James Traub has written a magnificent survey of the events leading up to the current war in Georgia, and the personal contest between Mikheil Saakashvili and Putin.
Of particular interest to me was this paragraph:
What is striking, though, is the growing consensus about Russian behavior. The United Nations, the European Union and NATO have all sided with Georgia in the disputes over Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Mr. Saakashvili was deeply disappointed when NATO declined in early April to put Georgia and Ukraine on the path to membership, but he says that the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, explained to him that while the Germans “don’t want to be pushed” on NATO, they might offer their support later this year. Almost as satisfying to Mr. Saakashvili was his discovery that Ms. Merkel “gets it” about Russia — “because she knows Russia from her own experience.”
(New York Times)
This is not only true of Georgia. With each effort Russia makes to strengthen her foothold and reassert her perceived traditional authority, it seems a little more sand slips away underneath the heel in international trust and esteem. There is perhaps a coming global recognition or collective diplomatic awareness, that the Russians are to be mistrusted and opposed in spirit on things of import, unless proven otherwise.
In that respect it’s extremely striking that both Robert Kagan and Michael McFaul –who serve as foreign policy advisers for John McCain and Barack Obama respectively– have essentially identical (and identically hostile) views of the new Russia.
People of all political persuasion now seem to get it about Russia. In “The Return of History and The End of Dreams,” Robert Kagan, the neoconservative foreign policy expert who is advising John McCain, writes of Mr. Putin and his coterie: “Their grand ambition is to undo the post-cold war settlement and to re-establish Russia as a dominant power in Eurasia.” Michael McFaul, a Russia expert at Stanford who is advising Barack Obama, also views Russia as a premodern, sphere-of-influence power. He attributes Russia’s hostility to further NATO expansion less to geostrategic calculations than to what he says is Mr. Putin’s cold war mentality. The essential Russian calculus, he says, is, “Anything we can do to weaken the U.S. is good for Russia.”
(New York Times)