The Limits of Diplomacy

This posting on Russia/Kosovo/Georgia prompted a pointed comment from reader Will:

Fascinating philosophy question: if X responds badly to your action and cites your action as a reason for that bad behaviour, how far are you responsible for what X does?

Seems to me that the answer depends on what you think of X - what you think X actually is.

Three scenarios:

Mineral:   you can take the long road round the base of the mountain, or attempt a short-cut across a steep slope covered in loose stones. You know that the stones may slip and cause damage to houses in the valley. You go for the short-cut. The stones slide and cause such damage.

You suspect that your footsteps prompted the mini-landslide. If they did, the stones simply made a Newtonian response to some or other physical force you exerted. They had no choice but to slide. You had no real options to calibrate the stones' response to your steps, other than not to attempt the slope at all.

Vegetable:   you decide not to weed the whole of the garden. Nasty weeds/brambles grow strongly in the most neglected areas, less strongly in the places where you keep nature at bay.

Here the response of the weeds/brambles is 'inanimate, but dynamic. Your actions do calibrate to a generally predictable extent what happens in which part of the garden. Your 'responsibility' is more subtle.

Animal:    you live in a nature reserve where some fierce bears roam. How far to avoid the bears? When you can not avoid them, act kindly towards them or beat them back?

You start to feed one bear in a kindly but wary fashion. One day he eats one of your pets. You whack him with a stick. He responds angrily by eating a neighbour's infant. Did you cause that tragedy to happen, not just by hitting the bear but by deluding yourself that a friendly relationship with the creature was possible and altering its consciousness..? 

* * * * *

All this is a convoluted way of pointing to the contradictions in much of the analysis about Russia and whether/why Western actions are 'provocative' to Moscow.

Do we treat Russia's 'fear of encirclement', 'insecurities' and 'anxieties' as, so to speak, inanimate facts of life over which we (and they) have no control other than to top-toe widely round them?

Or are they simple genetically coded facts of life which do respond in a predictable but insensate way to what we do?

Or are they animate/sensate facts of life, where we need keener judgement to get the response we want?  

Or are they human, even reasonable fears?

What if they are human but basically unreasonable paranoid fears?

The gushing Western punditry on Russia contains confusing contradictory elements of all these ideas.

Some people appear to suggest that Russia for reasons of obvious history/geography/Tsars/Communism/vodka has no choice but to behave the way it does. Safest is to adopt a Finlandish stance to avoid risking trouble.

Others argue that Russia of course does have choices, hence all the more reason to behave in a subtle respectful way: keep that bear calm and happy, even if he eats some of your rabbits now and again.

And then there are those who say that Russia of course makes its own decisions, but we have to strive to set a robust context in which they know that bad decisions have bad consequences for them. Eventually they will come to see that they have no more reason to fear 'encirclement' by democratic NATO states than eg Switzerland does.

To answer Will's question.  

I expected Russia to play tough in the CIS if key Western countries went ahead and recognised Kosovo as independent without having secured first a reasonable global consensus and in the face of explicit Russian objections.

NB this was separate from my view on whether and when Kosovo 'should' be independent, or whether Serbia 'deserved' to keep Kosovo.

The vital point was and is that the Kosovo independence issue is partly about Kosovo, but also about a bigger vision of global order. Acts of state recognition are at the very heart of diplomacy - it is a high risk strategy to mishandle them when a UN Security Council member is closely engaged and has Views.

I expected a tough Russian response not so much because Russia cares tuppence about Serbia or Kosovo - rather because Russia does care a lot about some other issues, whose handling turns on a sort of informal shifting balance of power as between differing accepted principles. This balance is not easily defined or articulated at any one moment, but top politicians and diplomats are paid to sense it and manage it. 

To conclude. It may look worthwhile to take a calculated risk. You know that your move can lead to a bad outcome, because you know that someone prone to lashing out may well lash out in response.

You move, and the lashing-out occurs.

You are not in any moral causation sense 'responsible' for that lashing-out when it occurs. Yet you can not complain much when people say you miscalculated somewhere. And you end up having to deal with the damage.

Some actions may be well motivated. Perhaps even Right.

But not, all things considered, Wise. 

The Oxford Webware maestros are helping me liven things up a bit round here.

 So (within the frugal limits of my ability to recall how to do it) there could be easier YouTube links and more pictures now and again.

Some people ask me, "Did you really have a Mini in your living room on the first floor in Warsaw?".

Indeed. This is how it got there:

And this is what it looked like driving in:

And the launch itself, just as the curtain hiding the car was pulled back to general amazement and wild acclaim:

Made a change from the usual diplomatic cocktail party.

The Times has two noteworthy pieces on Georgia and its ramifications today.

Bronwen Maddox weighs in on the EU's defiant chihuahua-like stance:

... even though the EU should rightly settle for the lowest common denominator on such important questions of its own identity, the proposals were weak beyond parody. “The Union will remain vigilant,” a version of the text said yesterday, adding that the review “may lead to decisions on the continuation of discussions on the future of relations between the Union and Russia in various areas”.

Yap!

Sir Christopher Meyer (formerly HM Ambassador in both Bonn and Washington) throws in some provocative if not eccentric observations, arguing that the best way forward for Europe is to go back to 'spheres of influence' of the sort agreed at the Congress of Vienna in 1815.

Christopher (as befits a distinguished former FCO Press Secretary) has some excellent lines:

The supreme fallacy in foreign policy is to take the world as we would wish it to be and not as it actually is. In Britain's case, the delusion is compounded when we are powerless to effect the outcome we desire. This has been particularly the case with Russia, where we have managed to be both impotent and provocative.

If we really want to put a halt to bad Russian behaviour, let us do so where we can make a difference, and where it is justified - starting with the expulsion of the vast nest of Russian intelligence officers in London, as Labour and Conservative governments did not hesitate to do in the 1970s...

...The Russia that we are dealing with today, with its fear of encirclement, its suspicion of foreigners and natural appetite for autocracy, is as old as the hills, long pre-dating communism. It is a Russia that will never be reassured by the West's protestations of pacific intent as it pushes Nato and the EU ever eastwards.

Most important of all, Russia and the West need to draw up rules of the road for the 21st century. Mr Miliband and others have condemned the notion of returning to the geopolitics of the Congress of Vienna which, in 1815 after the Napoleonic Wars, divided Europe into spheres of influence between empires and nations. They perhaps forget that what was agreed at Vienna held at bay for almost a century a general European war.

Something similar is needed today, based again on spheres of influence. Nato must renounce the provocative folly of being open to Georgian or, worse, Ukrainian membership. This strikes at the heart of the Russian national interest and offers no enhanced security to either Tbilisi or Kiev. As for Russia, it must be made unambiguously clear where any revanchist lunge westwards would provoke a military response by Nato.

Oh dear.

Next year is the 70th anniversary of the most recent attempt to divide Europe into 'spheres of influence', ie the Molotov/Ribbentrop Pact. That did not work out so well.

More generally, why do intelligent Western commentators emit as if on autopilot the cliché about Russia's 'fear of encirclement'?

Goddamit, Russia sprawls across 11 time zones. Its 17m square kilometres  'encircle' much of the planet.

A country that size has a lot of neighbours, many of whom have good reason to be uneasy about the weight of Russia bearing down on them. Why oh why do the alleged anxieties of Russia mesmerise us more than those of everyone else, especially when history shows Russians dumping mercilessly on smaller nationalities and not the other way round?  

Keep an eye too on absolute economic weight.

Thus EU and USA GDPs combined amount to some 70 million million US dollars (nominal).

Russia with all its oil wealth has a puny 1.3 million million or so of GDP, notably less than Spain.

Scary, huh?

The problem with the Meyerish analysis is that 'Russia's national interest' (as assiduously choreographed by generations of Communists and now Putinist Communists-Lite) defines itself as including a right to subjugate/humiliate/oppress anyone in the neighbourhood.

So, with whom do we side?

The bully swaggering round a big corner of the global schoolyard? Or the little kids he duffs up on his rounds?

Does that bully really deserve his own 'sphere of influence' which he himself chooses?

The EU appears to find that question All Too Difficult.

Here is a foreign policy classic moment:

"We have to find a balance. The balance is between tough talk and economic consequences. My stance is yes to tough talk. No to economic consequences," said Alexander Stubb, Finland's foreign minister.

The point, of course, is that tough talk backed by no consequences (economic or otherwise) is not in fact tough.

It is merely a passing silly noise.

Full of sound, but no fury. And signifying nothing much.

I have opined about the Rules purporting to lay down what diplomats can and can't say once they leave the FCO. See eg here.

Now my former colleage Sir Edward Clay has reiterated his concerns about the FCO Rules:

The rule requires former diplomats to consult about any proposed public comment - written, broadcast, in press articles, books, school debates - reflecting their career experience. This is not about official secrets. It is an attempt to convert a career-long professional duty of personal discretion into submission to censorship until death...

The worrying thing is not only regulation 5 but its vague scope and application. My part-time job was withdrawn hours after I commented on Radio 4's Today programme and in the Guardian about the government's suppression of the SFO's inquiries into BAE's dealings in Saudi Arabia damaging the credibility of its policies on good governance and corruption. This action reinforced my point.

... The FCO must rethink regulation 5 again, this time with more respect for freedom and for informed discussion of foreign policy. It should also publish its regulations: officials have a right to know which of the limitations on their liberty that they accept on joining the FCO will endure when they leave; citizens should also know by what decrees they are denied access to the views of former public servants.

Of course officials already do have the right to know these 'limitations on their liberty'. And is there really an issue about such Rules being published for the edification of the public?

Strive as I do to be indignant about all this, I fail.

Here I am, more recently retired than Edward Clay, blogging and writing away, often in a way highly critical of HMG positions. Yet I clear nothing with the FCO in advance, nor have they made any attempt to shut me up.

So in practice the impact of the Rules is not necessarily 'draconian', although I am not revealing/analysing operational decisions by Ministers on a highly controversial topic such as the decision to invade Iraq.

This is where Sir J Greenstock's book on Iraq has been left in the fridge. See his own characteristically gracious and sensible views in this lively exchange.

And whereas I suspect almost every serious serving diplomat accepts reasonable limitations on how far sensitive information gleaned during a career is published afterwards (and when), any such limitations are bound to be 'vague' to some degree.

The problem at the heart of all this is twofold:

• weak Ministers in a weak government annoyed at some disloyal former civil servants' memoirs, but themselves pouring fuel on the flames by employing their creepy armies of SpAds who hope to cash in when they leave office by throwing around internal gossip
• a serious incongruity between (a) any norms laying down post-career guidelines for publication, and (b) the fact that huge amounts of stuff can be prised from the system anyway via wily Freedom of Information Act applications.

In short, not a sinister attempt to censor until death. Rather the normal muddle of a democratic society.

Welcome Instapundit readers.

David Miliband puts forward the best available case for why the Kosovo precedent has no bearing on the Georgia case:

Some argue that Russia has done nothing not previously done by Nato in Kosovo in 1999. But this comparison does not bear serious examination.

Leave to one side that Russia spends a lot of time arguing in the UN and elsewhere against "interference" in internal affairs, whether in Zimbabwe or Burma. Nato's actions in Kosovo followed dramatic and systematic abuse of human rights, culminating in ethnic cleansing on a scale not seen in Europe since the second world war. Nato acted over Kosovo only after intensive negotiations in the UN security council and determined efforts at peace talks. Special envoys were sent to warn Milosevic in person of the consequences of his actions. None of this can be said for Russia's use of force in Georgia.

The decision to recognise Kosovo's independence came only after Russia made clear it would veto the deal proposed by the UN secretary general's special envoy, former Finnish President Ahtisaari. Even then we agreed to a further four months of negotiations by an EU-US-Russia troika in order to ensure that no stone was left unturned in the search for a mutually acceptable compromise.

It is easy enough to draw clear factual and policy distinctions between Georgia and Kosovo. Comparing them is stupid!

And yet some not obviously stupid people do compare them:

President Dmitry Medvedev has declared that Russia formally recognises the independence of the breakaway Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Mr Medvedev told the BBC Russia had tried to preserve Georgian unity for 17 years, but that the situation had changed after this month's violence ... Moscow now felt obliged to recognise South Ossetia and Abkhazia as other countries had done with Kosovo.

The Point is this.

It is trite to identify similarities and differences between the Kosovo and Georgia precedents. Rummage around in these issues and you'll find what you're looking for.

The actual 'Kosovo precedent' is not about the merits of the specific case(s). It is about the unwisdom of launching a lunge at Kosovo recognition in the face of serious objections within the EU and round the planet.

Kosovo's failure to establish itself quickly and uncontroversially as an independent state recognised round the world is remarkable. Kosovo declared its independence in February this year. Since then a mere 46 UN member states have recognised it. The absence from that list of all the big hitters in the Muslim world (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Syria) not to mention India and China is especially striking.

After the initial flurry only four more countries have signed up since May. It is hard to think of a comparable example of a significant body of states recognising a new member of the international fold, but a much greater number not doing so.

This shows up a Deep Issue. The countries of the world are a disparate, squabbling lot, but they do take one (for them) existential issue supremely seriously. When is a country a country? Who joins the Countries Club, and on what terms?

The diplomatic practice in past decades has been based on the operational wisdom of establishing a wide consensus before admitting new members to the Club. And of ensuring that UNSC permanent members are at one - see eg Taiwan.

The Miliband article glosses over the problems which he knew were bound to be caused by proceeding with Kosovo recognition in the face of a strong Russian objection and evident Chinese/Indian unhappiness.

See eg this:

But the US and UK as fellow UNSC members did not respect Russia's objections when pressing ahead with Kosovo recognition, even though Russia had made it unambiguously clear that pursuing such recognition would have 'implications' for eg Georgia.

In short, Washington and London were struck by (and yielded to) the intensity of tiny Albanian nationalism, but underestimated the intensity of far mightier Russian nationalism. I warned London myself about this risk several times as HM Ambassador in Poland. To no avail.

In all the weary meanderings under New Labour about the UK's foreign policy objectives/targets/priorities and (now) Policy Goals, is not this a comprehensive - and unforgivable - blunder of basic professional technique?

How will the mass of states round the world react now?

Most will be privately aghast at Russia's banal power-play to dismember Georgia.

Some may think that this is a reason to move to recognise Kosovo but not Abkhazia and S Ossetia, as a gesture of protest against crass Russian land-grabbing beyond its borders.

But I suspect that the great majority will keep avert their eyes from this shambles, torn unhappily between deriving private satisfaction from the unedifying disagreements between UNSC members on this core international law issue - and fervently hoping that violent separatist urges in their own respective parts of the world are not given new impulses.

Gordon Brown: the changing global order cannot be governed by institutions designed in the middle of the last century. We now know how much more we have to do to create an effective system of international rules. We must strengthen the system of global governance to meet the challenges of our interdependent world.

This windy rhetoric makes no sense. We all have invested in the UN system for decades, precisely to do this.

But let's be honest. Our own clumsy Balkans policy based on scissors and paste improvisation at the UN has messed things up.

Analysis/comment on Georgia/Russia gushes out. EU leaders meet tomorrow.

Hence we have the latest UK positions as described by Foreign Secretary David Miliband and (today) Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

These senior British statements are both alas inelegantly drafted. Who is preparing these texts for our leaders - and are they themselves reading them before signing them off?

Take the Prime Minister's opening paragraph:

Twenty years ago, as the Berlin Wall fell, people assumed the end of hostility between East and West, and a new world order founded on common values. As part of this, 10 Eastern European states joined Nato and intensified co-operation with Europe and more wanted to follow. But Russia's hostile action towards Georgia suggests that they are unreconciled to this new reality.

Huh? Who is the 'they' in that last sentence:

Or David Miliband's weird opening words:

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has seemed that new rules were being established for the conduct of international relations in central and eastern Europe and central Asia. The watchwords were independence and interdependence; sovereignty and mutual responsibility; cooperation and common interests. They are good words that need to be defended.

Don't they teach grammar in the FCO ("it has seemed that new rules were being established...")? Why do 'good words' need defending? A fun new lexicographic role for NATO here?

These infelicities aside, what exactly do we think that the UK plus its allies and partners should do about Georgia and the wider questions the Russian intervention raises? According to these statements the menu is something like this:

• consider meeting more frequently as G7 (ie put the G8 grouping including Russia into deep freeze - a good idea as far as it goes)
• help Georgia with humanitarian assistance (the UK's two million pounds package looks a bit feeble here?)
• deploy peace monitors to better judge violations of the ceasefire, appoint a senior figure to drive the humanitarian and political effort, and support the Nato Georgia Commission, with a Nato team sent to Georgia (modest 'do something' bits and bobs)
• demand the withdrawal of Russian troops to their August 7 positions (notable absence of any insistence that Russia reverse its recognition of S Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states: maybe wise, as Russia won't do it? But how does the 'West' plan to deal with these territories now?)
• review relations with Russia 'root and branch' (these meetings will be fascinating officials, but with a view to achieving what?)
• press European leaders to increase funding for a project to allow us to source energy from the Caspian Sea, reducing our dependence on Russia (do we really think that this is going to work?)
• Miliband: "re-balance the energy relationship with Russia. Europe needs to invest in storing gas to deal with interruptions. More interconnections between countries and properly functioning internal markets will increase resilience. It needs diverse, secure and resilient gas supplies" (fine in theory, but no serious impact likely for many years to come)
• Brown: "add urgency to the work on Europe's energy agenda. We must more rapidly build relationships with other producers of oil and gas. Our response must include a redoubling of our efforts to complete a single market in gas and electricity, a collective defence to secure our energy supplies" (ditto)
• support Ukraine's EU membership aspirations (good - but will the EU do it?)
• Brown: We now know how much more we have to do to create an effective system of international rules. We must strengthen the system of global governance to meet the challenges of our interdependent world. We must reshape our global architecture to meet the new challenges: climate change, energy security, poverty, migration. (This incantation is getting  wearisome. There are international rules aplenty at the moment - the problem comes when they are broken)

And so on.

If I were in the Kremlin I would not be too bothered by such rumblings.

