Posted on December 27, 2008 - by Venik

Uncomplicated Perspective

Long time, no posts. I resolved to not use a computer during my vacation. Quitting smoking was easier. Anyway, I just ran across an amusing editorial in NY Times about what Obama should do vis-à-vis Vladimir Putin. I am not sure if the author was trying to be entertaining, being coyly naive, or if he is ten.

America’s European allies have been in no mood to take their cue on Russia from Washington. A majority have resisted American efforts to quickly bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. The alliance, which cut formal ties with Russia after the Georgia-Russia war in August, has begun a “conditional and graduated re-engagement” with Moscow.

The US utterly misjudged both Ukrainian and Georgian presidents. The first turned out to be an ambitious, power-hungry and at times even ruthless but ultimately incompetent politician, who wasted his considerable political capital on a hopeless nationalistic agenda and kitchen fights with his Prime Minister. A week ago Yushchenko’s administration held an on-line Q&A session, where people could submit their questions to the president, who would then answer twenty of the most common questions. One of the top twenty questions was: how much do we have to pay you to leave? And Saakashvili… well, he turned out to be a nutcase and a drug addict.

By refusing to grant Ukraine and Georgia NATO membership, the EU essentially saved the Alliance. If Georgia was a NATO member when Saakashvili decided to start killing Russian peacekeepers, NATO still would not have intervened militarily and, instead of just looking foolish, the Alliance would have appeared in all its naked uselessness. And so NATO survived to annoy Kremlin for another sixty years precisely because someone in Brussels had sense not to take Rice’s guarantee of Saakashvili’s good character.

“America’s leverage over Russia’s behavior has been limited further by the widespread conviction among Russians that so long as they appeared to be weak, the United States took advantage of them.”

Regardless of what Garry Kasparov says, 145 million Russians can’t be all wrong at the same time. If this is what they believe happened in the nineties, then we should take their word for it.

“For every gesture, the United States would make clear that it expects a tangible response, starting with help in ending Iran’s nuclear program and continuing with cooperation against international terrorism and a withdrawal of Russian troops from Georgia.”

Here I actually agree with the author, but something tells me our definitions of “Iran’s nuclear program” and “Georgia” differ somewhat. Russia is Iran’s nuclear program. And as long as Department of State’s map of Georgia doesn’t match the one hanging over Putin’s desk, the US might as well let the Europeans do all this complicated diplomacy stuff with Russia. At least they are getting cheap gas out of it.

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