Welcome Back to the 19th Century

By JOSEF JOFFE
FROM THE WALL STREET JOURNAL EUROPE

Wait a minute, isn't this the 21st? Chronologically, it is. But last Friday, Russia -- like the mad scientist Emmett Brown in "Back to the Future" -- thrust us backward by about 150 years in the Caucasus: into the age of imperialism and geopolitics, resource wars and spheres of influence.

It was strictly 19th-century when Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin casually announced that "war has started." In the old days, such pronunciamentos were routine; war, to recall Clausewitz, was just the "continuation of politics with the admixture of other means." (For the specifics, look up: the Crimean War, Prussia's conquest of Germany, the Balkan Wars; then go farther afield to the Spanish-American and Russo-Japanese wars.)

But this is the 21st century, isn't it? At least in that vast swath extending from Berkeley to Berlin and to Beijing (with an outrigger in Moscow), anything "geo" could only refer to "economics." Welfare had replaced warfare. Tankers had replaced tanks, balance of payments the balance of power. At least in the Berlin-Berkeley Belt, all of us were playing win-win games, wheeling, dealing and consuming.

Chanting "no more war," we worried about "soft politics" and "soft power": how to battle AIDS and desertification, SARS and subprime crises. Sure, in international politics, it was still hardball -- the eternal struggle for influence and advantage, but without the ultima ratio. Basically, we in the West didn't think that somebody in the bleachers would empty an AK-47 at us.

Say hello to Vladimir Putin and his stand-in Dmitry Medvedev. By attacking Georgia, they have raised the curtain on a post-World War II premiere. They have launched the first real war in "Greater Europe" since 1945. (The 1990s clashes in the Balkans were secessionist/internal wars; the invasion of Prague in 1968 was, if you pardon the expression, an act of "bloc recentralization.")

But the Caucasus is the real thing: armies marching, fleets circling, rockets flaring. Many are blaming "hot-headed" President Mikheil Saakashvili for having baited the bear, and he is no angel, for sure. Didn't he go first by ordering his army into South Ossetia?

But in 1939, they also blamed the "hot-headed" Poles for refusing to placate Hitler, and so he just had to flatten Warsaw on Sept. 1. They also castigated the Czechs, a "faraway country of which we know little" for being so obstinate in resisting German demands on the Sudetenland.

Apologists for Russia can point to lots of mitigating circumstances, starting with the biggest one of Christmas Day 1991, when the hammer-and-sickle flag over the Kremlin went down for the last time, and up went the Russian tricolor. Poof, and a whole empire from the Baltic to Kazakhstan was suddenly gone. Yes, that chilled the Russian soul, and so did Georgia's love affair with the United States. How dare Georgia, the birthplace of Stalin, sidle up to the EU and NATO?

In the greater scheme of things, though, Georgia's geopolitical crimes pale against a simple historical truth: 8/8 is payback for 12/25, when the Soviet Empire expired.

That, as Mr. Putin has told us, was the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century," and ever since he was anointed neo-czar in 2000, he has been working hard, and as time went by ever more ham-handedly, to reverse the verdict of the Cold War -- to regain what Russia had lost.

* * *

So, forget about Mr. Saakashvili's bluster and bumbling; think "revisionism" and "expansionism," terms beloved by diplomatic historians trying to explain the behavior of rock-the-boat states. A revisionist power wants back what it once had; an expansionist power wants more for itself and less for the rest. The R&E Syndrome is a handy way to explain all of Mr. Putin's strategy in the past eight years. Draw an arc from the Baltic to the Caspian and then start counting.

Moscow has unleashed a cyberwar against tiny Estonia, formerly a Soviet republic. It has threatened the Czech Republic and Poland with nuclear targeting if they host U.S. antimissile hardware on their soil that could not possibly threaten Russia's retaliatory potential. It has exploited small price disputes (normally resolved by lawyers screaming at each other) to stop gas deliveries and thus show Ukraine, Belarus and former Warsaw Pact members who runs the "Common House of Europe," to recall Mikhail Gorbachev's famous phrase.

