Pushing Russia’s Buttons

So none of what's happening this week should be much of a surprise: ever since Putin rose to the presidency in 2000, promising to crush Chechnya's separatist Muslims—a pledge he carried out with ruthless dispatch—he has sought first to halt further disintegration of the former Soviet superpower's sphere of influence, and then to reverse the process. His efforts to unseat Viktor Yushchenko in the Ukraine back in 2004, using political subterfuge (and possibly poison) rather than armed force, failed. He seems to be trying to do the same against Saakashvili—exploiting the Georgian leader's foolhardy move into South Ossetia—with more aggressive methods, gambling (perhaps rightly) that America is too weak and distracted to do anything about it and that Europe too fractious and dependent on his energy supplies. Putin also knows that this revanchist approach is perhaps the main source of his enormous popularity in Russia. As former CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin summed it up to me succinctly at the time of the Ukraine crisis: "Mikhail Gorbachev destroyed the Soviet Union. Boris Yeltsin destroyed communism. Putin is reinventing Russia."

Some Moscow experts have also suggested that Putin thought he had a tacit deal with his pal George W. Bush: we'll cooperate in the terror war and Iran; you leave our backyard alone. But if such an understanding existed (did Bush give Putin the kind of wink that FDR gave to Stalin at Yalta?), America didn't honor it. At the summit in Sochi in April, when Bush and Putin issued a strategic framework declaration, including steps to promote security, prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction, combat terrorism and advance economic cooperation, Bush still went ahead and championed the path to NATO for Georgia and Ukraine. And he ignored Russian fears about his missile-defense plans.

So, without forgiving Putin's aggression in Georgia this week, the question we should ask ourselves is: was the bid to bring Georgia into NATO a bridge too far for the West? By aggressively pushing into the former Soviet sphere almost without pause since the early '90s, did we provoke the Russians beyond the point of endurance? It's a question that must be asked, because despite the flurry of diplomatic moves in recent days it seems pretty clear that Bush and Co. can do little to force the Russians out of Georgia. The reverse humiliation the West may now suffer, and the dispiriting signals this is going to send throughout Eastern Europe, will have a profound impact if Russian troops continue their occupation.

© 2008