Georgia and the Former Soviet Union: Impacts & Options

Ukranian President Victor Yushchenko discusses recent events in Georgia, in "Georgia and The Stakes For Ukraine." Note especially this quote:

"The tragic events in Georgia also exposed the lack of effective preventive mechanisms by the United Nations, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and other international organizations."

They're only exposed if anyone was stupid enough to believe in them in the first place, against all available evidence. See also Poland's foreign minister, Radek Sikorski:

"Parchments and treaties are all very well, but we have a history in Poland of fighting alone and being left to our own devices by our allies."

Russia's actions have even prompted renewed debate in Sweden and Finland about joining NATO. Speaking of Finland, Max Boot makes a very different point. Eastern Europe, including the Ukraine, has the means to defend itself...

The 2 Approaches

Ultimately, there are only 2 approaches when one is faced by a larger neighbor or Great Power at one's doorstep, with designs on one's territory or regime.

Option #1 is acquiescence to its policy demands. Libya is a good modern example of how that doesn't always come out badly. They came clean on a nuclear/biochemical WMD program that was further along than the CIA thought, dismantled it transparently, and openly addressed their previous involvement in terrorist acts. Response: growing integration into the international community, regime still in power - probably with a big infusion of new French military equipment pretty soon.

If the Great Power is inflexibly predatory, however, as China was with Tibet and Russia has been with Georgia, we come to option #2: making it too expensive for the Great Power or hostile neighbour to force the issue. In other words, deterrence.

Diplomacy is a viable tool in this regard. Mongolia, for instance, is fated to balance perilously between Russia and China. As the threat from one grows, its best hope is usually to tilt toward the other and hope to play them off. Robert Kaplan's excellent book Imperial Grunts has a whole chapter on American efforts in Mongolia. The USA acknowledges the reality that America can't save Mongolia if it comes to that. So they work to make the Mongolians more capable on their own, while improving ties with other nations via participation in UN peacekeeping missions et. al. That's certainly no guarantee, as Georgia demonstrates, but better something than nothing.

Note, however, that the tools for option 2 are weighed as (capability x likelihood of capability being used). Which is why Yushchenko's assessment is an absolute killer for the UN or OECD as a solution to any serious security issue. Likelihood of effective response approaches zero. Likelihood of their effectiveness for anything involving Russia? Zero. And any number times zero is... that's right, zero.

Might as well just admit this up front. Even as we admit that there are no guarantees in international relations.

Incidentally, that lack of guarantees is why "prevention" as a geopolitical doctrine is a simple impossibility. At some point, in some places, prevention will always fail or break down. What then?

This leads us to Max Boot's point re: defense expenditures. Singapore, which rightly distrusts its neighbours, spends about 5-6% of GDP on defense as a matter of policy, and uses a total mobilization concept as the core of its defense organization. So, too, do the Israelis. Switzerland spends less on defense these days, but keeps the total mobilization concept. Finland employed a similar model when it bloodied the Soviet Union so badly in the early days of World War 2 that the Russians decided to settle for a lot less (vid. the term "Finlandization"), declare victory, and leave.

No Guarantees

There are, of course, no guarantees here. It takes only one to start a fight, and war is a chancy business. Conventional wars are won in part by smart planning, acquisition, and training, but they also frequently turn on chance and unforseen circumstances.

Those include personalities, which can vary in ruthlessness and determination. Joe Stalin takes a back seat to no-one in that area, but a million or so Russian casualties in Finland gave even Stalin pause. Not that he really cared about a million lives; he killed 20-30 times that many. But he did have all those other countries he had seized during the war. Finland could not be allowed to become a potential problem that would tie up so many Russian troops in perpetuity, and perhaps serve as an example to others. The Finns had raised the stakes high enough to give themselves more options.

On the flip side, Poland had tried the same thing, from a weaker position. Soviet treachery during the Warsaw Uprising, and massacres of Poles in the Katyn Forest, left the country with little will to resist, and no successes to hang on to. As a result, it was treated like the other East Bloc acquisitions. It would be almost 30 years before Lech Walesa's Solidarnosc organization and a Polish Pope could fan those flames again, under more fortunate external circumstances.

On the asymmetric side, guerilla insurgencies often fail, despite the romanticism and myth associated with them - unless strongly backed by a capable outside power. And even that offers no guarantees.

Despite the best co-belligerent efforts of Islamists and the Left on various fronts of the war, for instance, America is now close to victory in Iraq. In large part, this is thanks to its Islamist opponents' essential barbarism. It also stems from the American military's growing understanding that the real terrain it was fighting on was social networks in a pervasively armed society. America also won in the Philippines, the British won in Malaysia and Oman, et cetera. Despite American efforts, the Sandinistas weren't really losing their grip in Nicaragua until their backer the Soviet Union collapsed. Et cetera.

Russia's victory in Chechnya, in contrast, stemmed from a extremely brutal approach of scorched earth tactics and assassination squads. Russia has used these tactics before, during the Basmachi revolts in Central Asia in the 1920. They worked then, and the just worked again. In between, Stinger anti-aircraft missiles probably did more than anything else to derail a similar campaign that was succeeding in Afghanistan. As part of a more strictly internal campaign, Guatemala has won with the same kinds of tactics during the 1970s and 1980s. Nor are they alone in doing so successfully.

