Transatlantic Politics

While the West’s leaders enjoy the gigantic-Mao-style Olympic show in Beijing, Russia is sending armoured vehicles and bombing Georgia.
The breakaway region of South Ossetia, a mere "post stamp" in terms of territory and capabilities (but backed by Moscow), has been constantly attacking Georgian civilians and peace-keeping troops in the region. After a last offer of ceasefire which was again violated by the Ossetians, the Georgian army got the green light to enter the breakaway region and regain control over it.

Only a few hours after, 3 Russian planes entered the Georgian airspace and dropped bombs onto Georgian soil. Moscow denies this but has acknowledged sending about 150 armoured vehicles into South Ossetia (see picture), allegedly in order to "protect" its Russian citizens (about 90% of the Ossetians have Russian passports).

In a CNN interview, Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili was asked whether Georgia and Russia were now at war:

"My country is in self-defense against Russian aggression. Russian troops invaded Georgia."

"All day today, they’ve been bombing Georgia from numerous warplanes and specifically targeting (the) civilian population, and we have scores of wounded and dead among (the) civilian population all around the country. This is the worst nightmare one can encounter."

Saakashvili also said it was in the United States’ interest to help his country.

"It’s not about Georgia anymore. It’s about America, its values. We are a freedom-loving nation that is right now under attack."

 The West should not abandon Georgia AGAIN, as it did in April during the Bucharest NATO summit, when the young democracy was not granted the coveted NATO candidate country status (see A NATO summit for Putin for more information).

Backing Russia (or even standing idly by) would be a huge mistake.

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Bucharest, Romania:  The final fronteer.

It was the first NATO summit where the US failed to get what it publicly asked for - granting Ukraine and Georgia a next step in the NATO-accession process, the so-called "Membership Action Plan" or MAP.  MAP does not mean automatic NATO membership and can take 5-10 years to complete because the requirements laid out in MAP are dependent on the reformist drive of the respective governments. In the battle over whether to grant MAP to Ukraine & Georgia, French President Sarkozy, whom Bush qualified as "the last reincarnation of Elvis", suddenly switched sides and joined the opposition led by German chancellor Angela Merkel, who was against MAP from the very beginning.

After bitter quarrels at a working dinner hosted by the Romanian president Traian Basescu, the leaders of Old Europe prevailed. Bush and Brown got a measly compromise - a second chance in December, when NATO foreign ministers could decide to give MAP to the two former Soviet countries. But German Foreign Minister Frank Walter Steinmeier already qualified as "unconceivable" the prospects of changing his mind by December, when, in his view, there will only be a "first assessment". Followed by a second, third, etc. until Ukrainians and Georgians give up hope of ever joining NATO.

The real winner of the NATO summit in Bucharest was none other than Vladimir Putin. It was he who delivered the final speech on the last day of the summit, it was he whom Germany and France were thinking of as these two stalwarts of "Old Europe" fought to keep Georgia and Ukraine out of NATO. Self-confident and pleased that "our concerns were heard", Putin gave the audience at the Summit a condescending discourse which seemed as if the West was already at his disposal and he, the "Tsar of the Kremlin" didn’t feel the need to bully his loyal servants.  If the result of the NATO Summit are any indication, Putin was right.

During the closed-door NATO-Russia Council in Bucharest, Putin threatened the statehood of Ukraine in the event that it would become a NATO member.  Putin noted that "there are 17 millions Russians there" and that "Ukraine is a patchwork of territories from other states". But in the following press conference he refrained himself form directly attacking Ukraine or Georgia. The argument against NATO enlargement, in Putin’s public speech, was that "NATO is not a democratizer", but "a powerful military block whose appearance on our borders will be considered by Russia as a direct threat to our country’s security.

He also stressed that no threat - from terrorism to proliferation of WMD, from cyber attacks to energy - can be tackled without Russia. NATO was set up during the Cold War against an "evil empire" - the USSR - "but it remains to be seen who was right then", Putin said. That statement alone should set off alarm bells among military strategists and historians throughout the West. 