And I'd keep printing the Russian passports.

Russia has responded ingeniously to the argument that its forces should leave Georgia - by redefining Georgia!

Having announced that Russia recognises the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states, Moscow now can say that its troops on the ground in these territories are no longer in Georgia. Howzat?

As and when needed it also has the option of proclaiming some sort of a new 'union' of these territories with Russia, so that any attack on them is an attack on Russia itself.   

Sorted?

Recognising the 'independence' of Abkhazia and South Ossetia needs international support. And Moscow is off to a strong start, with Hizbollah, Syria and Belarus looking to be on side.

This manoeuvre gives Russia a veneer of international law legitimacy at least one molecule thick. But that, combined with Facts on the Ground, might be enough for the Kremlin's immediate purposes:

"Hey, Kosovo has not been recognised by anything close to a majority of states round the world. Nor have S Ossetia and Abkhazia. What's the difference?"

Meanwhile is Russia playing chess while the Americans are playing Monopoly? Thus:

The board game Monopoly is won by placing as many hotels as possible on squares of the playing board. Substitute military bases, and you have the sum of American strategic thinking.

America's idea of winning a strategic game is to accumulate the most chips on the board: bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, a pipeline in Georgia, a "moderate Muslim" government with a big North Atlantic Treaty Organization base in Kosovo, missile installations in Poland and the Czech Republic, and so forth. But this is not a strategy; it is only a game score.

However:

Russia is fighting for its survival, against a catastrophic decline in population and the likelihood of a Muslim majority by mid-century. The Russian Federation's scarcest resource is people. It cannot ignore the 22 million Russians stranded outside its borders after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, nor, for that matter, small but loyal ethnicities such as the Ossetians. Strategic encirclement, in Russian eyes, prefigures the ethnic disintegration of Russia, which was a political and cultural entity, not an ethnic state, from its first origins.  

... like a good chess player, Putin has the end-game in mind as he fights for control of the board in the early stages of the game. Demographics stand at the center of Putin's calculation, and Russians are the principal interest that the Russian Federation has in its so-called near abroad. The desire of a few hundred thousand Abkhazians and South Ossetians to remain in the Russian Federation rather than Georgia may seem trivial, but Moscow is setting a precedent that will apply to tens of millions of prospective citizens of the Federation - most controversially in Ukraine.

What if this is at least plausible? That Russia wants to redefine the post-Cold war settlement by scooping within its borders most Russians left adrift when the Soviet Union collapsed?

There are two ways to achieve this.

• Crank up separatist plebiscites in Kazakhstan and Ukraine where the largest Russian communities live, then push through partition. Absorb Belarus one Sunday afternoon. Brutal - but potentially decisive.
• Or try to force Kazakhstan and Ukraine into some sort of more explicit formal union with Russia so that all their respective dealings with the USA/EU are conducted on Russian terms - no more creeping Westernisation or 'Europeanisation'. Less brutal, less decisive.

Maybe even Putin's Moscow does not have the nerve for the unheavals which entering such unfathomable complications would create.

So instead for now it can keep the game in a state of dynamic imbalance. Grab a couple of pawns from Georgia and leave the threat that this is part of a wider ruthless strategy hanging menacingly over the board?

Foreign Policy.

On a Grand Scale.

Foreign Secretary David Miliband spells out the UK position on Georgia:

The Georgian crisis is about more than vital issues of humanitarian need and rule of law over rule of force. It raises a fundamental issue of whether, and if so how, Russia can play a full and legitimate part in a rules-based international political system, exercising its rights but respecting those of others...

... Russian mind games on withdrawal do them no credit...

... International law must be obeyed. This goes to the heart of the question of how Russia comes to terms with its past, and how it sees its future; above all, whether it recognises that the old frontiers of the Soviet Union are now history, and whether Russia sees its future as part of a rules-based international system.

That sort of analysis rests on certain ... psychological assumptions.

One of them is that the reply will not be something like this:

The only sensible way to live in this world is without rules.

Do we really look like a country with a plan? We don't have a plan.

The EU has plans, the World Bank has plans. You know what we are, West? We're a dog chasing cars. We wouldn't know what to do if we caught one. 

We just do things. We're a wrench in the gears. We hate plans. Yours, theirs, everyone's.

Schemers trying to control their worlds. We are not a schemer. We show schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are.

So when I say that what happened to Georgia, your girlfriend, wasn't personal, you know I'm telling the truth.

You guys in the West were schemers. You had plans. Look where it got you.

I just did what I do best. I took your Kosovo plan and turned it on itself. Look what I have done to this small country with a few tanks and a couple of bullets.

Nobody panics when the expected people get killed. Nobody panics when things go according to plan, even if the plans are horrifying. If I tell the Western media that tomorrow a gangbanger in Nagorno-Karabakh will get shot or a truckload of soldiers in Chechnya will get blown up, nobody panics.

But when I say one little country will get a small invasion, everyone loses their minds!

Introduce a little anarchy, you upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. We are an agent of chaos.

And you know the thing about chaos, West? It's fair.

Hmm. Doesn't this sound ... familiar?

More on Russia, always a rich seam for foreign policy First Principles.

Thus Max Hastings gives us a striking Russia metaphor:

The Russians yearn for respect, in the same fashion as any inner-city street kid with a knife. They will become willing to play with the west by western rules only if or when they no longer perceive those rules as disadvantaging themselves. Today they cannot compete on the EU's terms, still less those of the US, so they make up their own.

It is unnecessary for the west silently to acquiesce in the Russians' excesses, but it must tread cautiously in the face of their sensitivities.

Maybe the fact that we in the UK tread cautiously in the face of the sensitivities of street kids with knives accounts for this?

More from Max:

America must stop pretending that democracy is, of itself, the answer to all the world's ills ... US policy towards Moscow for almost two decades has been based upon the assumption that since the Russians were losers, their wishes could be ignored or defied on every front. No useful business could result from such a posture.

Blimey.

Democracy may not deal with the world's ills but it makes a good step in that direction. Indeed, the problem in Georgia is that the Russian leadership want to send a profound anti-democratic signal that Might is Right - that what Russia wants or needs is the uber-value in that part of the world. See this latest outburst from the reportedly mild-mannered President Medvedev.

