Georgia On My Mind

On the tenth anniversary of the brief but significant war, I want to commend Michael Kofman’s retrospective on the Russo-Georgian War of 2008 at War on the Rocks to your attention. Here’s a snippet:

As Thomas de Waal explains, “Many people are busy rewriting the history of 2008 in light of Ukraine.” The story that Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili was simply reckless in ordering an attack on South Ossetia, and the Russian peacekeeper contingent isn’t true, but he certainly miscalculated and bears considerable blame for the conflict. Neither is the prevailing simplistic narrative that “Russia invaded Georgia” as though Georgia, and its political leadership, were an empty outline on a map with no role to play in starting this war. The conversation is demonstrative of a line from George Orwell’s 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” It’s important to recapture that history from the trenches of the current political debate, because the Russo-Georgian War holds lessons for future potential conflicts with Russia, and enduring ones for the U.S. practice of statecraft in foreign policy.

My account of the war would be very close to Mr. Kofman’s: the Georgians, egged on by the United States, provoked Russia into war.

While we fulminate over Russian malice, we might take a little time to consider whether Russia has foreign policy interests of its own and whether admitting Georgia to NATO would actually have promoted U. S. security.

1 comment… add one
  • bob sykes Link

    The admission of either Ukraine or Georgia to NATO would end their independence. There are plenty of ethnic Russians in each country that would gladly staff puppet governments.

    Estonia and Latvia also have large Russian minorities that would be able to govern those countries.

    Go look at the map of Europe in the summer of 1914. There are no Baltic countries, no Poland, no independent Belarus or Ukraine or Caucasus or Armenia… Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia share borders. Austria-Hungary rules much of the Balkans, especially along the Adriatic Sea.

    No borders are permanent, especially our border with Mexico.

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