Putin also mentioned Iran and that, although Russia opposes a military nuclear program, it is "fully committed to honor its contractual obligations in terms of civilian technology and fuel for the civilian Iranian nuclear program".  No comment.

So what will be the future of NATO after Bucharest, after Russia got a veto right through its advocates in the NATO Alliance, especially Germany?

Hopefully Russia will make another mistake, the way it cut off gas to Ukraine in 2006 and let German consumers shiver. And hopefully we’ll have a strong leader in the White House next year. One who knows Russia from the Cold War and sees the new threat it has become. One who doesn’t look Putin or Medvedev in the eyes and thinks he has "seen into their soul", as George W. Bush famously stated after meeting with Putin. That would be the only hope for the transatlantic community. It cannot rely on a reincarnation of Elvis in France and a jello-like chancellor in Germany, too weak to break the will of her half-socialist, pro-Russian government. 

It is a sad indication of where the power truly lies in Europe when Bush and Sarkozy, both hawkish on foreign policy in general, are not able to secure the nomination of two former Soviet satellites to one of the most important military blocs in the world.  Perhaps, in the end, Putin smiles because he knows the truth:  Putin has also looked into the West’s eyes to see its soul and has found that the West is lacking both a soul and a backbone. 

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America's tax dollars hard at work:

• The Energy Department is subsidizing two Russian nuclear institutes that are building important parts of a reactor in Iran whose construction the United States spent years trying to stop, according to a House committee.
• The institutes, both in Nizhny Novgorod, gave American officials copies of sales presentations that listed the Bushehr reactor, which Russia has agreed to fuel, as one of their projects. One institute is providing control systems, including control room equipment, and the other, hundreds of pumps and ventilation fans.
• The Energy Department is subsidizing the institutes under the Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention, a program set up in 1994, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The program was intended to prevent newly impoverished scientists and their institutions from selling expertise to states or terrorist groups that want nuclear weapons.  (Doesn't Iran fall into the category of a "state or terrorist groups" that we want to prevent from obtaining nuclear weapons?!?)
• Rep. John Dingell, chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, said in a telephone interview, that the State Department has accused Iran of using the Bushehr reactor as a cover for obtaining nuclear technology useful in a weapons program. And, he said, “We’ve got a bunch of federal laws that impose sanctions on U.S. companies that develop Iran’s oil.”
  But under the nonproliferation program, he said, “We’ve got U.S. money providing assistance to help develop a reactor that we’re busy denouncing.” (Duh.)

Boneheads. 

Perhaps if America's federal government weren't quite so large, such "oversights" wouldn't happen (or wouldn't take years to uncover)…

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Just released: "Cold Waves", a great documentary by the Romanian filmmaker Alexandru Solomon  (41 years old) about what Radio Free Europe meant for the listeners in the Communist block, especially Romanians. It was the only trustworthy medium in a sea of Communist propaganda. It was also highly risky to listen to it. The Secret Police (Securitate) and the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu himself considered this radio station as the main enemy in the decreasing popularity of his regime. The Securitate had about 800 people hired to follow the RFE journalists abroad and their listeners in Romania. They constantly tried to silence the RFE voices. Starting with hostile propaganda on the lines of "Radio Free Europe is a CIA propaganda machine" (despite the fact that since the late 60s the CIA was not funding it anymore) and culminating with terrorist attack carried out by Carlos the Jackal against the Munich-based radio station. Three of the directors of the Romanian RFE section died of cancer and one of them suspected that he might have also been exposed to radiation. Although there were no traces of radiation in the building, the memoirs of the former Securitate-agent Ion Mihai Pacepa (Red Horizons) speaks of a portable device that could irradiate targets. Ceausescu even found a nickname for it, "Radu". Since the Litvinenko case, this theory might be more credible than before, but there is hardly any evidence to support it…

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A very interesting debate on the Russian "selection", not "election" due tomorrow (Sunday, Dec.2nd) , as Edward Lucas from the Economist puts it. Watch it here. Relevant that Leonid Gozman, the Deputy President of the oppositional Union of Right Forces Party has a broken arm.. and Evgeni Kiselev, a leading Russian tv moderator has lost his very popular show because of his critical tones toward Putin.

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