One of the biggest mistakes people from weird, inconsequential countries make when they come to the States is assuming that anyone here knows or cares about their native land. I was listening to a Greek call-in show on New York radio last weekend and all the host would do is harp on and on about the US media’s attempt to make Greece look stupid during its coverage of the Athens Olympics. You know, the ones that happened four years ago. Somehow every Greek caller was able to remember verbatim some reporter’s slip-up or turn of phrase that pointed the existence of a massive, industry-wide conspiracy in the press to shit all over Greece because it’s a US ally (?). Anyways, the whole time I was listening all I could think was “Lady, if you think that anyone here gives enough of a shit about Greece to go to all this trouble, you’ve got to be [funny Greek word for crazy].”
It’s bad enough when some janky country blows itself all out of proportion but it’s even worse when it’s janky girls. I don’t mean all girls everywhere are janky and overblow the importance of their gender (although it happens), just certain individual, dramatic girls (they can also be guys, but it’s slightly less common). You know who I’m talking about, the ones who see a fire or a fistfight happening down the block from their window and start saying shit like, “We’re going to die,” and “Oh fuck did you see that? I think they’re/it’s starting to come this way,” and “Do you think we’re safe here,” but they don’t make it sound like a question because they want you to say Hmmm maybe we aren’t safe so they can haul out into the street in their pajamas shouting into their cell phone or at their neighbors about how they’re going to be able to get up the next day and go to work (this part is supposed to be them masking their anxiety by cracking a joke, but it comes out even more anxious because they’re too amped up to pull off a joking one). Then you end up having breakfast with them and some other folks the next day and they put out their hands when they’re sitting down to silence the table and start describing the incident to everyone strictly in terms of how it affected them.
I’m not sure if there’s a specific psychological explanation for this line of thinking (reverse MbP?) but it’s basically the same thing as when a kid at your high school committed suicide or got killed driving drunk and everybody tried to play up their friendship with him to reel in the most attention. Like a pussy version of cutting.
The absolute worst though, is when the same people play the This Is About Me game about shit they see on TV that has absolutely no bearing on their immediate lives. 9/11 is a pretty good example for people who didn’t live in New York or know anyone who died, but the recent war in Georgia really stands out as a misery-coopting bonanza. As soon as the shots of tanks started showing up on CNN, folks all over the internet spewing melodramatic crap like “the Cold War’s restarting” and “Why does give me a sinking feeling in my stomach?” and “Oh no, it’s like 1939 all over again.” Gawker even ran a post about “Why you should be concerned about Georgia” that cited as its primary reason that if the Russian intention was to take over Georgia and then if they decided to attack the Ukraine (a country nine times the size of Geogia with no recent turmoil to use as justification) it could lead to some sort of showdown with NATO. What’s that, three conditionals there? You might as well spend your time being “concerned” that if you left your wallet in a cab and if a serial rapist found it then he could steal your identity and frame you for all his rapes.
We got the feeling this whole Georgia thing and its connection to the West was being a tad overplayed, but it took us over a week to track down a Russian/Caucasus expert who would level with us as they were all busy trying to talk the rest of the press down from the ledge. Finally we got a hold of Justin Logan at the CATO Institute and guess what he had to say? Y’all’s gots to chiiiiiiill.
Vice: So, aside from it being a war and that being a generally cruddy state of affairs, is there any reason people in the US should be worried about what just went down in Georgia?Justin Logan: No. Not at all. You’re right to point out it’s a war—people are being killed, 100,000 people are being displaced from their homes, and it’s very hard for us to conceive of the same thing happening in American territory. But really these sorts of things happen in every corner of the Earth on a regular basis. If we focused ourselves on every one of them, we’d have no time to focus on anything else.
What do you make of the idea that Russia picked this battle over Georgia’s desire to join NATO?I think that the issue of NATO expansion has been lingering in the background, but you can’t single-handedly ascribe this conflict to it. These same Russia-Georgia tensions would have existed even if NATO had been disbanded in 1991. There’s a centuries-old historical grievance there, there’s a territorial grievance, and there’s sort of a longstanding tie between the Russian security establishment and the Ossetian people.
OK, what about just US-Russian politics in general? There’ve been similar claims that Russia’s decision to invade was based on Georgia’s ties with America and US involvement with its military.No, however, I think that if you look at the issues that have been important to Russia in the bilateral relationship, you can look at the decision earlier this year to recognize Kosovo. This was something the Russians tried to do everything in their power to stop, including taking measures in the UN Security Council, and then you had America and Western European countries recognizing the independence of Kosovo nonetheless. This just wasn’t something that was terribly thought about in Washington.
So do you think that this American thoughtlessness led to what happened in Georgia?Well, after the recognition, you had Putin saying rather explicitly “This is an interesting precedent that we have. We’d like to think about other cases in which it might apply. And hey there’s South Ossetia.” But the attention of the American people and even the American foreign policy establishment to these geo-political squabbles half a world away is, in some way rightly, not very high. If we worried about all these scenarios nobody would be able to live his life.
