After Georgia, A Day of Reckoning For Washington

Russia says it will start withdrawing its troops from Georgia tomorrow. If that truly happens -- and there are contrary signs -- a new, probably far more important stage of the Georgian crisis will begin. That's the assessment of the affair by the arc of countries -- from Europe, swinging south and east to the edge of western China -- that are directly affected by what Russia does.

How these countries perceive the U.S. response to the war in Georgia will determine whether Russia has effectively crippled a hard-fought, 15-year-old American effort to inject itself as a power in Russia's backyard.

So far, much ink has been spilled over whether the U.S. and Russia are in a new Cold War. In Washington, we hear that the era of a post-Soviet U.S.-Russia alliance is over. The Kremlin counters that the West is intent on provoking it, and thwarting its natural rights as a great power.

The truth is that Moscow's presumptions are essentially correct -- the U.S. has conducted a definitively anti-Moscow policy on Russia's western and southern rims, one dressed up as reformist- and energy-minded, but nonetheless centrally designed to contain Russia within its borders.

But this policy well-suits American security aims, and those of the West as a whole. Conceived in the Clinton administration, it foresaw this very day, when then-forlorn Russia would regain its feet and possibly threaten the independence of its traditional colonial backyard.

One thing to keep in mind is that Russian disgruntlement with Georgia didn't originate with NATO expansion, Kosovo independence, Russia's resurgent petro-power, or Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili's alleged jokes about Vladimir Putin's height.

Russia's first military attack on Georgia was not ten days ago but in 1993, when Moscow backed Abkhazia in its military separation from Georgia. In the subsequent years, then-Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze was twice nearly assassinated, attacks that, in interviews with me and others, he blamed on Russia and his insistence on Georgia becoming the strategic transit route for the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline.

In other words, there's strong reason to believe that nothing Saakashvili did, short of capitulation to Russian domination of Georgia, would have satisfied Moscow. Friends tell me that Shevardnadze finally found an accommodation with Russia. If so, it was an accommodation that included the threat of assassination if he went too far.

Georgia wasn't the rationale behind American policy. But the Caspian Sea policy, conceived, as O and G readers know, by a today-forgotten National Security Council officer named Sheila Heslin, did attempt to get Russia accustomed to living within its own borders, and not threatening its neighbors.

The policy was dual. It involved a continuation of the expansion of NATO initiated by President George H.W. Bush, in order to prevent a future, resurgent Russia from gobbling up pieces of the former Soviet bloc in eastern and central Europe. And, on the Caspian, to the south of Russia, the U.S. promoted the construction of energy pipelines to link the Caucasus and Central Asia to the West, and provide them the financial wherewithal to withstand any Russian economic pressure. As a transit point for three of the new pipelines, otherwise-isolated Georgia, situated right on Russia's border, became a U.S. strategic partner.

After 9/11, the Bush administration -- carrying the policy further -- established military bases in Central Asia for the assault on Afghanistan, and then left them in place after the Taliban were dispersed.

The policy made sense considering U.S. interests. The West had a stake in making sure that Russia did not again become a threatening power; by encouraging Russia not to expand back into its former Soviet lands, it might express its nationhood in other ways, such as in business. (For those who see all policy as oil-generated, remember that there was no oil shortage in the 1990s; oil was much-discussed, but it was an instrument of policy -- how to give the Caucasus and Central Asia some breathing room from Russia -- rather than the rationale for it.)

Many of the eight presidents of the region embraced the U.S. agenda. At once, there was a lever against centuries-old Russian dominance.

But ten days ago, Russia put that declaration to the test. With its assault on Georgia, it seemed to expose the U.S. policy as a superpower vanity.

And it seemed true that Washington was caught off-guard. It seemed either to have forgotten the rationale behind its Caspian Sea policy, or, more probable, to have staked its policy on the hope that by now Russia had changed, and would not rotely use its military in the face of a perceived challenge.

Whichever the case, Russia's invasion of Georgia threatens the very real gains of these 15 years. If Russia is seen to have come out ahead, the U.S. may retain its influence in Europe, where Moscow could even suffer a backlash -- Europe could decide after all to build new pipelines to diversify away from Russian natural gas. But America's carefully built role as a great power in Russia's south would be in jeopardy.

The Central Asian and Caucasus leaders are watching.

I myself wonder now whether it matters if Russia in fact does withdraw all the way into Abkhazia and South Ossetia (which I doubt. I think Russia will maintain at least some troops outside the territories. It seems improbable that Russia will entirely give up the ground it gained within Georgia proper.).

Russia has demonstrated that it can and might cross borders of its former Soviet colonies when it sees fit. In Russia's view, these are not international borders; they are Georgia, they are Kazakhstan, they are Azerbaijan -- not real independent states, but former Russian territories.

Ultimately, Azerbaijan's Ilham Aliyev, Kazakhstan's Nursultan Nazarbayev and Turkmenistan's Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov -- the stewards of the region's great energy wealth -- understand the language of power.

They understood when a parade of American officials visited and argued that it was wise to cultivate a relationship with the most powerful nation on Earth.

The trouble is that, these days, it's not clear any longer that the U.S. is very powerful in its declared zones of strategic interest.