Ideology doesn't matter

I've been trying to get at this point, but Spencer Ackerman says it clearer than I could:

I've noticed this sort of "Democratic Georgia vs Autocratic Russia" formulation occurring with some frequency. To the degree it's meant to actually describe a motivation for the conflict, the democracy/autocracy point is a category error. The Russian invasion of Georgia has absolutely nothing to do with a conflict over methods of political organization. I admit to a rather deep ignorance over Georgia/Russia issues, but the conflict is rather obviously over coincentric spheres of influence -- Georgia claims South Ossetia; Russia claims protectorate status over South Ossetia and, in a nontrivial way, also claims Georgia. These claims have deep historical roots and would hold even if Georgia subscribed to the Juche ideology of North Korea and Russia became an Islamic Emirate. To graft an ideological component to the current conflict is to guarantee misunderstanding it -- or, more cynically, to try to manipulatively rope the U.S. into it.

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.

All Tied Up

Matt Yglesias:

If Kristol really thinks we should go to war with Russia, he’s being crazy and irresponsible. If he doesn’t think that, then he has no business busting out these Munich analogies. Nowhere in his column does he propose a single concrete step with any meaningful chance of altering the situation — it’s all dedicated to mocking doves, but utterly lacking in viable alternatives.

I linked to this because I think it gets another problem caused by the War in Iraq. If we had no troops in Iraq, we could have still, in theory, come to the aid of Georgia militarily. Would we have done so? Probably not. But it would have served as a deterrent. Right now, the bad actors of the world - Iran, Russia, whoever - have free reign because they know there is nothing the United States is tied up elsewhere and can't do anything to stop them. So Kristol knows he can't call for war with Russia because we have no troops to fight said war, but still wants to make fun of anyone who would be opposed to a theoretical war.

Does Putin really hate Democracy?

Robert Kagan in the WaPo:

Putin's aggression against Georgia should not be traced only to its NATO aspirations or his pique at Kosovo's independence. It is primarily a response to the "color revolutions" in Ukraine and Georgia in 2003 and 2004, when pro-Western governments replaced pro-Russian ones. What the West celebrated as a flowering of democracy the autocratic Putin saw as geopolitical and ideological encirclement.

I think Kagan, both here and in his recent (and very good) TNR essay (I haven't read the book version), places too much emphasis on ideological differences between the United States and Russia/China. I don't think the "ideological encirclement" matters as nearly as much as the geopolitical one. If Georgia was a democracy that hated the United States, I don't think Putin would be invading it. To extent that Georgia's form of government matters, it's only to the United States/NATO, where many would believe we have more of a duty to protect a democracy.