The Free Thinker

The Wages of Appeasement

"India's China Obsession":

On June 21, two Chinese military helicopters swooped low over Demchok, a tiny Indian hamlet high in the Hima-layas along the northwestern border with China. The helicopters dropped canned food over a barren expanse and then returned to bases in China. India's military scrambled helicopters to the scene but did not seem unduly alarmed. This sort of Cold War cat-and-mouse game has played out on the 4,057-kilometer India-China border for decades. But the incident fed a media frenzy about "the Chinese dragon." Beginning in August, stories about new Chinese incursions into India have dominated the 24-hour TV news networks and the newspaper headlines.

China claims some 90,000 square kilometers of Indian territory. And most of those claims are tangled up with Tibet. Large swaths of India's northern mountains were once part of Tibet. Other stretches belonged to semi-independent kingdoms that paid fealty to Lhasa. Because Beijing now claims Tibet as part of China, it has by extension sought to claim parts of India that it sees as historically Tibetan, a claim that has become increasingly flammable in recent months.

Ever since the anti-Chinese unrest in Tibet last year, progress toward settling the border dispute has stalled, and the situation has taken a dangerous turn. The emergence of videos showing Tibetans beating up Han Chinese shopkeepers in Lhasa and other Tibetan cities created immense domestic pressure on Beijing to crack down. The Communist Party leadership worries that agitation by Tibetans will only encourage unrest by the country's other ethnic minorities, such as Uighurs in Xinjiang or ethnic Mongolians in Inner Mongolia, threatening China's integrity as a nation. Susan Shirk, a former Clinton-administration official and expert on China, says that "in the past, Taiwan was the 'core issue of sovereignty,' as they call it, and Tibet was not very salient to the public." Now, says Shirk, Tibet is considered a "core issue of national sovereignty" on par with Taiwan.

When Russia got away with naked aggression in the Caucasus, it showed bad guys everywhere what's possible. If this catastrophe happens, the West will be to blame for, as McCain put it in the last great statement of American purpose we're likely to hear for years, his brilliant Republican National Convention speech, "turning a blind eye to aggression."  Meanwhile, Russia's delusional insolence is accelerating:

"Let Medvedev Share Nobel with Obama":

It is a pity that President Dmitry Medvedev will not share the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize with U.S. President Barack Obama. In my view, he deserves it no less than Obama, whose principal accomplishments are still in the future.

Together with Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Medvedev is responsible for changing the tone and direction of international politics to craft a better world.

Not unlike Obama, Medvedev inherited a foreign policy plate that was driving his country into isolationism and debilitating self-pity.

In fits and starts in less than two years, he has managed to transform Russia’s international role from that of an estranged spoiler to that of a constructive problem-solver with a stake in a functional world order. Medvedev has gradually steered Russia away from the unilateralist initiatives taken by his predecessor.

He shares Obama’s penchant for multilateral diplomacy and has worked to make international institutions — from the United Nations to the nascent Group of 20 — stronger and more efficient.  His more pragmatic position on Iran is likely to make global efforts to stop Tehran’s secretive nuclear program more effective.

Medvedev commanded a successful war that was forced upon him. Like Obama in Afghanistan, he did not go wobbly in Georgia and proved his resolve to defend Russia’s interests and citizens. Medvedev’s toughest foreign policy decision has been to unilaterally recognize Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Despite broad international criticism, Medvedev’s perseverance on this issue casts him as a world leader with a strong set of values. He does not crave popularity, just respect for his country.

I think it's true that Russians crave respect. That's why rolling back Russia could be so cheap: merely to send a loud signal that the world despised the cowardly, lying, thieving thugs and bullies of the Putin-Medvedev regime-- merely to, for example, announce a boycott of the 2014 Olympics-- while stating a justifiable high regard for the country's historic cultural and scientific achievements which contemporary Russia's aggression is sadly eclipsing, just might do the trick. But that would require a degree of geostrategic insight not seen since... well, the Bush administration.

Georgia = Russia's Reichstag Fire?

There are some women who keep falling for jerks who abuse them.  They just can't settle for the kind of nice guys their friends recommend.  That's the relationship of the Russian people to their rulers, as this Moscow Times article-- "Medvedev's Toughest Presidential Test"-- reminds us:

It was bound to happen at some point -- President Dmitry Medvedev would have to face the difficult test of responding to a serious crisis. It came last week, when Georgia attacked South Ossetia with a barrage of Grad truck-fired missiles...

Now, the big test for Medvedev has become Georgia. From the outset, Medvedev had no choice but to send armed forces into the region.

Since his inauguration in May, Medvedev has demonstrated a soft leadership style, but Russians don't care much for that kind of president. Medvedev is the total opposite of Putin, whose abrupt and forceful manner impresses voters. That is the style they associate with "getting Russia up off its knees" and returning the country to its superpower status.

Once military operations began in South Ossetia, Russians -- having been fed a continual diet of patriotic propaganda -- expected decisive action by the Kremlin to "protect Russian citizens" in South Ossetia.

But at the most critical moment, when it just became widely known to the public that Georgia invaded South Ossetia, the first to make a statement regarding the conflict was not the commander-in-chief but the prime minister. It was Putin who labeled it an act of aggression while still at the Beijing Games, and it was Putin who discussed developments in a series of meetings with world leaders. Medvedev, meanwhile, seemed a bit confused, and he was clearly uncomfortable ruling the country solo during such a heated crisis...

It is clear, however, that Medvedev now finds himself in a very difficult situation. He has no choice but to maintain a touch stance against Georgia because any other reaction would be poorly received by domestic public opinion -- especially since official propaganda has portrayed Georgia's unjustified aggression against civilians as being supported by the West, primarily the United States. The people remember all too well how Putin behaved in a similar situation, when the second Chechen war began in 1999. They expect the same from Medvedev; otherwise, people would begin to call into question his ability to run the country and accuse him being spineless...

How will Medvedev emerge from this military conflict? If he handles it poorly, it could mean the beginning of the end of his presidency. And that would mean that Putin's return to the Kremlin is all but guaranteed.

According to the Russian constitution, Medvedev should have a four-year term as president, up to 2012.  Putin is subject to term limits and is, as far as I know, not allowed to serve as president again.  A Putin takeover, even if it enjoyed strong popular support, would be the end of the democratic constitution Russia adopted in the 1990s.  Would Putin stage another-- seemingly un-constitutional-- "election" or would there be some kind of "referendum?"

So far, even in their invasion of Georgia, the Russians have been mimicking Western forms of legitimation, e.g., holding elections, and now justifying the invasion of Georgia as "peacekeeping" and drawing analogies with Kosovo and Iraq.  It's not clear what Western precedents Russia could draw on as pretexts for "Putin's return to the Kremlin."  At least, not since the Reichstag fire.

UPDATE: Whatever the truth of the matter, if Putin comes to power after this, the narrative that may emerge in the West about the Georgian war, whatever the truth of the matter (and I think it may be at least partly true) is that Putin set up the crisis as a pretext for staging a coup in the Kremlin, and used Medvedev's relative dovishness as a pretext to sack him.  If so, that would give all the more impetus to isolate Russia diplomatically and to build up NATO.

It's also worth noting that Putin's initial rise to power came in the wake of some terrorist attacks on some apartments in Moscow that killed hundreds of people, widely attributed, but without proof, to Chechens.  These triggered the Second Chechen War which united the nation behind Putin and paved the way for his presidency.  There have been speculations, based on circumstantial evidence, that Putin may have staged those bombings as a pretext for getting into a war that would shore up his popularity (he was then, as now, prime minister, typically a transient position) and allow him to step into the presidency as Yeltsin's successor.  It would be a diabolical ploy.  I didn't believe it, and I still don't.  But my subjective probability that Putin and the FSB secretly carried out those bombings is higher than it was two weeks ago.