Plus the USA in fact has spent large sums of money in and with Russia on all sorts of common projects, aimed at building a new sense of partnership. The problem is not that the Americans treat the Russians as losers. It is that the Russians behave like losers, unable to make do with their sprawling eleven time zones of territory and hankering after regaining former imperial lands elsewhere.

One recurring theme in Russian and some Western analysis is the deterministic but weird idea that Russia has to behave differently (ie badly) because it is 'surrounded by enemies'.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin once said that the fall of the Soviet Union was a geopolitical disaster. This didn't mean that he wanted to retain the Soviet state; rather, it meant that the disintegration of the Soviet Union had created a situation in which Russian national security was threatened by Western interests.

As an example, consider that during the Cold War, St. Petersburg was about 1,200 miles away from a NATO country. Today it is about 60 miles away from Estonia, a NATO member. The disintegration of the Soviet Union had left Russia surrounded by a group of countries hostile to Russian interests in various degrees and heavily influenced by the United States, Europe and, in some cases, China.

If a country occupies such a vast land mass as Russia does, it necessarily has plenty of neighbours and all sorts of complex questions to deal with. The Russian problem is that it tends to see anything it does not like as 'hostile'. And that attitude extends even to the Bambi-ish spread of EU values and processes into eg Ukraine.

Because, of course, the point is not that 'Russia' has a problem with that. Rather the Russian post-KGB elite have the problem, since the spread of Western democratic values brings with it new transparency and reliance on open rules rather than shadowy power-plays. And that threatens both their biznes interests and their world-view.

Above all, the Western democracy which is sneered at so much in the West brings with it a sense that political behaviour has (and depends on) Limits - limits of law, of convention, of personal self-restraint..

Here is the profound cultural/philosophical difference between Russia and the West.

'The West' sees Limits as a source of strength. 'Russia' sees Limits as a form of weakness.

Max does not seem to get this:

... the west (sic) will find it easier to coexist with this tormented, intransigent, melancholy and oil-rich neighbour when Russia feels comfortable with itself, not when its nose is rubbed in its long history of failure.

This has to be mainly wrong. No serious community policy can be based round the idea that we all wait for the inner city street kid with knife to 'feel comfortable with himself', if his idea of being comfortable is to slash away at smaller kids who disagree with him.

If we are not brave enough to take away his knife and haul him off to therapy, we at least need to limit his room for slashing, and do a lot more to help those he threatens to defend themselves? 

Michael Binyon deploys chess metaphors to describe Russia' s military push into Georgia:

Vladimir Putin lost several pawns on the chessboard - Kosovo, Iraq, Nato membership for the Baltic states, US renunciation of the ABM treaty, US missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic. But he waited.

The trap was set in Georgia. When President Saakashvili blundered into South Ossetia, sending in an army to shell, kill and maim on a vicious scale (against US advice and his promised word), Russia was waiting ...

... Moscow can also counter Georgian PR, the last weapon left to Tbilisi. Human rights? Look at what Georgia has done in South Ossetia (and also in Abkhazia). National sovereignty? Look at the detachment of Kosovo from Serbia. False pretexts? Look at Ronald Reagan's invasion of Grenada to “rescue” US medical students. Western outrage? Look at the confused cacophony.

There are lessons everywhere. To the former Soviet republics - remember your geography. To Nato - do you still want to incorporate Caucasian vendettas into your alliance? To Tbilisi - do you want to keep a President who brought this on you? To Washington - does Russia's voice still count for nothing? Like it or not, it counts for a lot.

Let's dwell on that chess metaphor a while.

Aron Nimzowitsch was a great chess Grandmaster. One of his famous reputed chess aphorisms is "the threat is stronger than the execution".

The sense is that one can wait for some time to play a strong chess move, letting the threat that it might happen create new advantages. However, once the move is played the threat is gone and the move stands on its own merits. And, of course, the move is 'committal' - once played it can not be taken back.

In this case the Russians have been watching the Kosovo precedent and waiting to move.

One possible move was to stand firm on rejecting Kosovo independence. Another was to say that if Kosovo gets what it wants, why should not some others do the same?

The Georgian episode opens the way for Moscow to play the second move, as looks to be happening: "Georgia's territorial integrity is a dead issue".

However, Russia is a UN Security Council Permanent Member so such moves have to be wrapped in some sort of credible international law ribbon.

By parking on unbending opposition to the Kosovo precedent, Russia claimed to rule out ad hoc exceptions to a key precept of international practice in Europe in recent decades, namely that borders can not be changed without general consent.

What exactly is Russia now saying?

That if a country behaves badly enough towards minority territories, those territories can break away?

That any territory can break away if it has a strong supportive neighbour?

Or is there a new realpolitik doctrine emerging, that a new twilight zone category of small pseudo-states might emerge whose 'independence' is recognised by a core of supporters but not the international community as a whole? See also Transdnistria.

These questions have mind-boggling political and diplomatic ramifications rippling on down the decades to come. What looks like a strong move now may (or may not) come to look like a mistake.

For now Russia has all sorts of operational options in Georgia, using the presence of Russian official and unofficial forces on the ground to play for time and create (as we chess-players say) unfathomable complications.

For a famous example of such complications, see Game 14 of the World Championship match between Garry Kasparov and Vishy Anand. At the height of the battle (and the Championship struggle as a whole) with both players short of time, Kasparov on move 27 made a dramatic speculative knight sacrifice throwing the position wide open. He outplayed his opponent in the ensuing dog-fight.

Putin maybe has in mind a famous American example:

I don’t believe in psychology. I believe in good moves.

The commentaries on Georgia pour out.

This one by John Bolton is sharp and good. Try this:

The European Union took the lead in diplomacy, with results approaching Neville Chamberlain’s moment in the spotlight at Munich: a ceasefire that failed to mention Georgia’s territorial integrity, and that all but gave Russia permission to continue its military operations as a “peacekeeping” force anywhere in Georgia. More troubling, over the long term, was that the EU saw its task as being mediator – its favourite role in the world – between Georgia and Russia, rather than an advocate for the victim of aggression.

