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The following article appears in the 25th anniversary issue of World Policy Journal. For the month of November, read the entire 25th anniversary issue, fall 2008, for free!

There is one thing important to keep in mind when talking about Russia—it doesn’t change. Not that it doesn’t change at all, of course. Buildings, fashions, leaders, regimes, or at least regimes’ names, all these change. And over the next quarter century, inevitably, revolutions will roar, the ruble will collapse or soar, just as over the past quarter century Soviet dissidents or Russian oligarch, have been imprisoned or exiled. This all happens. But neither the late czarist system, nor late-communism, nor post-communism was able to generate a viable alternative to a society where changes, when they do happen, result in a destructive and malfunctioning social order. This, I fear, is what Russia has in store for itself—and for the world—over the next quarter century. Continue reading…

In my World Policy Journal article on the “geopolitics of oil” over the next 25 years, I wrote about the many political pressures that will add upward pressure on crude oil prices over the next several years. But we’re now in the middle of a global financial crisis that has helped drop prices from a high of $147 per barrel in July to under $60 today.

Does the steep price drop remove politics from oil markets? Not at all. Look to recent headlines from three of the countries that have profited mightily from the windfall oil profits of the past few years.

In Iran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the theocrats who hold real power in the country know that lower crude prices give them plenty to worry about. The International Monetary Fund has warned that when oil prices fall below $90 per barrel, Iran starts to run a budget deficit. When oil falls below $75 per barrel, it can’t afford its import bill. We got a glimpse of the jitters in Tehran in early October, when Iran’s oil minister announced that a price below $100 per barrel was “unacceptable.”

For a government that has ordered gasoline rationing and continues to fight a losing battle against 30 percent inflation, this is a serious problem. Iran’s government has increased spending by nearly 90 percent over the past three years. If that politically popular spending is to continue, where’s the money going to come from if not from energy exports? Read the rest of this entry »

When I was an undergraduate in college (in the last century), French was considered the language of diplomacy. My United States passport, despite the recent estranged “Freedom Fries era” of Franco-American relations, still states most entries in both English and French. Alas, in this brave new age, the diplomatic power of French appears to be slipping, not the least in Europe, and especially on its now contested borders with Russia.

France currently holds the presidency of the European Union, in which role and under the enterprising leadership of President Nicolas Sarkozy (whose name it is really too tempting in the present context to spell “Czarkozy”) France undertook to broker the withdrawal of Russian forces from Georgia after their recent incursion to “liberate” South Ossetia and Abkhazia. With typical French panache, the whole thing was neatly presented, apparently understood, and expected to be rapidly executed. However, it quickly became apparent that certain critical details of the original French draft of the terms of Russian withdrawal had, literally been lost, or at least warped, in translation.

It all hinges on a prepositional dispute. Does the draft agreement call for security “for” South Ossetia, as the Georgian and English translations state, or does it call for security “in” South Ossetia as the Russian translation allows. The Russians are sticking with their translation, which they are interpreting to mean that their presence in South Ossetia is essential for security in this disputed territory. Mon dieu! Read the rest of this entry »

Ketevan Ninua is a co-founder of Georgian Center of Technology, a technology and engineering institute in Tbilisi, Georgia, and a board member of ProGeorgia.org, Inc. Born in Tbilisi, she is a New York representative of the Georgian Association in the United States.

While Russia’s recent invasion of Georgia came as a surprise to most around the world, it should have evoked quite the opposite reaction. Molestation of her neighbors, including setting impoverished Ossetians against Georgians, has long been Russian policy. Today imperial Russia, flouting international law, threatens Georgia’s very existence by bombing the country, slaughtering civilians, and occupying territory. This is a situation that the West has encountered numerous times in the past: Czechoslovakia, 1938; Berlin, 1948; Budapest, 1956; Prague, 1968; Afghanistan, 1979. The world condemns Russia, but condemnations do not curb Moscow’s behavior.

Russian aggression stretches back centuries; its approach to conquest dates from the Middle Ages, when soldiers were sent to war with no promise of payment other than loot. Russian aggression on a macro level is well-documented, but the savagery of its soldiers has not been widely reported. Russian soldiers in Georgia have engaged in widespread looting of food, electronic equipment, furniture, footwear, and clothes—even used toilet bowls and sinks.

