What Does America Want in Europe?

Russia does not get good media coverage in the West. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the introduction of market economy and the diversification of the press notwithstanding, Solzhenitsyn’s motherland is largely perceived as the “Gulag Archipelago.” Russia’s president, now serving as its current prime minister, Vladimir Putin, is seen as a KGB old hand. Nothing you can do about it. Chase away the prejudices through the door, and in they return by the window. Think of former U.S. president Carter: having sealed a peace agreement between Egypt and Israel, he is largely remembered today as President Peanut Farmer.

According to the Western media, it is obvious that on August 8, 2008, on the day the Olympic games opened in Beijing, it is evil Russia, which, just like that, attacked Georgia, a small democratic country in the Caucasus, sowing panic everywhere. Furthermore, it is a country managed by a young and sympathetic man who can speak both English and French, and who is also a graduate of Columbia University in the United States.

However, even Moscow’s keenest adversaries are obliged to recognize today that in fact it was Georgian military forces which attacked the pro-Russian separatist province of Ossetia in the South, bombarding its capital and killing the Russian soldiers who had been stationed there for the last fifteen years, in accordance with a UN resolution to maintain local peace. Whatever legitimacy the separatist Ossetians and Abkhazians may claim, this is a matter for debate, not an aggressive takeover. Especially if re-enforced by Georgian allegations that the Russians had been preparing for this for quite a while. Then what is the reason for Mikhaïl Saakachvili’s initiative? Did he take it on his own, or was the U.S. complicit in this affaire?

Far be it for me to defend the Russians, whose brutality in response to any aggression against their interests is well known (Afghanistan, Chechnya …). But I do try to understand the strategy and goals behind president Saakachvili’s choosing a war, which facilitated the destruction in three days of the military potential of Georgia. The Georgian president will certainly have to account for his decision to his voters, once the dead are buried and the ruins cleared away. But what was President Bush’s role in this business?

From what I had seen on television, when the war in Ossetia was announced, what struck me most was the difference in the reactions exhibited by the U.S. president and Vladimir Putin. Both attended the opening of the Olympic Games. The Prime Minister at once took a plane for the Caucasus, bypassing Moscow; the U.S. president, in contrast, was content to give a few declarations, almost offhandedly, from Beijing.

It should be recalled that Bush did not cease, ever since his inauguration, to work towards isolating Russia, economically and geographically. The true reasons for this escape me, except the consideration, promoted by his neocon advisors, that there is no difference between the former Soviet Union and today’s Russia. The battle for world domination between the two superpowers did not lose any of its exigency.

For a moment there, Putin believed in Bush’s friendship and tried to give him some pledges of good will. Did he not dismantle Russian military bases in Cuba and Vietnam? Did he not integrate the SOEC (Organization for safety and the co-operation in Europe)? Who wouldn’t share his disillusion and anger in seeing the United States establish military bases in Central Asia, in Georgia, in the Czech Republic, and in Poland?

Now I come to Europe. This is the second conflict on its continent, after the conflagration of Ex-Yugoslavia. It is therefore up to Europe to resolve the conflict. It is just as well that Nicolas Sarkozy acknowledged this responsibility and betook himself immediately to the region. But vis-à-vis this anachronistic confrontation, between Russia and America, what can Europe do? First of all, [Europe can] exist, as Stefan Zweig and others prescribed. To exist, can Europe utilize the presence of NATO forces, which had been created in 1949 in Washington to resist the expansionist aims of the Soviet Union? One does not have to be anti-American, as is the case with me, to consider that Europe’s independence is not compatible with its membership in NATO. Their interests are not always identical. Let’s recall Iraq.

To put it briefly, what’s George W. Bush’s business in Georgia? I believe that the military takeover in Ossetia by Saakachvili was coordinated with American advisers and approved by Condoleeza Rice in her last visit to Tbilisi. Neither Bush nor Saakachvili were surprised by the violence of the Russian reaction. Their strategies relied on the Russian reaction and the subsequent media furor that ensued. Even the meeting of the Polish, Ukrainian and Baltic, all Russophobic, leaders on August 12 in Tbilisi was pre-planned. I’m willing to bet that in the coming days we will see a whipping up of the dangers these small countries are facing from the military force and the economic interests of the country of Gazprom. This “danger” will justify a posteriori the expansion of the American presence in these regions, to the detriment of the solidarity and integrity of Europe. Vladimir Putin does not play for failures, unlike all the Russian leaders preceding him. He is a judoka. The judoka does not need force to win the match. The judoka knows how to take advantage of the force of his enemy in order to knock him down.