SPEAKING FREELY Wrong friends, wrong enemies
By Andrei Tsygankov
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The United States would be in a state of war with Russia had Georgia been a
member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) when President Mikheil
Saakashvili attacked South Ossetia.
Russia responded by ordering its military to defend South Ossetia and Georgia's
NATO membership would have not restrained Moscow from protecting Russia's most
important interests in the Caucasus. These interests include supporting Russian
citizens in
South Ossetia and preventing military buildup on Russia's southern border.
Few people in the American political class have contributed more to provoking
possible military escalation with Russia than Republican presidential nominee
Senator John McCain.
A prominent member of the American establishment, McCain has been an extremely
partisan advocate of US ties with the small Georgia at the expense of relations
with Russia. McCain advisors are also known to have worked as paid lobbyists
for Georgia. In the words of the New York University law professor Stephen
Gillers, the latter "poses valid questions about McCain's judgment" in choosing
those who "are paid to promote the interests of other nations".
To Russia, the American senator's actions have been nothing short of
provocative, and the Kremlin made it clear that it holds the McCain-advocated
expansion of NATO responsible for the violence in the Caucasus. In the
aftermath of the alliance summit in April 2008, then-president Putin stated,
"We view the appearance of a powerful military bloc on our borders ... as a
direct threat to the security of our country."
More recently, an anonymous senior official at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
predicted a "full-scale crisis of existence" in the United States and a further
cooling of relations between the US and Russia. If McCain is elected president,
it is likely that Russia will be treated as an enemy, rather than a potential
partner, and US-Russia relations will escalate into a military confrontation.
Since 1997 when he first met Saakashvili, McCain's relationship with the future
president of Georgia has became a close friendship. He stood behind Saakashvili
during Georgia's Rose Revolution in 2003; indeed McCain worked to make that
revolution happen. In February 2003, six months before the Rose revolution,
McCain was among those welcoming Saakashvili in Washington when the latter was
received by senior officials, such as Vice President Dick Cheney.
The McCain-led International Republican Institute (IRI), an international wing
of the National Endowment for Democracy, was involved in training and financing
the revolutionary opposition to Saakashvili's political rival Eduard
Shevardnadze. Along with other organizations, such as the National Democratic
Institute, Freedom House and the George Soros foundation, McCain's IRI
presented its activities as a support of elections and the democratic process,
but in reality it was biased in favor of the pre-selected candidate
Saakashvili. On October 2003, immediately before the revolution, McCain
traveled to Georgia to convince then-president Shevardnadze to relinquish power
after conducting "badly flawed elections".
After helping to bring Saakashvili to power, McCain became a leading voice in
advocating for Georgia's membership in NATO - against Russia's objections.
Along with other anti-Russian lobbyists and sympathetic politicians, McCain saw
the alliance's purpose as to contain Russia and promote American domination in
the Eurasian region with its vast resources and geopolitical importance.
Saakashvili had his own objectives in mind in pushing his nation to NATO. In
August 2004, Georgia first used force against South Ossetia, attempting to win
control over the strategic Djava district. In the fall of the same year,
Saakashvili also turned down Russia's offer of a good neighbor treaty and aimed
at solving territorial disputes with Abkhazia and South Ossetia by relying on
political support from the United States.
In early 2005, Senators John McCain and Hillary Clinton "rewarded" Saakashvili
for his strategic choice by nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize for
"leading freedom movements in their respective countries" and winning "popular
support for the universal values of democracy, individual liberty, and civil
rights". This emboldened Georgia's leader to the point that balanced American
observers, like Dmitri Simes, asked: "Why do we allow and sometimes even
encourage Georgia to continue provoking Moscow at our expense?"
In August 2006, Senator McCain again traveled to Georgia as a part of a US
Senate delegation. In evaluating the situation in the region, he found "a
tremendous progress" in Georgia, but decried Russia's role, urging for the
replacement of its peacekeepers in the region. Although his objective was to
assess the state of Georgia's frozen conflicts and NATO membership effort,
McCain had come to the region with his conclusions already formed.
Speaking in Brussels before his trip to the Caucasus during the same year, he
insisted that "We should be crystal clear: these conflicts endure because of
Russian policy and Russian support for illegal separatists." He further
condemned "Russia's predatory use of energy supplies and its reversal of
democracy at home."
In the meantime, McCain's advisors lobbied on behalf of Georgia's NATO
membership in Washington and Europe. According to records at the Justice
Department's foreign agents registration office, in recent years McCain's
advisor Randy Scheunemann and his partner, Mike Mitchell, were paid more
$830,000 by Georgia for advocating its membership to NATO.