And this:

The West, collectively, failed in this crisis. Georgia wasted its dime making that famous 3am telephone call to the White House, the one Hillary Clinton referred to in a campaign ad questioning Barack Obama’s fitness for the Presidency.

The point being:

 ... we are facing the much larger issue of how Russia plans to behave in international affairs for decades to come. Whether Mikhail Saakashvili “provoked” the Russians on August 8, or September 8, or whenever, this rape was well-planned and clearly coming, given Georgia’s manifest unwillingness to be “Finlandized” – the Cold War term for effectively losing your foreign-policy independence.

Hence:

 ... we should have a foreign-minister-level meeting of Nato to reverse the spring capitulation at Bucharest, and to decide that Georgia and Ukraine will be Nato’s next members. By drawing the line clearly, we are not provoking Russia, but doing just the opposite: letting them know that aggressive behaviour will result in costs that they will not want to bear, thus stabilising a critical seam between Russia and the West.

 ... Russia did not invade Georgia with diplomats or roubles, but with tanks. This is a security threat, and the proper forum for discussing security threats on the border of a Nato member – yes, Europe, this means Turkey – is Nato.

Saying this may cause angst in Europe’s capitals, but now is the time to find out if Nato can withstand a potential renewed confrontation with Moscow, or whether Europe will cause Nato to wilt. Far better to discover this sooner rather than later, when the stakes may be considerably higher.

What is interesting about Issues is that they do not go away even when we do not want to look at them.

'Europe' (in this case the EU) finds some things Just Too Difficult.

One example. Which countries are in Europe? This simple question is highly unsimple and (worse) uncomfortable, since to answer it clearly opens the prospect of EU membership to those countries who qualify.

Those EU members who (a) do not want much further enlargement and (b) see the EU above all as some sort of balance to the USA do not want to think about bringing any more of the former Soviet republics into the European fold. To do so opens questions about Russia's role which (they think) are best left unopened.

Alas for them the Russian intervention in Georgia does open that question.

So, EU. Are we going to stand nervously inside our fence listening to the cries for help of people looking remarkably like Europeans hammering at the gate as they get savaged by bears?

Here is Nobel Peace Prize Winner Mikhail Gorbachev piously enjoining people in the Caucasus to live together nicely:

The roots of this tragedy lie in the decision of Georgia's separatist leaders in 1991 to abolish South Ossetian autonomy. Each time successive Georgian leaders tried to impose their will by force - both in South Ossetia and in Abkhazia, where the issues of autonomy are similar - it only made the situation worse...

What happened on the night of August 7 is beyond comprehension. The Georgian military attacked the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali with multiple rocket launchers designed to devastate large areas. Russia had to respond. To accuse it of aggression against "small, defenceless Georgia" is not just hypocritical but shows a lack of humanity...

... Georgian armed forces were trained by hundreds of US instructors, and its sophisticated military equipment was bought in a number of countries. This, coupled with the promise of Nato membership, emboldened Georgian leaders.

... Small nations of the Caucasus do have a history of living together. It has been demonstrated that a lasting peace is possible, that tolerance and cooperation can create conditions for normal life and development...

The international community's long-term aim could be to create a sub-regional system of security and cooperation that would make any provocation, and the very possibility of crises such as this one, impossible...

What a superb performance. These Russian communists sure have staying-power.

A couple of the more obvious points:

1)     The roots of this problem are not to be found in 1991, but rather in the preceding decades of Soviet brutalisation of Georgia which continued while said Gorbachev was still in power. Eg this example of the Gorbachev communists tackling the National Question in Georgia in 1989:

At the dawn, the Soviet special task forces attacked the demonstration with sharpened spades and poisonous gases, killing twenty-two demonstrators, mostly women and teens. Some two thousands were left sick for weeks and months, in hospitals and at home, from the toxic gases. The brutality of the Soviet forces against the peaceful demonstrators was recorded on the tape and shocked entire Soviet Union. A number of cases of ethnic hatred by the Soviet soldiers was attested. As witnesses recalled, some soldiers, while battering victims with trenching spades, were yelling "This is what you get for Stalin."

2)     Gorbachev insinuates that Georgia is to blame for the current violence, egged on by the USA. No mention of the dismal Russian record in South Ossetia over the past decade or so.

3)     Most impressively, Gorbachev calls for a "sub-regional system of security and cooperation". That is Communist for "just give us back the Soviet empire and leave us Russians alone and all will be well". The whole problem is that parts of the former Soviet Union and indeed parts of Russia itself do not want to be in Russia's 'sub-regional security system'. Why should they be, when Russia is giving them only insecurity and lumpen corruption?

Gorbachev deservedly crashed from power because he believed in replacing discredited Soviet Imperialism with a fizzy and brightly packaged new product, Soviet Imperialism Lite.

Seems he is still selling it. And that the Guardian is still buying it.

Welcome Instapundit readers.

While we Crawfs have been travelling the Georgia story has moved on, to the point where French President Sarkozy has been helping broker some sort of truce and possible peace plan.

No end of commentaries too, of course, many dwelling on what this episode tells us all about Russia's apparently resurgent power and equivalent 'Western weakness.

Here is the mordant Spengler saying that Putin should be the President of the USA, not Russia.

Or try the hopeless divisions in the EU, as described by the Guardian.

This rapier-like analysis by Victor Davis Hanson nails most of the right wider points:

We talk endlessly about “soft” and “hard” power as if humanitarian jawboning, energized by economic incentives or sanctions, is the antithesis to mindless military power. In truth, there is soft power, hard power, and power-power — the latter being the enormous advantages held by energy rich, oil-exporting states. Take away oil and Saudi Arabia would be the world’s rogue state, with its medieval practice of gender apartheid. Take away oil and Ahmadinejad is analogous to a run-of-the-mill central African thug. Take away oil, and Chavez is one of Ronald Reagan’s proverbial tinhorn dictators.

... When one factors in Russian oil and gas reserves, a pipeline through Georgia, the oil dependency of potential critics of Putin, and the cash garnered by oil exports, then we understand once again that power-power is beginning to trump both its hard and soft alternatives.