Mr. Putin has always reserved the harshest treatment for Georgia. Tbilisi's mortal sin was the attempt to get out from under the bear's paw and snuggle up to the West. Ever since, Moscow has tried to subjugate Georgia or to split it up. It was either undermining the government by cutting off trade and gas, or putting the whole country on the butcher's block. Hence Russia's support, including arms and troops, for the secession of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Reports from the fighting suggest that Russia's war aims go way beyond driving Georgian troops from South Ossetia. According to President Saakashvili, the Russians have captured the city of Gori in central Georgia, cutting the country into two. Moscow denies this.

The object is pure 19th-century: domination plus winning the resource war. Georgia is the "last of the independents," so to speak, a critical conduit of oil and gas that goes around Russia into the Black Sea and (with a planned gas pipeline) via Turkey into the Mediterranean. It is no accident that Russian planes are bombing throughout the country, and narrowly "missed" pipelines. The message to the West is: "You don't really want to invest in energy here."

If Moscow gains control over Georgia, it is "good night, and good luck" to Europe. All of its gas and oil bought in Eurasia (minus the Middle East) will pass through Russian hands in one way or the other.

So, in the Caucasus, we are not observing restless natives turning faraway "frozen conflicts" into hot ones. Who ever heard of Abkhazia? And isn't "Ossetia" some kind of caviar? No, these are the flash points of the 21st century's Great Game, and the issue is: Who will gain control over the Caspian Basin, the richest depository of strategic resources next to the Middle East.

By penetrating deeply into Georgia, Russia is signaling to the West: "We will!" Alas, neither the U.S. nor the EU was prepared for the return of the 19th century. They thought that Clausewitz was dead once and for all, that it was win-win games now and forever, that Russia, lured by respectability and riches, would turn into a responsible great power. Apparently, George F. Kennan, the diplomat and historian, had it right. To him is attributed a very apropos aphorism: "Russia can have at its borders only vassals or enemies."

But the issue runs a lot deeper as of 8/8: What are Russia's borders? Will it be satisfied with Georgia? As Prince Gorchakov, Russian chancellor, put it in 1864, in the midst of the Russian conquest of the Caucasus: "The greatest difficulty is to know when to stop." And what is the regime's character? Government by, for and of goons?

At least we now know one thing: Dreams of multipolarity, of governance by committee, are premature. Revisionist powers are never responsible. Which goes for China, too. Though it pursues a "peaceful rise," it also wants more for itself and less for the common good. Indeed, it was China and the other wannabe-superpower, India, that buried the Doha Round and thus any chance for expanded free trade.

Which leaves us with the two usual suspects, America and Europe, to take care of global business. And with NATO, the alliance supposedly doomed by victory in the Cold War. With 8/8, Messrs. Putin and Medvedev have given the old lady more steroids than might have been consumed on the way to the Beijing Olympics.

Mr. Joffe is publisher-editor of Die Zeit and a fellow of the Institute for International Studies and the Hoover Institution, both at Stanford.

Why Tony Blair
May Be Having a Laugh

By KYLE WINGFIELD

When Gordon Brown returns home from his summer vacation, he may find that the locks at 10 Downing Street have been changed. The downward political spiral of Britain's prime minister quickened after a special-election loss in his native Scotland last month. Meanwhile, Labour backbenchers are bickering and ministers are not-so-subtly jockeying to replace him. For the first time in nearly two decades, the Tories are ascendant.

And somewhere, Tony Blair is having a good laugh.

AP

Blairism, so reviled as the root of Labour's problems -- and by extension of Britain's -- remains the driving force in U.K. politics more than a year after its namesake's retirement. It, more than party lines, is what divides Westminster these days.

First consider post-Blair Labour. Mr. Brown's premiership, which began in June 2007, might be summarized as one long spell of dithering: over calling snap elections last fall (in the end, he didn't); over nationalizing mortgage lender Northern Rock (he did, but too late); over planned tax hikes (he's dropped most of them to quell voter rebellions). But his biggest vacillation has been over pressing forward with Blairism.

A quick aside here: Blairism is better known as New Labour, the movement that turned a formerly unelectable party into a vote-winning juggernaut as of 1997. But Mr. Brown either abandoned or never really bought into some of New Labour's central tenets. For example, he rejected Thatcherite economics which Mr. Blair had embraced -- namely, low headline tax rates and disciplined spending -- as well as using competition and choice to revamp the National Health Service and education. New Labour minus the convictions and personality of Mr. Blair isn't really new.