Russian soldiers have raped and murdered innocent civilians. In Georgia, three generations often live in the same home; Russian soldiers have beaten elders and shot family members who dared to object. After their looting and killing was over, Russian troops have burned Georgian villages to the ground, destroyed towns, and mined roads—to ensure that no food or humanitarian aid can reach devastated Georgian citizens. Read the rest of this entry »

From what many politicians and some of the press are saying, the house of ethnic togetherness is about to fall apart and the Ossetian withdrawal from Georgia is soon going to destabilize whole continents. No wonder that Beijing is opposing Moscow in rushing to recognize the new order in South Ossetia.

Is this a valid fear? Theoretically yes, historically no. A few years ago, the political scientists James Fearon and David Laitin studied ethnic division in Africa, a continent notorious for its wars. They identified tens of thousands of pairs of ethnic groups that could have been in conflict. But they did not find thousands of actual conflicts or hundreds of new states. Indeed, for every one thousand such pairs of ethnic conflicts they found fewer than three incidents of violent conflict. With only a few exceptions, state boundaries in Africa are the same as they were in 1960 at the time of the independence movement.

It is true that Africa over the last decade and a half has been through a period of great turmoil. But, according to the just-published annual report of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Africa (along with Europe) is now the most peaceful continent in the world, with only one significant tribal or interstate conflict last year. Read the rest of this entry »

August was a strange month, and there were times when one felt that it could have been a Sarajevo moment (1914 style), or even a Cuban crisis. There is an almost Newtonian law of diplomacy about the resulting release of belligerent energy when two roughly equal masses of foresightlessness collide.

Neither side emerges with much credit from the Ossetia debacle, whether the issue was controlling unruly surrogates, or delivering an effective solution afterwards. In this case, however, the George W. Bush White House unusually played the role of Khrushchev, and backed down in the face of a clearly irrational opponent. But even that commendable forbearance has unintended consequences across the globe, in particular, with China and Taiwan.

In the short term, Moscow tweaked the Eagle’s feather, and got away with it because, for once, this White House appreciated its own limitations. Moscow certainly weakened U.S. military prestige even as it enhanced its battered reputation for sanity, but it was a hollow triumph, reminiscent of the Russian tank column that raced to Pristina Airport in Kosovo and cocked a snook at General Rupert Smith and NATO—but then, sheepishly, had to get fuel and food from NATO since all Russia’s former allies refused over-flight permission for reinforcement.

Clearly, that memory still rankles in Moscow, and can only hope that the little brief authority that Russia’s raid into Georgia gave its generals will overcome their chronic Kosovo syndrome. However, it was dearly bought therapy, which has compounded Russian isolation. It delivered support in Prague, Warsaw, and Kiev for NATO, missiles, and bases that a month ago looked like unjustifiable provocation but which the Russian action has now made seem eminently sensible. Indeed, apart from the effect on its neighbors, one cannot but help wonder at the long-term effect on the Russian Federation itself—Chechnya and Tartarstan being but some of many potentially fissiparous components. How long before Israel recognizes the independence of the Birobidzhan “Jewish Autonomous Region” in Russia’s far eastern provinces? Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s be frank: NATO is no longer needed. Indeed, this has been true for some time: once the Warsaw Pact closed up shop there was no good or honest reason for keeping NATO going. The threat that NATO was created to deter disappeared when the Soviet Union collapsed.

It is now time to let the European Union take the strain—whether by trade, investment, diplomacy, or political intimacy (indeed, the hallmarks of a successful union that has mastered the art of expansion and influence by clever use of the carrot)—while America deals with its own problems, brought about by its quest for global influence and application of the Bush doctrine of “preventive war.”

As Mark Leonard, the director of foreign policy at the Center for European Reform wrote in his clever little book of three years ago, “The contrast between the two doctrines is stark. The Bush doctrine attempts to justify action to remove a ‘threat’ before it has a chance of being employed against the United States. It is consequently focused very closely on physical assets and capabilities, necessarily swift in execution and therefore short term in conception, and unavoidably entirely military in kind. The European doctrine of pre-emption, in contrast, is predicated on long-term involvement, with the military just one strand of activity, along with pre-emptive economic and legal intervention, and is aimed at building the political and institutional basis of stability, rather than simply removing the immediate source of threat.”

Passive aggression—the outward expansion of the Eurosphere—is just what the continent needs. For countries such as Turkey, Serbia, or Bosnia, the only thing worse than having the Brussels bureaucracy (with its multitude of new rules) descend on their political systems is to have its doors closed to them. Read the rest of this entry »

Russia’s invasion of Georgia should compel the United States and Europe to alter their policies of using economic engagement to promote democracy.

After the Cold War, the United States and Europe sought to integrate Russia, China, and their satellites into the Western market economy. Policymakers believed this would encourage democracy, human rights and a peaceful demeanor toward their neighbors.