Fair enough.So all this went under the radar screen and then you had the chain of events that we’re all familiar with now. And THEN the response is this sort of “What happened? Why are the Russians invading foreign countries? The Bear’s on the rampage, the Cold War is starting again.” without recognizing some of the antecedent incidents. Again I don’t think you can say if it weren’t for Kosovo none of this would have happened, but the exact contours of the way it happened owed a lot to Kosovo. You could tell that in the press—the Russians came right out and started making these ridiculous claims about how Tshakashvili was committing genocide in South Ossetia, which is obviously not true. There was a concerted effort on the part of the Russians to make a parallel to NATO’s intervention in Serbia. They really tried to keep the narrative as close to the Kosovo example as they could.
Is that because they wanted to get back at us over Kosovo or just because that model provided a good humanitarian excuse for invading?I think there was a previously long existing desire, but the Kosovo example opened this sort of rhetorical door where they could say “Hey look, what you all said was going on in Kosovo was genocide against a certain group of people, and that’s what’s happening here. There was trouble in the security council therefore you circumvented the UN and went in under NATO auspices, you left behind a large military presence and kicked the can of hard political questions down the road and then ten years later unilaterally recognized Kosovo.” If you look at what the Russian design is in the case of South Ossetia, it’s basically exactly the same thing. Come in, win the war, leave a significant deterrent military presence behind in the province, and then slowly try to pry it away over the course of years. And that’s probably what you’re going to see.
OK, what are the odds of this flaring back up and spreading to somewhere like the Ukraine?That was something that again was talked about, but I never saw a very well fleshed out analysis of what exactly was going to happen in the Ukraine. It’s true you have this geopolitical wrestling match over Sebastopol and the Crimea between them and Russia, but it’s an entirely different ballgame. To send military personnel over the border through a significant swath of Ukrainian territory down into Crimea, coupled with a large-scale Naval deployment in the Black Sea—it’s just a different scale and objective. Further Russian-Ukrainian tensions are a prospect, but a lot of the narrative that was advanced in Washington was that Rabid Russia is on the rampage and no one knows where it will stop.
And that was a completely bogus assessment, right?It was a little overheated. Everyone knew the contours of this conflict before it even started—Saakashvili was warning that the Russians were looking for any excuse possible to plunge over the border, they were amassing troops in North Ossetia for a long time. The die had already been cast in terms of the basic nature of the military confrontation.
What about the idea that this whole thing was a ploy to topple the Georgian government and take over the country?There was a lot of speculation that the Russian objective was to get Saakashvili out of power. Certainly there wouldn’t have been anyone rending their clothes and gnashing their teeth in Moscow if he were to have lost power, but I think trying to ascertain Moscow’s original intentions from outside the Kremlin is a sucker’s game. It’s even possible that the Russians simply felt thrust forward by Saakashvili’s incursion into South Ossetia by force, but then were sort of flying by the seat of their pants in seeing what kind of outcome they could get.
All right, what about all this Cold War II business? Is there any accuracy to that comparison? I’m not a big fan of historical analogies generally. The Cold War means something specific, and when you’re talking about one side of the Cold War having an economy the size of Italy and Portugal combined versus the $13 trillion US economy, with military bases around the world—it’s not the same thing. My first stopping point when looking at claims like this is what are the material capabilities of both powers and it just doesn’t match up to the Cold War. There you had two very very serious, very very large global powers inclined to military action. Russia kicking around a smaller, less fortunate country on its border is not significant proof of a new Cold War. Entirely different set of circumstances.
Is there any aspect of this conflict that really, tangibly concerns the West?There is a larger point of what NATO is doing. You saw the statement from their recent summit, where they couldn’t even bring themselves to say that there would be any consequences for Russia down the road. You have the Russian ambassador to NATO literally snickering and saying “The mountain has given birth to a mouse.” It begs the question, what is NATO’s purpose? Is it to promote liberal economics and democratic governance? Or is it a serious, article-five military alliance that threatens nuclear war against Russia if any of its members are attacked? Cause those two things are separable, but you hear NATO advocates in Washington using one or the other of those arguments depending on the audience. The fact of the matter is some people think of it as this democracy-promoting good guys’ club, and other people see it as a hard military alliance against Russia. An unnamed NATO official said “Look, we have no intention of going to war with the Russians over Georgia.” Which is fine because that’s a sensible position, but then there shouldn’t be talk from any member states about making Georgia a NATO member. It’s a military alliance—you don’t write checks for your members you aren’t willing to cash.
*By you we mean all the North American kids shitting themselves on message boards for the past two weeks. If you are one of the 163 people who visits this site from Tbilisi each month we hope you’re OK.