When the Soviet Union collapsed a new implicit Deal emerged. It had various elements, some more obvious and robust than others:

• the 'West' would not reorganise its economic and security arrangements developed during the Cold War (primarily EU and NATO) to accommodate a totally new situation.
• Russia was invited to cooperate with the 'West' but effectively from an objectively weak position, and therefore on Western terms albeit with significant Russian involvement (see the pretty good Contact Group period in former Yugoslavia)
• but Russia insisted on and somehow retained the idea that its 'near abroad' (ie the former Soviet Union republics) were more Russia's then the West's.
• The three tiny Baltic republics dashed from the Russian camp and formally joined the Western camp, but while the new 'Commonwealth of Independent States' led by Russia was an institutional flop it achieved its main purpose in Moscow's eyes, ie keeping the other new states involved in a Russian psychological space.
• For some years this seemed like a good enough outcome for the West. Involvement in these deeply Sovietised territories was hard work. Russia was arguably the most democratic state in the CIS and looked to be exporting modest pluralism or at least modernisation to them.
• Latterly we have seen two rival tendencies. The CIS states moving to some sort of open market relationships beyond former Soviet borders and therefore opening up to Western processes (and wealth); in short, having different and rather attractive new options. And Russia gaining a windfall of wealth from soaring energy prices while itself adapting to a strategic transformation.
• This gives Moscow impressive new ways to exert influence across the CIS - buying key assets, 'persuading' CIS leaders that cooperation is in their best interests and so on. Why strap these countries down in close and boring neo-imperial ties with Moscow when it is so much easier to buy or control indirectly the best bits?
• That goes only so far. Moscow has to be especially tough with the (few) parts of the CIS which are still making the greatest formal efforts to join the Western camp. Hence intense Russian efforts in Ukraine while keeping CIS frozen conflicts well chilled, to create local imbalance/uncertainty which Moscow can nudge as and when necessary.
• And, now, Moscow pouncing on Georgian miscalculation to up the ante by overt military intervention.
• This Georgia crisis therefore represents the formal end of the original West/Russia Deal, which was already dead in the water as evidenced in part over Balkan policy in general and Kosovo in particular.
• Russia instead is proclaiming a New Arrangement: that if there are to be Westernising processes in the CIS area they will take place on Russia's terms, and that Russia is ready to use force to defend its self-proclaimed interests.
• Russia could press on and topple the Georgian leadership, and maybe still will.
• But the Russian Mind also will relish the idea of leaving Saakashvili twisting forlornly in the wind, humilated both by having failed to recapture South Ossetia and by having been left standing alone as the USA and all Georgia's European friends watched aghast but did significant nothing to help.
• And the likely Russian tighter grip on South Ossetia also creates a handy pseudo-precedent for Serbia gripping the Serb-controlled territories in northern Kosovo.

Will the West sign up to Russia's New Arrangement for the CIS space? If so, what? And if not, what?

More generally, are we moving to a new, darker and unpredictable international situation?

In which Rules will matter less, Willingness to Prevail a lot more?

Does the objective correlation of forces favour those leaders who in a pre-modern way have a clear sense of what they want - and are ready to take risks to achieve it? Leaders who will think they have the upper hand against other leaders who rely on little more than post-modern flannel and uneasy hopes?

Richard Beeston and Edward Lucas both know what they're talking about on Georgia.

Both wonder if Georgian impulsiveness is not going to backfire. Lucas:

It seems Russia is ready to hit back hard, in the hope of squashing the West's pestilential protégé. In short, it looks more and more as though Georgia has fallen in to its enemies' trap. The script went like this: first mount unbearable provocations, then wait for a response, and finally reply with overwhelming military force and diplomatic humiliation.

What do the Russians want? Free Thinker drills down into the comment section of a Russian website to try to find out:

It's strange: this discussion thread is in some ways a model of democratic debate, with a wide range of views expressed.  There's a right-left spectrum of sorts, only its center of gravity of the discussion is in a disturbing place.

Mind you, look at the Comments on my own Indy Open House piece about the rules on memoirs for former diplomats if you want to see some 'disturbing' thoughts:

When is Britain going to cast-off the cord to Washington, and tell the yankee-doodles to go to hell? Sucking-up to tyranical despots because they're Uncle Sam's buddies is not in Britain's interests, and is a gut-wrenching travesty of what British diplomacy is supposed to achieve.

Sigh.

The one thing the disparate CIS frozen conflicts have in common is this. Russia could have worked with its European partners to use its weight and ingenuity to solve these problems on modern creative democratic terms. Instead it has done little other than create morbid little pockets of corruption and instability, essentially for psychological reasons: to show the world and itself than it can not be 'pushed around in its own backyard'.

Hence another failure of 'European diplomacy' in wanting to look away from the hard choice here which Poland and some other former Communist countries correctly insisted was the only real one. Either these European countries are given a fair chance to be free to join the Western democratic mainstream, or they stay in a new sort of virtual Soviet empire.  

Except that once the Russian tanks start moving in, it is not that virtual.

Edward Lucas again:

The fighting should be a deafening wake-up call to the West. Our fatal mistake was made at the Nato summit in Bucharest in April, when Georgia's attempt to get a clear path to membership of the alliance was rebuffed. Mr Saakashvili warned us then that Russia would take advantage of any display of Western weakness or indecision. And it has.

I swung by the FCO the other day to have a chat about Bosnia.

The snappy desk officer dealing with this problem now is 24 or thereabouts.

Let's say she is 24. She was born in the year I was British Olympic Attache at the Sarajevo Winter Olympic Games. She was 7 when the Soviet Union broke up, 11 when the Dayton Peace Accords were signed, 14 when NATO bombed Serbia.

Hence her formative years have seen the 'frozen conflicts' here and there in the former Soviet Union as part of normal life. Abkhazia, S Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Transdnistria - all mysterious places in a geopolitical limbo where nothing much happens, or can or even should happen.

But ice melts.

Suddenly out of thin air (or so it seems) Georgia - a country hitherto pushing for NATO membership - is battling with Russian forces on its own territory in a struggle to control a few tens of thousands of Ossetians who do not want to be part of Georgia.