As I say, insurgencies can fail. Sometimes, they fail for internal reasons. Sometimes, the other side is simply ruthless and determined enough to crush them.

I keep hammering on this, because so few people understand it. There are no guarantees in the field of human conflict. Only a set of fuzzy "Schrodinger's percentages" that live within broad limits, and truly coalesce only when put to a test.

Defense and the Economy

Not that plans for guerilla warfare are useless. Pre-planning for a total mobilization concept can indeed raise the stakes. Max Boot's suggestion re: having lots of anti-tank rockets and portable anti-air missiles in Russia's neighbors would indeed increase the danger factor for Putin, by creating a pool of sophisticated weapons that could be taken and used in a crisis. Stocking them is also relatively cheap, so it's possible to increase a country's deterrent capability with a quick jump.

Boot is not wrong, therefore; but he isn't wholly right, either.

Shoulder-fired rockets and missiles are not sufficient on their own. For instance, Russian armies have always put a lot of emphasis on artillery, and it isn't the modern American approach of "GMLRS rocket fired from 50 miles away takes out an al-Qaeda safe house, while leaving its next-door neighbours standing." It's more like the rolling carpet/ corridor clearance approach used in Grozny, and by the Americans themselves during urban fighting in World War 2. Unlike Afghanistan, many of Russia's neighbours have terrain that's well suited to this approach.

Solutions to that kind of problem tend to involve alliances, necessarily backed by more conventional forms of local military power. Buying that backup requires money.

This was a problem for Finland in 1939, whose troops referred to their obsolete equipment as "Model Cajander" after the idiot Prime Mister who cut military funding in the 1930s. Fortunately, they could all ski cross-country, and had the option of sucking in their enemy and attacking during the winter snows. But their "Winter War" was a full conventional army battle with a lot of commando-style operations, not an insurgency.

Right now, Boot points out that Bulgaria is one of just 4 NATO states with GDP% defense expenditures over 2% (USA near 4%, Britain and France near 2.5%, Bulgaria just above 2%). Most of western Europe is near or below 1%, actually, while Eastern Europe is usually in the 1.5-2% region.

Clearly, that won't build a deterrent. Problem is, if you're Bulgaria, even 4% would be limited in terms of what it buys. Would it help? Yes. 10 years from now? Well, it depends. To create credible deterrents for the long term, these countries need money in their economies, as well as a higher budgetary priority for defense.

That's true now. It will become more true later.

The Future Threat

Russia under Putin is and will be a predator state. Period. The bad news is, its combination of resources and successful leverage in its own geographic back-yard means it's going to have lots more money to spend on weapons and other tools of predation.

The good news is that it has a whole arms industry to rebuild first, because it lost almost all of its engineers in the 1990s collapse. Once orders go away, people find new jobs, and you rarely get them back later. Especially since oil & gas are more attractive careers for Russian engineers these days. But Czar Putin I intends to rebuild that industry over the next decade, in a country where his intention is effectively law. He will do so, and the budgets to catalyze and take advantage of that rebuilding are beginning already.

For Eastern Europe, therefore, and for larger Central Asian neighbours like Kazakhstan, growing their economies must also be a long term priority, so that they'll still be able to keep pace a decade from now.

Personally, I thought that given their history with Russia, the Ukranians were crazy to give up the nuclear weapons on their territory after the USSR collapsed. That would have been the complete equalizer, right there. But they did it, and it's water under the bridge. Mr. Yushchenko will have to do this the hard way instead. If he can.

If I was the Ukraine, I'd definitely be looking at boosting the defense budget right now, especially around the anti-tank and anti-air missiles their Soviet legacy industries already make. I'd also diversify my foreign suppliers with a particular focus on finding some Turkish firms and partnerships to deal with, and make separate deals that would add modern diesel-electric submarines with ship-killing missiles as an asymmetric conventional threat.

Longer term, however, Ukraine's prosperity requires integration into Europe's industrial and agricultural markets. If you've ever seen pictures, you'll understand why the Ukraine has been Europe's bread basket for centuries - and also how hard Stalin must have worked to starve 6-7 million Ukranians, while the NY Times covered it up. That trade income will be needed to keep pace with a resource-rich Russia, and ensure Ukranian independence over the long haul.

So, yes, spend some more on defense, as Max Boot suggests, and make the case to your people as to why. After all, "Model Cajander" stuff won't cut it when push comes to shove, just as the UN and lies about a mythical "international community" will provide zero protection against Russia.

Even so, Viktor Yuschenko's most important initiative for the Ukraine may not be NATO membership (which looks very doubtful) - but EU membership. In his case, it's also (to quote James Carville) "the economy, stupid".

Which is why American policies that recognize this element via bilateral free trade agreements with countries like Poland, the Ukraine, et. al. are just as important as any military aid or equipment we may choose to send.