Holding neo-conservative political beliefs, these American lobbyists did not
see a principal conflict with US national interests: they were providing
Georgia and others with highly questionable security guarantees against Russia
in exchange for obtaining Tbilisi's full support of even more doubtful American
policies, such as the invasion of Iraq, all at the cost of angering Moscow.
Instead of repairing its relations with Russia, tiny Georgia reciprocated by
sending the third largest military contingent to Iraq and paying handsomely to
anti-Russian lobbyists in Washington.
When in November 2007 Saakashvili used force against his opponents at home,
McCain's voice wasn't heard among the critics of Georgia. However, when Russia
recently intervened to stop the Georgian military attack on South Ossetia, the
American Senator was again accusing the Kremlin - this time of "a de facto
annexation of part of Georgia" - and urging Western governments not to allow
Russia to "undermine Georgian sovereignty."
So extensive was McCain's involvement with Saakashvili during the crisis that
the two talked over the phone several times a day. As Saakashvili said,
referring to his American friend, "he spends less time on his presidential
campaign these days and lots of time on Georgia." In his turn, the McCain said
presumptuously, "I told him that I know I speak for every American when I said
to him, today, we are all Georgians."
Russia has always been presented by McCain in an extremely negative light, and
as deserving of only a hard-line response. Assisted by the American media, the
Republican Senator never missed an opportunity to blame Russia for everything
that was going wrong in the former Soviet region and outside. It was following
McCain's statement warning of "a creeping coup against the forces of democracy
and market capitalism" in Russia, delivered in the Senate on November 6, 2003,
that many on Capitol Hill, including senators Joseph Lieberman, Joseph Biden
and Richard Lugar, were soon calling on the administration to get tough with
the Kremlin.
In 2004, McCain prominently supported the pro-Khodorkovsky campaign, along with
such known advocates of American hegemony as Richard Perle. He subsequently
made a number of anti-Russian statements and co-signed a number of anti-Russian
letters, such as An Open Letter to the Heads of State and Government Of the
European Union and NATO, organized by the right-wing group the Project for New
American Century and released in September 2004.
During the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, McCain was again on the frontline. In
addition to traveling to the country, the American Senator publicly promoted
breaking Russia's Ukraine connection, and insisted on "tying" Ukraine "to the
West". Along with others in the American political class, he overwhelmingly
supported the color revolutionaries' drive to join NATO and circumvent Russia's
energy pipelines, claiming that doing otherwise would amount to appeasing the
Kremlin. In early 2005, McCain was among the first to call for expelling Russia
from the G8.
In the Caucasus or outside, McCain believed that Russia was doing everything in
its power to restore the old imperial control. Whatever actions were pursued by
the Kremlin - reluctance to dismantle its military bases in Georgia, the
exercise of force in Chechnya, promises to preventively use military force
outside its own territory to respond to terrorist threats - was construed by
McCain and his supporters as an imperialism incompatible with Western
objectives and Russia's own international treaty obligations. Whatever
instability persisted in the former Soviet region was linked to the Kremlin's
failures or deliberate manipulations.
These policy beliefs partly explain McCain's dismissive, even contemptuous tone
while speaking about Russia. For example, in his remarks to the Los Angeles
World Affairs Council, McCain proceeded from assumptions about the Kremlin's
threatening intentions and spoke of "Russia's nuclear blackmail" - apparently
referring to the nation's unwillingness to acquiesce to the US missile defense
system (MDS) plans. McCain's disdain for Russia's view was clearly revealed
during a Republican debate on MDS, when he said "I don't care what [Vladimir
Putin's] objections are to it."
In his article published in the Financial Times, McCain appealed to the
European audience, seeking to rally it behind the US on an anti-Russian
platform. Repeating the nuclear blackmail thesis, the republican senator
charged that Putin's "blend of cynicism and Napoleonic delusion presents a
dangerous challenge to the Euro-Atlantic community," and he insisted on
confronting Russia's "profoundly authoritarian regime, dominated by an
intelligence service hostile to Western liberal values".
Some have suggested that, if he is elected president, McCain may be restrained
in his further actions toward Russia. American institutions and the heavy
burden of responsibility for maintaining peace and stability in the world may
indeed encourage him to try diplomacy rather than belligerent rhetoric and
hot-headed actions in Eurasia.
But there is also the possibility that McCain will do what he says, and chose
steps leading to a military escalation with the second largest world nuclear
power. The question is whether Americans would want to explore that
possibility.
Andrei P Tsygankov is professor of international relations and political
science at San Francisco State University and the author of Anti-Russian
Lobby and American Foreign Policy (forthcoming).
(Copyright 2008 Andrei P Tsygankov.)
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say.
Please click hereif you are interested in contributing.
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