The other struggle Part Two - We gave them the knife...

First off, huge thanks to both my cousin Maria at CrookedTimber and Robert Farley at Lawyers Guns and Money for providing links. Just the other night a family member (not Maria) was rather acidly noting that pretty much all of my posts had 0 comments, so the traffic is much appreciated. I hope new visitors to the Parasite will stick around.

On to business. As Nathan Hodge has already pointed out in a great series of articles for Wired magazine, the Georgian army has undergone some pretty rapid changes under Saakashvili primarily under the direction of the US. Partially this has been part of a general preparation for Georgia to join NATO at some future point. It may also have been, as Hodge's article makes clear, part of an effort to give the Georgians the means to take back South Ossetia and Abkhazia by force, or threat thereof. Whether or not the US State Dept. actually approved this, as Doug Merill hypothesises, the Pentagon cannot have been unaware that the Georgian's weren't likely to refrain from using their new toys given the opportunity.

Obviously it didn't work out quite as they expected. And Russia has not been content to simply expel Georgian forces from South Ossetia - it is now expanding the war into Georgia proper and it would seem systematically destroying Georgia's military capabilities (as well as punishing her citizens for good measure.) The Abkhazians have also opened up the promised second front (albeit a small one) and are pushing the Georgians out the few areas they control there as well.

All this has a number of very serious implications for the broader relationship between Russia and the West.

1.) As in the good old days of the Cold War, this has also been a testing ground between Western doctrines and arms against their Russian counterparts, and to state the obvious, the former has come off very badly. True, the Russians came in greater numbers, but the lesson for a lot of the other post-Soviet republics is clear - fancy Western military aid and training doesn't mean you can stand up to the Bear, so it may be prudent to avoid antagonising the Bear by forming military (or any other) relationships with the West in the first place. So kiss goodbye to a lot of our influence in the post-Soviet space.

2.) The US-NATO long-term strategy of increasing strategic influence in the Caucasus is now probably dead. This has huge knock-on effects - the West has been trying to gain a strategic foothold in Russia's underbelly since the end of the Soviet Union. The long term goal has been a) to establish a military presence in a strategically sensitive area 'just in case' but more importantly b) to open up an alternative transit route for Central Asian oil and gas that bypasses both Russia and Iran (and to do this the Caucasus is really your only game in town.) If, as seems likely, Russia's war aims are now to completely destroy Georgian military capability, sever off Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and replace Saakasvhili with a more pliant satrap (and to be clear I think they're more than likely to accomplish all of these goals) then this strategy is dead as a door nail. After this demonstration of brute force, no-one in the Caucasus is going to risk an alliance with the US, and Georgia will be a dismembered and thoroughly cowed nation. I cannot over-emhpasise what a huge setback this is for Europe and the US and what a boon it is for Russia. Basically Gazprom has been greedy, and has not put the money it should have into developing new fields in Russia as it should have, so is in danger of running out gas to meet its existing contracts. Central Asian gas provides a great source of readily available energy for domestic consumption and re-export, and since Russia is now the only game in town they can buy gas from the Kazakhs and Turkmens at whatever price they please, and sell it to Europeans at whatever price they please. The US and Europe, through initiatives such as the BTC Pipeline had hoped to drain the Russian well in a sort of 'I drink your milkshake' strategy. Now it looks like we may have to BOGU (moreso.)

3.) To state the obvious, the Russian army has performed brilliantly and demonstrated it has successfully reformed itself into a competent fighting force. Previously I had been extremely sceptical of the Russian MOD's various claims to resurgent military power. While the officer corps has undoubtedly thrived under Putin, it was less certain that Russian forces had undertaken the kind of technological and doctrinal reforms necessary for a modern army. Equally I was very doubtful of the Russian Air-Force and Navy's respective abilitie to conduct major combat operations due to reported chronic shortages of fuel. Finally, I was sure that the Russian style of soldiering (i.e. mass conscription and the Dedovshchina instead of a professional all-volunteer force) was incapable of producing an effective fighting force. It seems I, and quite a few other people were wrong, or at least over-estimated the degree to which any of these factors mattered. To reiterate, the Russians won the 1999 Chechen war mainly through their willingness to employ absolutely brutal tactics (such as the deployment of fuel-air bombs) in a combat theatre where they could do so without much outside interference. In Georgia they've demonstrated they can wage a relatively 'clean' war too, and project power outside their borders (if on a limited scale.) This is to put it mildly, worrying.

All in all, we're entering a qualitatively new stage of East-West relations, and both sides know it. It is difficult to understate what a massive boon to Russian psychological confidence and prestige this operation has been, and what a blow its been to the West. To whit - Saakashvili's increasingly desperate please for some, any, kind of Western assistance have just demonstrate our own impotence. However much John McCain might want to Nato-ise the conflict it ain't gonna happen, because well, the bomb-shelter lobby just ain't what it used to be (and if Obama was smart he'd resurrect the 'In your heart, you know he might' line Johnson employed against another Arizona Senator who got a barely concealed hard-on at the prospect of perpetual warfare.)

But it does raise the question Что Дальше? What next? Might an increasingly unhinged Russian leadership decide to try something similar in Transnistria? Crimea? Or the night-mare scenario, Russian enclaves in the Baltics? Where do we draw the red-line, if anywhere? In the aftermath of the Irish failure to ratify the Lisbon treaty (Moore, Michael, Dad I'm looking in your direction) its doubtful that the EU can even pretend to have any sort of unified foreign policy anymore, and the US currently has its own problems. Much of International Relation, especially in terms of security policy depends on a healthy degree of ambiguity, and an unwillingness by both sides to see how far the other will go. Well the Russians just called our bluff, and as a result might not take any future warnings and admonitions so seriously.