The cost of ditching Blairism was most brutally exposed in a memo by Mr. Blair himself that was leaked to the press this month. The memo was reportedly penned in September, three months after Mr. Brown took office. Referring to himself, Mr. Brown and New Labour by their initials, Mr. Blair says "GB" created a "lamentable confusion of tactics and strategy" by trying to "define [himself] by reference to TB i.e. this was not the era of spin, we are going to be honest, the style would change etc.

"Strategically," Mr. Blair continued, "the consequence was twofold: a) we dissed our own record -- instead of saying we are building on the achievements, confronting new challenges, we joined in the attack on our own ten years -- a fatal mistake if we do not correct it and b) because we were disowning ourselves as a government, we junked the TB policy agenda but had nothing to put in its place."

He concluded by noting that "The choice is and always was between GB running as the change candidate or as continuity NL. . . . By trying to be change, he . . . never [played] the game that gives us the only chance of a 4th term."

Inside the Brown government, the senior minister who seems to best understand the party's need to get back to Blairism is David Miliband, the foreign secretary.

Mr. Miliband is a former aide to Mr. Blair. He also is the author of a July 30 op-ed in the Guardian that has been widely interpreted as the launch of a leadership campaign against Mr. Brown. In his op-ed, Mr. Miliband refers four times to 1997 or the past 10 years, and following through with the work that began then. He doesn't mention Mr. Brown even once. That article preceded the leak of the Blair memo by four days, leading many to conclude that Mr. Miliband is the front man for a Blairite counter-counterrevolution.

An even bigger vindication of Blairism can be found in David Cameron's Conservative Party. For what is Cameronism if not Blairism?

This charge is admittedly a cliché, but it's a conception that the Tories themselves have promoted. In May 2007, shortly after Mr. Blair announced his retirement, shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne said, "As the prime minister leaves office, there is an agreement between him and ourselves about the way forward."

Mr. Osborne may be correct, but not all Tories are happy about this. Tax cuts, for example, still sound good to many Conservatives -- not least after taxes have steadily crept up under Labour. The state share of the economy is now larger in Britain than in Germany. Yet the "Cameroons" have pledged to "share the proceeds of growth" between higher spending and only small tax cuts.

All of this will come to a head when Britons next vote -- no later than May 2010, but potentially sooner if Mr. Brown is pushed out and his successor recognizes the need for a new mandate. Labour may be booted out of No. 10 whenever the next election is held. But Mr. Blair's influence will be felt for a long time to come.

The War in Iraq Is Over.
What Next?

By BING WEST

Iraq

The war I witnessed for more than five years in Iraq is over. In July, there were five American fatalities in Iraq, the lowest since the war began in March 2003. In Mosul recently, I chatted with shopkeepers on the same corner where last January a Humvee was blown apart in front of me. In the Baghdad district of Ghazilia -- where last January snipers controlled streets awash in human waste -- I saw clean streets and soccer games. In Basra, the local British colonel was dining at a restaurant in the center of the bustling city.

For the first time in 15 trips across the country, I didn't hear one shot or a single blast from a roadside bomb. In Anbar Province, scene of the fiercest fighting during the war, the tribal sheiks insisted to Barack Obama on his recent visit that the U.S. Marines had to stay because they were the most trusted force.

The war turned around in late 2006 because American troops partnered with Iraqi forces and tribal auxiliaries to protect the population. Feeling safe, the population informed on the militias and terrorists living among them. Then, in the spring of 2008, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki attacked the Mahdi militia of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr that controlled Basra and half of Baghdad. The militia crumbled under pressure from Iraqi soldiers backed by coalition intelligence and air assets.

The threat in Iraq has changed from a full-scale insurgency into an antiterror campaign. Al Qaeda in Iraq is entrenched in northern Mosul, where it may take 18 months to completely defeat them. By employing what he calls his "Anaconda Strategy," Gen. David Petraeus is squeezing the life out of al Qaeda in Iraq. The mafia-style militia of Sadr has been splintered.

The competition among Iraqi politicians has shifted from violence to politics, albeit yielding a track record as poor as that of our own Congress. After failing for two years to deliver basic services, both Shiite and Sunni politicians are stalling on legislation to hold provincial elections because many of them will be defeated. While irritating, these political games have not blocked U.S. gains.

Americans should praise rather than slight our military's achievements. Civil war has been averted. The Iraqi army has thrown the militia out of the port of Um Qasar, thus ensuring stable oil exports. Al Qaeda fought to make Iraq its base in the Arab Middle East. Instead, it is being hunted down.

