to Georgia."
The conflict, he argues, "was Moscow’s way of saying" that the "rules" of the existing European security system "no longer apply." Hence, the current emphasis on "how European security was run and which institutions had the lead."
Moscow’s side of the story, though, is regrettably absent from the book. Russian officials refused to talk with Asmus, he writes.
Asmus, who served in President Bill Clinton’s administration from 1997 to 2000, urges Western policymakers to focus on two key decisions that, he claims, prompted the Kremlin’s military action: recognition of Kosovo as an independent state; and the campaign for a NATO Membership Action Plan for Georgia and Ukraine earlier in 2008.
Western diplomats failed to understand the extent to which Moscow interpreted recognition of Kosovo as a red flag for NATO’s eastern expansion, he contends. "We didn’t think about the side effects that it could have on the Caucasus," Asmus said in a January 25 interview with EurasiaNet in Paris. "We had talking points saying that Kosovo was not a precedent, but we had no policy."
Disunity among NATO members over the proposal to give Membership Action Plans to Georgia and Ukraine was similarly "a mistake," he said at a January 25 debate at Paris’ Centre for International Studies and Research with French presidential advisor Jean-David Levitte and philosopher André Glucksman.
That disunity signaled to Moscow "that there was a window of opportunity in which these [Georgian and Ukrainian NATO] candidacies could still be undercut and stopped," he writes.
But Asmus, who terms President Mikheil Saakashvili’s reforms "breathtaking," does not cast Tbilisi as the unwitting victim of Russian aggression - an image actively promoted by the Georgian government since the war’s conclusion.
"Georgia also made plenty of mistakes that led to the war," Asmus commented to EurasiaNet, adding that it’s "the role of a friend to tell this."
"Tbilisi’s handling of its relations with Russia, destined to be difficult, could have been better," he writes. Meanwhile, "lukewarm European support for Georgia was not just a function of appeasement, as Georgian officials sometimes suggested," Asmus told EurasiaNet. "It reflected real doubts about Tbilisi’s democratic reforms at home and the weaknesses of Georgian diplomacy."
But on August 7, 2008, the day war broke out, "Saakashvili didn’t have any choice probably," Asmus claimed to EurasiaNet. He characterizes the Georgian president’s decision to move on Tskhinvali as a "desperate response" to the perceived prospect of losing South Ossetia and Abkhazia, a Russian invasion of Tbilisi, an ethnic cleansing of Georgian residents of South Ossetia, and the demise of his own political future. "But he was warned many times before by his Western friends to do everything to not start a war," Asmus said.
The ex-diplomat, now the executive director of the German Marshall Fund’s Transatlantic Center in Brussels, sidesteps detailed recommendations for how Western policymakers should use the lessons learned to shape policy toward Russia.
Keeping NATO’s doors open to Georgia and other former Soviet republics should remain an option, but engagement with Russia should also take place, Asmus posits. "We must return to our own first principles . . . the right of all European nations to enjoy equal security," he said in the interview. Yet the "abandonment of liberal democratic values in the hope of accommodating authoritarian powers . . . is not a recipe for long-term stability."
With an eye to the future, Asmus hopes that the United States and Europe "can come together to again revive the Atlantic Alliance to meet the challenge of a new era." But how to move forward to meet that challenge remains a work in progress.
Editor's Note: Regis Gente is a freelance reporter based in Tbilisi.
Posted February 2, 2010 © Eurasianet
http://www.eurasianet.org
|
The Central Eurasia Project aims, through its website,
meetings, papers, and grants, to foster a more informed
debate about the social, political and economic
developments of the Caucasus and Central Asia.
It is a program of the Open Society
Institute-New York. The Open Society Institute-New
York is a private operating and grantmaking foundation
that promotes the development of open societies around
the world by supporting educational, social, and legal
reform, and by encouraging alternative
approaches to complex and controversial issues.
The views expressed in this publication do not necessarily
represent the position of the Open Society Institute and
are the sole responsibility of the author or
authors.
|
|
Get RSS Feed
