O'Sullivan nails it pretty good.
Even today, fighting might with might is often the only solution
By John O'Sullivan
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 23/08/2008
Seated in an open-air restaurant overlooking the River Kura, enjoying a light lunch of mountain trout and Georgian salad, it's hard to believe that Russian tanks are only about 15 miles away - indeed, that they may be even closer by the time the Turkish coffee arrives.
Tbilisi shows few signs of being a capital city at war. National flags hang from many buildings. Newspapers have emphatic anti-Russian headlines such as "Peacekeepers Go Home".
But there are no bomb shelters; no one looks up anxiously at the sky when a plane is heard; and refugees head into the capital from South Ossetia for help rather than away from it in panic.
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Still, the differences between this post-modern invasion and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia 40 years ago bear examination.
In 1968, Soviet tanks reached the centre of Prague. Today, Russian tanks seem to be going back and forth around major Georgian cities, but they will not head straight for Tbilisi without an additional Georgian provocation.
In 1968, Czech leaders of the Prague Spring were rounded up and deported, reappearing years later as gardeners and furnace-men. Today, Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia's president, addresses large anti-Russian allies in the capital and hosts visits from western leaders.
In 1968, the Soviets simply imposed the regime change they wanted; today, they are reduced to urging the Georgians to replace Saakashvili which, if anything, seems to strengthen him.
In 1968, the Soviet invasion was a "multinational" one, drawn from the entire USSR and Eastern Europe; today, most members of the CIS have either criticised Russia or remained silent.
Soviet Russia in 1968 had to make a fairly simple calculation. It had to weigh the preservation of its power over Eastern Europe against the value of political and economic détente with America.
It chose the former, calculating that the US would restore détente from a mixture of self-interest and moral weakness after an interval. And that is what happened.
Two weeks ago, the authoritarian Russia of Vladimir Putin had a much more complex problem to solve.
Its war aims were to "punish" Georgia for seeking to join Nato (and for being noisily pro-West); to warn other ex-colonies not to follow Georgia down the same path; to establish de facto control over all the energy pipelines; and to translate its new-style geo-economic power into old-style geo-political power.
A 1968-style seizure of Prague and "suiciding" of Saakashvili would have achieved these aims in short order.
But the Kremlin wanted these results without (a) damaging Russia's access to western markets and investment; (b) undermining good diplomatic relations with the West; (c) provoking Eastern and Western Europe into safeguarding their interests, and (d) infringing international norms too blatantly.
Hence, the Kremlin needed a pretext, a respectable public aim, and a satisfactory "narrative" for its nice little war.
Saakashvili provided the first by allowing the Georgian forces to respond to sniping and mortaring with a full-scale military assault.
The second was the defence of South Ossetia and its peacekeepers. And Russia's official media catered for the third by accusing the Georgians of "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing" while the fog of war was still thick on the battlefield.
If this narrative had stuck, Russia might have prevailed morally in diplomatic debate as well as militarily on the ground. But it was contradicted too plainly by the reality of a massive pre-planned Russian invasion. And as the media uncovered more and more of this reality, so the perverse effects of the Russian intervention began to appear:
Poland signed the deal to accept US missile defences; investors began to take their money out of Russia; western leaders turned up in Tbilisi pledging eventual entry into Nato; a Nato summit ended "business as usual" co-operation with Russia.
All these developments focus our attention not only directly on Russia as a resentful and nostalgic neo-imperialist power, but also on larger contending forces in global politics.
Two recent books - The New Cold War, by Edward Lucas, and The Return of History and the End of Dreams, by Robert Kagan - have argued persuasively that instead of an essentially peaceful world of co-operative democracies, we face a new struggle, both global and ideological, between the western democracies and self-confident and economically successful authoritarian states such as Russia and China.
At first glance, the Georgia crisis fits that description well - especially since many Georgians seek entry into Nato as a way of entrenching their own fledgling democracy as much as a protection against Russia. In fact, as the crisis revealed, the "western democracies" were not one camp but two.
Eastern Europe, the Baltic States, Ukraine, (Sweden, interestingly), and America wanted clear support for Georgia, its entry into Nato, condemnation of Russian aggression, and the threat of strong penalties if the Kremlin maintained its hard line. On the other hand, France, Germany, Benelux, and Italy wanted a softer policy in order to keep Russia engaged with the West.
That division overlaps heavily with another distinction stressed by Kagan in the past: those who see a need for sovereign states and military power (and so are Nato-minded) versus those who believe that "lawfare" has replaced warfare in a world of soft power, global rules, and supranational bodies (and so look to the EU as their main security provider.)
If this is so, then the world is really a three-way struggle between authoritarians, national democrats, and global legalists. But the odd thing is that when the crisis broke, those who rushed to defend the new international norms were not the global legalists but the national democrats - in particular, the leaders of Poland and the Baltic states who came to Tbilisi to show solidarity with the Georgians (as did David Cameron).
The global legalists were very quiet about Russia's breaking of the rules. The EU mission to Moscow led by Nicholas Sarkozy was bamboozled by the Russians into accepting a document with loopholes through which they drove tank battalions.
The EU argument that pooling sovereignty leads to greater real power proved to be a sham - it led in practice to collective impotence and self-deception.
Nato proved to be the international forum where real pressure was brought to bear on Russia, in part because it disposes of real military power, in part because it includes states, notably Poland, that are still conscious of their own sovereignty, hence respectful of other sovereign democracies.
This post-modern war proved the limits of military power in Russia's case, the limits of soft power in Europe's case, and the emptiness of global legalism without roots in democratic support.
