Russia’s cold-war mentality
By going to war with Georgia, Russia is drawing a new Iron Curtain.

The Christian Science Monitor
from the August 11, 2008 edition

A new Iron Curtain is being drawn around Russia. It’s not so
impregnable or wide as the Soviet one. But Moscow’s willingness to war
with NATO-aspirant Georgia sends this clear message to the expanding
West: Thus far, and no farther. Given Russia’s strength, the West has
few options.

Neither the US nor any other NATO country will fight Russia over
Georgia’s two tiny separatist enclaves ` South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Russia invaded South Ossetia Aug. 8 after Georgian troops tried to
reassert influence there. Meanwhile, Russia’s sending reinforcements to
Abkhazia. Both territories have been protected by Russian peacekeepers
since the early 1990s, when they broke from Georgia in bloody
rebellions.

The US is bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan. Who wants war with
Russia over this?

Neither does the West have much diplomatic or economic leverage with
oil- and gas-rich Russia, whose autocratic regime has broad support
from a population satisfied with stability.

As Russia’s swift and deadly military response in Georgia shows, the
West has underestimated ` indeed sometimes aggravated ` Moscow’s fears
about growing Western influence eastward.

Over the last year, Europe and the US pushed ahead with Kosovo’s
independence from Russian ally Ser
bia. While this may have been the
right thing to do, it happened over the Kremlin’s vigorous objections.
And the US has not relented on anti-missile installations in Poland and
the Czech Republic.

But if others underestimated Russia’s determination to control its
"near abroad" ` and perhaps no one miscalculated more than Georgia’s
pro-Western president, Mikheil Saakashvili ` Russia grossly
overestimates the threat of the West’s eastward march.

NATO is not an anti-Russian military alliance. The EU has improved the
economies, governments, and lawfulness of its new eastern members. This
benefits Russia as an EU trading partner and neighbor.

When he was Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin accused the West of
reigniting the cold war, but it is actually Russia that’s stuck in the
cold-war mentality.

Bullying through energy blackmail and now tanks and bombers, it reaches
for its imperialist past and believes it requires a buffer to protect
itself from threatening democracies. It would love to get back, or more
tightly control, parts of Ukraine and Moldova, the long-disputed region
of Nagorno-Karabakh, and parts of central Asia.

The West can best respond by starving this cold-war mentality ` and
weaning itself from Russian fossil fuels. If there is nothing for
Moscow to fear in NATO and EU expansion, its members should not act as
if there is. Russia deserves a strong rebuke, but at the same time, the
West must be careful not to feed Russian nationalism.

The arguments to be made to Russia now must be ones of reason: Its
support for separatists can come back to bite it (think Chechnya); and
is violating another country’s sovereignty something Russia would want
for itself?

This must be part of a patient strategy that may, in the near term,
result in Georgia having to give up its enclaves in exchange for peace.
But for the West to abstain from the cold-war game appears to be the
only way, over time, to win it.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress