Ivan Krastev: Footnote

Do you remember the White Queen from Alice in Wonderland teaching herself to believe six impossible things before breakfast? Think of that as the closest you’ll get to the logic of European and American policymakers today. At least that’s my impression after reading Ron Asmus’s new book, A Little War that Shook the World. The book offers a sharp, controversial, and powerfully argued analysis both of the events and decisions that led to the Russo-Georgian war, and of the way it ended. It has already provoke heated debates in Europe and the US, drawing both ardent supporters and angry critics.

Asmus argues that Georgia was trapped in a war it did not provoke (readers are entitled to disagree). He is convinced that in its nature the Russo-Georgia war was the Kremlin’s rebellion against the post–Cold War European security system that Moscow sees as tilted against its interests. As Asmus puts it, “Tbilisi became the whipping boy for Russian resentment against the US and NATO.” In explaining not the whys but the hows of the actual war, Asmus asserts that the West’s push for Kosovo’s independence without a plan for mitigating the possible fallout in Georgia and the destructively ambiguous message that came from NATO’s 2008 Bucharest Summit (Ukraine and Georgia were promised membership but they were denied a Membership Action Plan) almost predetermined the timing of the war.

You can agree or disagree with Asmus’s conclusions—my personal interpretation differs from his—but what is striking for any reader of Asmus’s thoroughly researched analysis of the West’s reasoning before and during the war is the extent to which NATO policymakers misread the intentions of both their allies and their opponents in the region. The West bet that Moscow would back Kosovo’s independence in the UN Security Council. The expectation was that the Kremlin was planning to trade its support for some other political goodies closer to its heart. This turned out to be a false expectation. Kosovo did not matter much geopolitically for the Russians, but it was of great symbolic importance for the Kremlin, so Moscow blocked the Kosovo independence at the UN. Western policymakers were sure that Russia had no interest in conflict in the Caucasus and that the Kremlin would never recognize the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, thus creating a precedent that could fuel Chechnya’s aspirations for independence. This judgment proved to be wrong too. By recognizing the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia the Kremlin was taking a risk, but the Russian leadership was ready to take any risk so long as they wouldn’t be seen as weak and irrelevant.

The extent to which Western policymakers misread their allies in the region was striking too. The political dynamics in the post-Soviet space cannot be reduced to a clash between democracy and authoritarianism, between pro-Western and pro-Russian forces. Calling Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili a model democrat is like calling the singer Madonna a model for the Holy Mother. The political processes in the region cannot be explained as a clash between the white knights of democracy and the dark forces of authoritarianism. State-building—not democracy-building—was the major objective in the first decades of post-Soviet transitions. The elites in these republics used all available resources—and performed unthinkable geopolitical zigzags—to survive as they consolidated their fragile states. They adopted Tito-style policies, trying to use the tensions between East and West to stabilize their countries. In this respect, the authoritarian Alexander Lukashenko is not very different from the democrat Yulia Tymoshenko. So, it should not come as a surprise that for Saakashvili regaining Georgia’s territorial integrity was the prime goal of his government, and that he was very selective in listening to Western advice.

So, why such a failure of judgment on the side of the NATO toward both Russia and Georgia?

There are three major factors explaining Brussels’ consistent misinterpretation of the intentions and the rationales of the main players in this crisis. The first has to do with the fact that Americans—and, to an even greater extent, Europeans—cannot make themselves believe that somebody can seriously consider their actions as a threat. They are so convinced of their own benevolence that any Russian claims of a security threat coming from the West are disregarded as a bluff.

The second factor is the universalization of the experience of 1990s, and particularly the universalization of the Eastern European experience. The wars in the Bulkans and the EU enlargement are the formative experiences for the current generation of Western decisionmakers, so unsurprisingly they tend to that “democratization” and “Europeanization” as the only two processes worth pursuing. As a result there are now a lot of experts on the “democratization of Georgia” who are not necessary experts on what is going on in Georgia.

The third reason is that the process of foreign policy decisionmaking in both the US and the EU creates the impression of pluralism and a diversity of views without actually delivering either. The fact that different national perspectives feed into constant consultations does not necessarily mean that what happens is not, in fact, a classic example of group think.

So, if there is one bit of advice that Western decisionmakers should heed, it is this: Get curious.