The Realist Resurgence

Putin has been promising huge new infusions of cash to solve some of the military's problems, and on the financial front his government wisely built up an enormous reserve of some $600 billion in foreign currency over the past nine years. But those monies may be needed now to stave off economic disaster, not re-create the old war machine. Russia's fortunes are tied directly to the volatile price of oil and gas, which is headed down sharply as the world economy slows. Russian markets started hemorrhaging capital even before the confrontation in Georgia, then took massive hits when the shock waves from the global credit crisis started rolling over the country in September. The Moscow bourses had to stop trading several times in September. Last week they dropped 21 percent in a single day. Even before the current crisis, the scale of Russia's $1.3 trillion economy was roughly on a par with Mexico's and Brazil's, well behind China's (at $3.3 trillion) and the United States' (at $13.8 trillion).

The second salient point appreciated by today's realists is the role NATO and the European Union played transforming the old Eastern bloc into a collection of increasingly prosperous democratic states and, yes, steadfast allies who share U.S. values. In the 1990s NATO was at a loss to justify its original hard-power reason for being. If the Western Europeans' rationale for the alliance after World War II was "to keep the Americans in, the Russians out and the Germans down," the fall of the Berlin Wall put an end to that game. There weren't going to be any European wars of the kind NATO was created to fight so it would have to adapt to small conflicts elsewhere. The catchphrase in the halls of Brussels became "Out of area or out of business." And soon enough, those little wars were found: first Kosovo, which was a quick, relatively clean victory in 1999, then Afghanistan, a fight that has gone on for seven years and is getting uglier by the day.

The story of NATO's soft power was different. The collapse of the Soviet Union had left a vacuum in Central Europe, and NATO rushed to fill it, not with troops, but with ideas about good governance and democratic societies. To vulnerable new regimes, the alliance held out the tantalizing prospect of membership with guarantees of defense under Article 5 of the treaty. But that came at a price. According to Ronald Asmus, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for Europe, in the 1990s "the administration consciously used potential membership in NATO as a 'golden carrot' to encourage the countries of Central and Eastern Europe to consolidate political and economic reforms, resolve minority issues and border disputes and establish civilian controls of the military." The expansion of NATO was "values driven," not militarily driven, Asmus said. As the EU expanded its membership, too, the borders of "the West" were pushed east from the Elbe by 1,600km. Not a shot had been fired, not a brigade deployed. Soft power had triumphed.

But success brought its own complications. Analysts as distinguished—and as tough—as former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz now regret the lack of attention paid to the Russians' pride in the 1990s when the country was poor and its people often felt humiliated. "What they have sought, sometimes clumsily, is acceptance as equals in a new international system rather than as losers in cold war to which terms could be dictated," the elder statesmen wrote jointly in an op-ed piece earlier this month.

NATO tried to discourage its new partners from embarking on campaigns to build up conventional war-fighting capabilities that might look provocative to Moscow. War with Russia, no matter how weak the Kremlin had become, was not what Brussels wanted. In fact, the American administration was looking for NATO's new members to fill useful niches for its far-flung "war on terror," whether in Iraq or Afghanistan. But the aspirants inevitably saw their training in a different light. Ultimately, their grudges were against Russia.

Georgia became a case in point of this simmering animosity—and of Morgenthau's dictum to "Never allow a weak ally to make decisions for you." Though the little country in the Caucasus was not a NATO member, U.S. military trainers were teaching local troops basic tactics for counterinsurgency operations. In a stunning miscalculation, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, paying too much attention to talk of "common values" with the West, made the decision to attack South Ossetian rebel positions, which caused the Russians to move in to relieve their allies. NATO stepped back, not forward, which was the unpalatable but prudent thing to do. Moscow's military, whatever its shortcomings, then rolled over the Georgian troops like a lawn mower over an anthill.