Various people warned that if 'the West' pushed ahead with Kosovo independence, Russia would move to change the rules in one or more of these frozen conflicts.

Kosovo course is (for Moscow) a sort of reverse S Ossetia. In Kosovo the Western parts of the international community are leaning hard on Serbia to drop its claims, and would react sharply against any attempt by Serbia to recapture Kosovo by force.

In Georgia the Western sympathies lie with the existing state, and it is Russia helping the tiny South Ossetian community stay separate. Russia plans to get round this conundrum by blaming the violence on Georgian fascism or somesuch, while NB opening a new form of external self-defence doctrine said to aimed at protecting Russian citizens alleged to be at risk beyond Russia's borders in other former Soviet republics. A doctrine with all sorts of ingenious political and other deployment options... 

This FT editorial gets it mainly right:

Mr Putin (and Dmitry Medvedev, his anointed successor) seem to want to prove two things: that Georgia is far too unstable to join Nato, and that they alone can determine the future of the former Soviet space.

But not quite:

They are right that neither the US alone, nor the Nato allies, would dream of intervening in a military confrontation. But Georgia is only unstable because of Russian policies. Encouraging secessionists sends a terrible signal to others inside Russia, especially in the rebellious north Caucasus. Moscow’s policy may be macho, but in the long run it will be utterly self-defeating.

Really?

How long is long?

And is Moscow sending a signal that 'encourages Caucasus secessionists'?

Or is it sending a signal that it means to keep a tight political and/or psychological grip on as much of the former Soviet Union as it can grasp - and that US/NATO had better back off?

Imagine a nice piece of land where under the law anyone can walk freely. Someone brings on to it a few big snapping dogs and lets them roam there.

The law has not changed - but if nothing happens to get the dogs removed or contained, the inclination of many people in fact to go for a stroll may well diminish.

If that situation becomes the norm, the owner of the dogs may feel that that land is now his for all effective purposes.

And he did not even have to buy it.

Memo to the Bosnia Desk: The North Caucasus area is like the Balkans but without the sense of ethnic harmony and self-restraint which has always prevailed in much of former Yugoslavia. Read Robert Kagan.

When we get all worked up (pr not) about British blunders and hypocrisy, we tend to lose sight of where they fit in to the greater scheme of things.

Pointing to others' even viler behaviour does not legitimise or make right one's own.

But it just is the case that some horrors are bigger and worse than others. And that different systems and political cultures are ... different.

Some find it easier to contemplate and launch outlandish behaviour. And safety mechanisms for stopping Bad Policies once they start kick in at different points.

So, is there anything in modern UK practice to compare to the French performance in Rwanda:

Drawing on documents recently released from the Paris archive of Mitterrand, the commission clearly describes the motive for French policy in Rwanda ... The RPF was a part of an “Anglophone plot”, involving the President of Uganda, to create an English-speaking “Tutsi-land”. Once Rwanda was “lost” to Anglophone influence, French credibility in Africa would never recover...

... The French created a secret command of the Rwandan Army through what he called a “légion présidentielle”. This was a group of elite operatives that was answerable only to Mitterrand and which drew up battle plans and military strategy, and built a psychological warfare capability with operatives trained in the manipulation of public opinion.

My own work has shown that not all French military operatives left Rwanda when the UN peacekeepers arrived in 1993. When the genocide began six months later there were senior French officers attached to key units in the Rwandan Army - the para-commando and reconnaissance battalions, and the Presidential Guard. It was French-trained soldiers from these units who, early in the morning of April 7, had orders to eliminate members of Rwanda's political opposition - and to kill anyone with a Tutsi identity card ...

The French Senate discovered how policy towards Rwanda had been made by a secretive network of military officers, politicians, diplomats, businessmen, and senior intelligence operatives. At its centre was Mitterrand ... It may be that a true reckoning of France's responsibility will never be possible.

What do other EU governments including ours do now to get to the bottom of this calamity?

Rien.

A creepy Euro-etiquette forbids us even to talk about the issue publicly in any way that counts. Especially when the French hold the EU Presidency.

The French of course insist that to open all this up is intolerable - their motives and actions were 'pure'.

Not perhaps quite the whole story?

More on the feisty Report by the HoC Public Affairs Select Committee report which came down heavily on FCO rules purporting to limit what diplomats might say after they leave the Service.

Craig Murray calls these regulations 'near-fascistic':

The idea, of course, is that only the ministers' version of truth will enter history. You can be confident that Jack Straw's memoirs will not tell you that he instructed Richard Dearlove that we would use intelligence from torture, or that we colluded with torture and extraordinary rendition in Uzbekistan and elsewhere. You needed my memoirs for that. If Jack Straw had his way, I would not have been able to publish my book telling you the truth; in fact the new regulations were born directly out of Straw's fury at Murder in Samarkand.

We now have a government so despised that it strives to protect itself further and further from scrutiny...

Let's be a tad more dispassionate.

Back to first principles.

The public want - and expect - to know in some detail what Government is up to with their money. 

The public also want Government to Just Get On With It, weighing complex interests and principles and taking hard decisions intelligently. 

As we are a free country, people should be able to comment on and/or write searching analyses of policy issues once they are out of public service, subject to some sort of reasonable cooling off period.  

That said, the public simultaneously like tittle-tattle and 'revelations', but also do not like seeing former officials trading in the public’s information to make a personal profit. 

These fickle public expectations are not invariably compatible with each other, or with real life. 

Foreign policy in particular requires a different quality of common sense confidentiality.

Domestic issues are in a way all 'ours' - disagreements and negotiations are within the British political family, all of whom claim that they want the best for the country.

Foreign affairs are different. Day in, day out HMG are involved in tough negotiations round the planet with people who may be our enemies, or who rightly want to do the best for their countries by exploiting British weaknesses/mistakes. It is madness to show our detailed analysis and negotiating hand to our rivals for ‘UK freedom of information’ reasons, when they of course will not reciprocate. 

At the very hard end of the spectrum are highly sensitive intelligence reports, sometimes gleaned from foreigners risking their lives to share information and insights with us (which NB does not mean that those reports are accurate/reliable).

The public know that the world can be a dirty place. They broadly trust the government to defend British interests by using such material wisely. This means