Not So Fast
George Bush, egged on by his own domestic politics, is attempting to recover his footing after Vladimir Putin pulled the rug out from under him.
Putin's surge into Georgia was intended to show Georgia and its western supporters who is in charge. It's the impulse with which O and G readers are familiar -- we won't be pushed around, and anything goes in terms of making that clear.
The assault has been a significant blow to American prestige and long-cultivated strategic interests. Most leaders in the 'Stans knew that all the American demonstrations of an ability and will to project its military might into Russia's back yard -- going back more than a decade, when the U.S. first parachuted men into Kyrgyzstan just to show that it could -- were basically theater. But Georgia's Mikheil Saakashvili appears not to have. Now he does.
The region's leaders now know that they must rethink how to accommodate Russia in their economic and political plans. The same goes for the major oil companies.
Ed Chow, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, told me that the companies must now reconsider the security of an oil route that until now seemed completely safe. And, whether they are operating in Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan or Turkmenistan, they have to think about whether they are prepared to expand their oil shipments through the East-West Corridor. If they do decided to proceed, as Chow says, they'll have to consider whether they have to accommodate Russia somehow.
As for Bush, he's attempting to show that the U.S. is still a force to reckon with in the region. Putin's response bears watching.
Putin's surge into Georgia was intended to show Georgia and its western supporters who is in charge. It's the impulse with which O and G readers are familiar -- we won't be pushed around, and anything goes in terms of making that clear.
The assault has been a significant blow to American prestige and long-cultivated strategic interests. Most leaders in the 'Stans knew that all the American demonstrations of an ability and will to project its military might into Russia's back yard -- going back more than a decade, when the U.S. first parachuted men into Kyrgyzstan just to show that it could -- were basically theater. But Georgia's Mikheil Saakashvili appears not to have. Now he does.
The region's leaders now know that they must rethink how to accommodate Russia in their economic and political plans. The same goes for the major oil companies.
Ed Chow, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, told me that the companies must now reconsider the security of an oil route that until now seemed completely safe. And, whether they are operating in Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan or Turkmenistan, they have to think about whether they are prepared to expand their oil shipments through the East-West Corridor. If they do decided to proceed, as Chow says, they'll have to consider whether they have to accommodate Russia somehow.
As for Bush, he's attempting to show that the U.S. is still a force to reckon with in the region. Putin's response bears watching.
2 Comments:
I think its makes clear that one of the great powers has to be fully accommodated (i.e. full military bases with standing units). But I don't (yet) see that Russia has made itself the default choice.
The RF government have demonstrated that pipelines through Georgia survive because the RF government allow them to.
As for US bases and standing military units,it remains to be seen where those would come from. It wasn't that long ago that US Treasury Secretary Paulson went to Moscow to ask Putin to invest the Russian sovereign wealth fund in the US.
The world changed then. It's not going back.
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