Russia’s actions in the Caucuses found the West asleep and ill-prepared. It ought to precipitate an urgent reassessment of foreign and military thinking that was already looking dangerously complacent. Yet the calls by neo-Cons, from Dick Cheney to David Cameron, to respond by fast tracking Georgia’s membership of NATO, and thus to continue the existing strategy, reveal an alarming lack of reality.
For whatever the immediate catalyst for the fighting in South Ossetia, the truth is Putin has played his cards brilliantly. With the armed forces of the US and the rest of NATO seriously over-stretched by a combination of Iraq, Afghanistan and a myriad of peacekeeping missions, he could be supremely confident the West would not respond militarily. A relatively small demonstration of Russian force was sufficient to show the world – and more importantly former Soviet satellites – that Moscow was back. Emboldened by oil and gas wealth, a volley of warning shots have been fired, whether over the security of Russia’s smaller neighbours or of the security of the West’s non-Russian energy pipelines.
A response that criticises Russia for her attacks into Georgia’s sovereign state territory is both necessary and valid. Russian leaders are brutal bullies and the international community must condemn such disproportionate action. Yet these ex-KGB are also hard-headed and calculating. They know NATO is in no state to offer Georgia membership – and the defence guarantees that comes with membership – at least on current levels of military spending. Russia might be more impressed by macho talk from Dick Cheney and the Conservative Leader if it was accompanied by pledges to return defence expenditure to Cold War levels and introduce conscription. Yet the cold logic that led Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher also to propose major rearmament seems to have passed the neo-Conservatives by.
So how do we impress Putin and Medvedev, so that they are deterred from such aggression in the future? How do we reconstruct our defence and foreign policies so we regain the priceless weapon of credibility?
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