Conclusions about Russia and Georgia

Matt Yglesias (with help from others) makes several points about the limits of Russian power:

• Russia's GDP is equal to that of Portugal.
• Russia's economy isn't diverse and is extremely reliant on oil and natural gas.
• Its military is years behind the United States'.

He summarizes:

Russia’s combination of resource wealth and nuclear weapons makes it a hard country to push around which, in turn, makes it difficult for anyone to stop Moscow from pushing Georgia around. But on the whole, Russia’s clout is still puny compared to what it was back in the day and demographically it continues to be in decline while a large number of countries once subservient to Moscow are growing more prosperous than ever in the western orbit.

Long story short, the whole “Russia’s Back!” narrative needs to be kept in perspective. There’s a lot of demand out there for “new cold war” scenarios featuring Russia or China or maybe both, but fundamentally that kind of talk is out of step with reality.

It's not like Georgia is that important anyway, says Andrew Sullivan:

The US will do nothing but diplomacy because there is no vital interest at stake in Georgia, and because the US military is completely absorbed in two wars that make this Georgia-Russia conflict a tea-party. Russia knows this; the US knows this; the EU knows this; and the Georgian leadership was too cocky to absorb it.

So can we quit the hyper-ventilating, please? This is another indicator of how the world is not uni-polar, and how badly this administration has managed American soft and hard power for the last seven years. A stronger, more belligerent Russia is part of the post-Bush picture. And there's not much anyone can do about it now.

After reading quite a bit on this crisis, I've come to the following conclusions:

• The U.S. and NATO aren't going to go do anything militarily or go beyond diplomacy in any way.
• The attacks on Georgia will stop when Putin wants them to stop.
• Saakashvili screwed up and thawed the "frozen" conflict.
  
• This is nothing but the confirmation of something we already knew: the world is no longer uni-polar.
  
• Sucks to be Georgia.