Georgia still on our minds

I wish I didn’t have to look at the Georgia vs. Russia situation through the prism of domestic politics—or, even worse, culture war—but there has been a veritable stampede of apologists for Russia, which I find disturbing.

Jeff Weintraub agrees:

Thomas de Waal is probably right to offer the plague-on-both-their-houses judgment that “The immediate trigger of this conflict [was] both Moscow’s and Tbilisi’s cynical disregard for the well-being of these people” in South Ossetia. But given the way that the war has developed since then, the Presidents of Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were also quite right to declare in a joint statement that Russia’s attack on Georgia was the latest manifestation of an “imperialist and revisionist” policy aimed at restoring Russian hegemony over what the Russians call their “near abroad.” That is the heart of the matter, and discussions about whether Saakashvili is really a good guy or a bad guy, a wise leader or a foolish one, sufficiently or insufficiently democratic (compared to which other leaders in the region?), are really just distractions or evasions.

By itself, none of this tells us what would be the best policies for the US and Europe to follow in response to this crisis and its fallout. The immediate response of many so-called “realists”–spread from left to right across the political spectrum–has been that we should simply let Russia go ahead and re-establish its hegemony over neighboring post-Soviet states, since doing anything else would be more costly and dangerous than it’s worth. I disagree, but that’s at least an arguable position.

What I find more objectionable are hypocritical efforts to obscure this cynical (but hypothetically realistic and unsentimental) conclusion in clouds of pseudo-sophisticated and pseudo-moralizing rhetoric and sloganeering. The fact that this has been the knee-jerk reaction of too many alleged “progressives” has been depressing, though unfortunately not entirely surprising. Many of the same people who (correctly) condemn great-power bullying and aggression against small countries when the US does it, and who fulminate against “disproportionate” military responses when Israel supposedly undertakes them, jump to make excuses for both when Russia is the one doing it.

So many people still showering Russia with love.