Iran has emerged as the major threat to stability in Iraq. While its goal was to control a weak Iraq after the American army was driven out, Tehran overplayed its hand. Iran supplied the rockets to attack Iraqi politicians in Baghdad in April and supported Sadr's militia. But hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Shiites died fighting Iranians in the '80s, and those memories are still fresh. In southern Maysan Province, American and Iraqi units are waiting to hunt down terrorists returning from Iranian training camps. Iraq, backed by some American forces in remote desert bases, is poised to emerge as a regional counterweight to Iran.

Yet the progress in Iraq is most threatened by a political promise in the U.S. to remove all American combat brigades, against the advice of our military commanders. Iraqi volunteers working for a nonsectarian political party in Baghdad asked me, "Is America giving up its goals?" It's an unsettling question.

With victory in sight, why would we quit? The steady -- but not total -- withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq is freeing up forces to fight in Afghanistan. But Afghanistan is not the central front in the war on terror. Al Qaeda is hiding in Pakistan, a nation we are not going to invade.

The Iraqis aren't yet confident enough to stand entirely on their own; al Qaeda's savagery still imposes too much fear, while Iran is training terrorists next door. In counterinsurgency, the people must know they are protected. Gen. Petraeus has proven that intimidation can be defeated by placing American soldiers among the population. Wars are won by confidence, but also by procedures that take time to mature; and the Iraqi offensive against Sadr's militia in Basra last April revealed an atrocious Iraqi command and control system.

We are withdrawing as conditions permit. For instance, in the infamous Triangle of Death south of Baghdad, Col. Dominic Caraccilo has spread his rifle companies across 22 police precincts. Over the next year, he plans to pull out two of every three companies, leaving the population protected by Iraqi forces, backed by a thin screen of American soldiers.

If implemented on a countrywide scale, this model would reduce the American presence from 15 to five brigades over the next few years. They can be comprised of artillerymen, motor transport and civil affairs as well as infantrymen. By calling these residual forces "Transition Teams," we can remove the political argument in the U.S. about the exact number of combat brigades, and allow our commanders flexibility in adjusting force levels. This change of names rather than of missions is a way to save face and bring Americans closer together.

The problem is not American force levels in Iraq. It is divisiveness at home. While our military has adapted, our society has disconnected from its martial values. I was standing beside an Iraqi colonel one day in war-torn Fallujah when a tough Marine patrol walked by. "You Americans," he said, "are the strongest tribe."

But we cast aspersions on ourselves. The success of our military should not be begrudged to gain transitory political advantage.

In 1991, our nation held a parade after our military liberated Kuwait. Over the course of more than five hard years, our troops have brought stability and freedom to 25 million Iraqis, while crushing al Qaeda in Iraq. Regardless of disagreement about initiating the war back in 2003, Americans should unite to applaud the success of our troops in 2008.

A stable Iraq keeps faith with the million American soldiers who fought there, sets back Iran's aggression, and makes our enemies in Afghanistan and elsewhere fear us. It's time we stopped debating about yesterday and displayed national pride in our soldiers.

Mr. West is a former assistant secretary of defense and combat Marine. His third book on the Iraq war, "The Strongest Tribe: War, Politics and the Endgame in Iraq," is out today from Random House.

How the West Can Stand Up to Russia

By GARY SCHMITT and MAURO DE LORENZO

Given the cutthroat politics Moscow has practiced at home and abroad in recent years -- with only the softest protests from the U.S. and its allies -- no one should be surprised by Russia's decision to conquer the two breakaway regions of Georgia. Nevertheless, it should once and for all disabuse policy makers in Washington and Brussels of hopes that Russia intends to become part of the post-Cold War condominium of democratic peace in Europe. The point of the Kremlin's invasion of Georgia, which now threatens the capital city of Tbilisi, is to demonstrate to the world how impotent that security order has become.

For Moscow, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili's mistake in finally taking the bait of Russian provocations and ordering his troops in South Ossetia last week was the opening they sought -- and for which they had been planning for some time.