Policymakers believed robust foreign commerce and free markets—privatization, private property, and business law—would expose these societies to Western culture and instigate expectations for personal freedoms and free elections. Market economies function best when individual initiative and property rights are protected by elected governments. Democratic capitalism has decidedly outperformed autocratic communist and fascist regimes. And prosperous nations, invested in global commerce, are less inclined toward aggression.

Russia instigated wide-ranging privatization and other market reforms, opened to foreign investment, and had a rocky experiment with democracy. From 1990 to 1995, gross domestic product (GDP) dropped 50 percent, thanks to falling prices for oil and metal exports, inadequate commercial law, cronyism, and corruption. Output stabilized for a few years, but then sank further after the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Boris Yeltsin, largely discredited, turned over the presidency to Vladimir Putin in 1999.

Mr. Putin may be a capitalist, but he is no democrat. He maintained essential elements of a market economy but compromised elections, asserted control over regional governments and the judiciary, squelched personal freedoms, and sought to reestablish Russian influence, whenever possible, in former Soviet republics. Read the rest of this entry »

Throughout the Nazi era in Germany, while Hitler and his minions were in the process of enslaving much of Europe, Wilhelm Furtwaengler served as chief conductor of the renowned Berlin Philharmonic, bringing his baton and his fabulous ensemble into the service of the propaganda machine of the Third Reich.

Now, it seems, Valery Gergiev, longtime principal guest conductor of the Metropolitan Opera and now the London Symphony, is performing the same service for his masters in Moscow.

As the Associated Press reported Thursday morning in a dispatch from Georgia, “Valery Gergiev, who is Ossetian, was to lead a requiem concert for the dead in the devastated central square [of the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali] Thursday night, part of an effort to win international sympathy and support for Russia’s argument that its invasion of Georgia was justified.”

Okay, so Valery Abisalovich Gergiev is Ossetian. Wilhelm Furtwaengler was certainly German. Yet Furtwaengler had a far more compelling motive to sweep his baton into the services of Hitler and the Nazis than Gergiev does bringing his to bear in the service of Vladimir Putin. At the start of the Nazi era, with the Weimer Republic in the grip of a crushing economic meltdown, the once proud Berlin Philharmonic, had become, quite frankly, flat broke. The livelihood of Furtwaengler’s 80-plus musicians, indeed the survival of their families, some of them at the time Jewish, were at the mercy of the hyperinflation that was sweeping Germany at the height of the Great Depression. Without question, Furtwaengler sold out. And his reputation, eventually, indeed that of his great institution, suffered for decades as a result.

Should Gergiev pay no less a price? It is, after all, Putin who’s accusing the democratically elected government of Georgia of “ethnic cleansing.” It’s Russian tanks that have dug into hillsides and roadblocks across the borders of this tiny, independent nation—an action that should be no less abhorrent than Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland which then, weeks later, was to include all of Czechoslovakia.

Gergiev has certainly been in Putin’s hip pocket for much of his career. Each is godfather to the other’s children. Putin, at least indirectly, placed him at the helm of the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, the pinnacle of the Russian musical establishment. Until now, this profoundly interlocking relationship could be ignored in the West. After all, Russia was all but an ally. Putin and President George W. Bush were great pals. They rode in the same golf cart together. No longer. Now, suddenly, the West is searching frantically for a means of sending a message to the Kremlin. Read the rest of this entry »

Kosovo, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Chechnya, the Bakassi Peninsula. All disputed territories but only one (the last named), a sizable oil-rich wedge of land lying between Nigeria and Cameroon, has been taken to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for adjudication. Why not the others? To my mind, I can think of no good reason apart from, in the latest conflagration, hubris on the Russian side and an inflated sense of self-importance on the Georgian side, partly borne of America’s encouragement.

Six years ago, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo (on whom I reported for the summer issue of World Policy Journal) was confronted with growing tensions with neighboring Cameroon over the Bakassi Peninsula, long ruled by Nigeria. In a show of restraint, he decided to resist the advice of his minister of defense, who pushed for a military solution, and turned the dispute over to the ICJ. Local newspapers ridiculed Obasanjo and public opinion was nationalistic, but he held his course and did so even when the court ruled in Cameroon’s favor. Yesterday, Bakassi was formally turned over to Cameroon.

Unlike South Ossetia, there was something to fight over—large quantities of oil—but Nigeria swallowed its pride. This doesn’t happen as often as it should, but it does happen. Read the rest of this entry »