McCain, Obama and Putin

The latest news from the Russia-Georgia front finds the Russians pushing past the disputed regions, and further into Georgia itself. Looks like they're trying to overthrow, or at least powerfully damage, the Saakashvili government, which provoked this crisis. The Georgians are getting their heads handed to them, and have sued for peace. Russia ought to accept that. What's happening now is difficult to justify.

Now that we've got a real international crisis, which of the two presidential candidates would you rather see in the White House handling it?

Here are the initial responses by the candidates. Short version: McCain talks very tough, wants to throw Russia out of the G-8; Obama wants diplomacy to deal with the crisis. The thought of Young Mr. Obama standing up to Vladimir Putin under these circumstances is risible. The idea of John McCain -- whose senior foreign policy adviser was recently a paid lobbyist for the Georgian government -- being in the White House plotting strategy is frightening. Clarification: it's commonsensical that you'd want an old hand in command at a time like this, but the choleric McCain's instincts are so combative and reflexively hostile to Russia that I fear for what kind of mess he would get the US into.

A possible indication: Bill Kristol lays down the neoconservative line in his Times column this morning, calling Putin a "dictator" (how much of a dictator can you be when you are widely popular among your people?), likening him to Hitler, saying the West is being tried in the same way it was tried by Nazi Germany, and suggesting that the US should consider military assistance to Georgia. No, no, no. We have been down this road before. Insofar as McCain would take us down it again, this time with Russia, advantage Obama. Putin's Russia has to be dealt with skillfully and resolutely. We can't keep hauling out the Hitler example to muddy our thinking every time a foreign government does something Washington doesn't like. Think before committing our military to a foreign situation that we don't fully understand!

I think Maximos has a pretty good handle on the situation. Excerpt:

America imprudently extended security assistance to a small nation with no connection to any vital American strategic interest, primarily as an element of a grand geopolitical strategy in which a non-prostrated Russia does not factor, and in which, as many current Western commentators are openly acknowledging, the control of Central Asian petroleum resources does factor, notwithstanding the manifest fact that Western dependence upon Russian petroleum reserves, and the reserves of Russian-allied states, cannot be mitigated substantially, let alone eliminated, so long as Russia remains an intact and functional state. American strategists cannot abide the commonsensical observation that patriotism means that citizens of other nations love their countries as much as we love ours, and labour under the delusions of exceptionalism and indispensability, not to mention the truly bizarre assumption that, if not for various false consciousnesses, citizens of other nations would be delighted to dwell under our tutelage and dominion.

Moreover, it is worth noting that the Russian campaign on behalf of South Ossetia is incontrovertibly the former's prophesied response to the West's world-historical blunder in facilitating the independence of Kosovo: the United States cannot logically traduce the international order of sovereign states at will, and then turn about to demand that other great powers respect that order where it both suits the declared interest of the U.S. for them to do so, but suits the interests of those powers to modify that order (It is worth mentioning, for what it is worth, that the status quo in South Ossetia simply was de facto autonomy from Georgia), and it is loathsome to listen to Bush administration officials, and John McCain, one of whose advisers was until recently a lobbyist for the Georgian government, prattle on about the sovereignty of Georgia. Yes, yes, we understand all of that. Now, hegemonists, heal yourselves!

Bottom line: shades of grey, and no legitimate and objective American interest.

Once again, I commend to you Larison's most excellent blogging on this situation.

UPDATE: And by the way, could we please stop the knee-jerk assertation that my view on this issue has anything to do with my Orthodox Christianity? It doesn't. Georgia is an Orthodox country too, you know. We have Russians and Georgians both in our parish. I don't like or trust Vladimir Putin, and do not consider him Orthodox, no matter what kind of show he puts on for the Russian Orthodox hierarchy. The thing I'm interested in here is trying to understand what's going on in a broader strategic and historical context, without succumbing to the usual Western liberal democratic line. How is it that NATO goes to war to defend Kosovo's secession, but Russia is not permitted to go to war to defend South Ossetia and Abkhazia's secession? To be clear, I don't think Russia gives a rat's rear end about the Abkhazians or South Ossetians; it wants to send a message to NATO that it will not be permitted to expand indefinitely. To the extent that Putin's aggression stops the NATO alliance from overextending itself, thereby drawing the US into future wars it has no business fighting, the KGB SOB has done us a favor. But this has nothing to do with Orthodoxy.