David Gothard

South Ossetia is not, as some have suggested, tit-for-tat payback for American and European recognition, over Russian objections, of Kosovo's independence from Serbia. Russia has been "at war" with democratic Georgia for some time. Driven to distraction by Mr. Saakashvili's assertiveness and Georgia's desire to join NATO, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin first tried to bring the country to its knees through economic warfare beginning in 2005. He cut off access to Russian markets, expelled Georgians from Russia, quadrupled the price of Russian energy to Georgia, and severed transport links.

Georgia failed to collapse. To the contrary, it has flourished: After the Rose Revolution of 2003 ended the corrupt reign of Eduard Shevardnadze, the former Soviet foreign minister, Georgia instituted far-reaching reforms to its governing structures, cleaned up the endemic corruption that infected every facet of pre-Rose Revolution life, and found new markets for its products in Turkey and Europe. It persevered with some of the most profound and thorough economic and pro-business reforms ever undertaken by a developing country -- slashing taxes and government regulations, and privatizing state-owned enterprises. All of which is reflected in Georgia's meteoric rise on the World Bank's Doing Business indicators. The irrelevance of Russian economic sanctions to Georgia made the ideological challenge that the Rose Revolution posed to Putin's vision of Russia even more profound.

Unable to bend Tbilisi to its will, the Kremlin in recent months ratcheted up the pressure and provocations in South Ossetia and Abkhazia -- reinforcing Russian forces and Russian-backed paramilitaries, violating Georgian air space with Russian jets, shelling Georgian villages and outposts, and passing a resolution to treat the two provinces administratively as part of Russia. Starting in 2004, Russia began issuing passports to the residents of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, a fact that today serves as one of the main pretexts for the ferocity of Moscow's military campaign.

However, Georgia's "impertinence" in seeking NATO membership and building close ties with Europe does not fully explain Moscow's blatant display of brute power. In a speech before the Munich Conference on Security Policy in February last year, Mr. Putin made it clear that Russia would no longer accept the rules of the international road as set by the democratic West. It was an in-your-face challenge to the U.S. and Europe, and we blinked. With the exception of John McCain, who warned against "needless confrontation" on the part of Moscow, no American or European official at the conference made any attempt to push back. Ever since, Moscow's contempt for NATO, the European Union and Washington has only grown.

Reversing this course will not be easy, but it is absolutely necessary. At stake are international law, energy security, NATO's future, and American credibility when it comes to supporting new democracies. It is also about resisting Russia's openly hegemonic designs on its neighbors -- including Ukraine, which Mr. Putin reportedly described as "not a real nation" to President Bush at their meeting in Sochi earlier this year.

What can the West do? The first step is for the U.S. and its allies to rush military and medical supplies to Tbilisi. If we want democracy to survive there, Georgians have to believe that we have their backs. At the moment, the tepidness of the Western response has given them serious cause for doubt. In addition, Washington should lead the effort to devise a list of economic and diplomatic sanctions toward Russia that impose real costs for what Moscow has done. Russia should know that the West has a greater capacity to sustain a new Cold War than Russia, with its petroleum-dependent economy, does.

Next, the West should make use of Russia's claim that its role in South Ossetia and Abkhazia is driven by the need to protect the populations there. If so, Moscow should have no objections to U.N.-sanctioned peacekeepers and observers moving into those two regions to replace the jerry-rigged system of "peacekeepers" that, until the war broke out, consisted of Russian troops, local separatist militaries and Georgian forces. If nothing else, the goal should be to put Mr. Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, the new Russian president, on their back foot diplomatically.

Over the longer term, it is essential that Russia's stranglehold on Europe's energy supplies be broken. The EU's failure to get its house in order by diversifying energy supplies and insisting that Russia, in turn, open up its own market, has created a situation in which Moscow rightly believes it has significant leverage over the policy positions of key countries such as Germany.

It was Germany that led the opposition at the most recent NATO summit in April against a Membership Action Plan for Georgia, emphasizing that a country that has unresolved conflicts should not be allowed to enter NATO. We presumably won't know for some time what the precise calculations were inside the Kremlin when it came to the decision to send troops into Georgia, but one can surely assume that the German position did nothing to discourage Russia's plans.

The real payback for Moscow's decision to invade Georgia should be the sweet revenge of a strong, prosperous and fully independent Georgia. Building on the strides Georgia has already made, Brussels and Washington should give Tbilisi a clear road to NATO and EU membership.

Mr. Schmitt is director of the American Enterprise Institute's program on advanced strategic studies. Mr. De Lorenzo is an AEI resident fellow.