Wayne Brown is a well-known Trinidadian writer and columnist who now resides in Jamaica. This is the twentieth in his Sunday Stabroek series on the US presidential election.
It must be something about Fridays. This column was all set to discuss this week the amazing self-propulsion of the Clintons, Bill and Hillary, back onto Obama’s stage, when an event of (at least temporarily) surpassing importance occurred. Came Friday morning, and the phenomenal opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics had hardly begun when there came the news that war — real war, with bombers, tanks, artillery and troops — had broken out between Russia and neighbouring Georgia.
Talk about a commotion in the wings of the presidential race!
The events taking place in China and Georgia are more than tenuously connected — and not just because two of the principle players in the armed conflict suddenly taking place in Europe, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and US President GW Bush, are at the time both occupying ringside seats in Beijing.
China has long signalled its intention to use the Beijing Olympics to announce its arrival on the world scene as a superpower, and none who registered the ingenuity of design, perfection in execution, and the sheer ambition and scale of Beijing’s extraordinary opening ceremonies could doubt it had succeeded. It’s not often that hosting the Olympics changes the world’s perception of the host country (notwithstanding the usual hype), but the Beijing Olympics must surely be the exception that proves the rule. It’s hard to imagine that — especially if China follows up its staggering extravaganza by winning the lion’s share of medals at the Games — perceptions globally won’t tilt towards seeing that huge Asian nation as a formidable counter-superpower to the United States — a perception that, by itself, would set swaying the spider’s web that is the current global balance of power.
The Russia-Georgia ex-plosion of hostilities is more immediately alarming — more so because it has all the ingredients of a classic casas belli.
Georgia declared its independence from the collapsing Soviet Union in 1991, but found within its territory the province of South Ossetia, with a heavy Russian population. (North Ossetia is right across the border in Russia.) For 16 years, after the South Ossetians fought it off, the Georgian government has been either too weak or too insecure to assert control of its border province, which in consequence has enjoyed an ad hoc form of self-government.
Georgia President Mikhail Saakashvili is currently in real peril of being ejected from office by an opposition coalition which has no problem with his strong pro-America, pro-Nato stance but is fed up with his handling of domestic affairs — loss of jobs, corruption, human rights abuses (and distrusts the fact that Saakashvili’s avowed heroine is the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher). Launching, and succeeding in, an armed subjugation of South Ossetia is Saakashvili’s last best hope of retaining power: a ‘wag the dog’ scenario with, for the President, unequivocal, all-or-nothing stakes.
So, in ‘invading’ South Ossetia, Saakashvili was acting under compulsion. But so, too, was the Kremlin in confronting him there.
For years, an increasingly oil-rich Russia under Putin has chafed at the loss of its eastern European empire and cast a baleful and avaricious eye on its breakaway states.
Georgia’s defiance is a real strategic blow to Moscow: a major oil pipeline running through it, from Azerbaijan to Turkey, effectively undercuts the Kremlin’s effort to control the huge oil reserves and oil production of the Caucasus and the Caspian and use it — or more specifically, (the threat of) its interruption — as a powerful diplomatic stick, one whose coercive reach extends as far as western Europe. Russia’s designs on Georgia are thus grounded in its current security concerns, as well as perhaps its imperial dreams for the future, no less than in post-imperial pique. Moreover:
In the past three years the Bush administration has established military bases in the Black Sea-bordering countries of Romania and Bulgaria; has been pushing for Georgia’s entry into NATO; has strengthened military relations with Azerbaijan, and is currently planning to erect a ‘missile defence shield’ in the Czech Republic and Poland — the last despite the furious and dead-serious opposition of Putin, who hasn’t been amused by feckless Bush administration protests that it’s intended as a defense against Iran.
A glance at a map will show that these aggressive military moves by the ‘oil barons’ currently occupying the White House are meant increasingly to threaten Russia’s oilfields, almost the sole source of its geopolitical and military heft — and also to quarantine them off from delivering oil to China: a major strategic concern of the Bush-Cheney neo-cons. While a large part of the Bush administration’s bellicosity towards Iran is doubtless due to the prospect of controlling and accessing Iranian oil, it also derives from the White House’s knowledge that a proposed transcontinental pipeline running from Iran to China will permit China to escape such a quarantine.
So the stakes are high all around, and the Georgian president’s televised plea for the US to come to his aid militarily raises them even higher. Even the Bush administration would hardly be reckless enough to confront Russia’s armed forces in South Ossetia, but the web has been set to shaking, and things now can happen anywhere.
For the moment — to segue back to this column’s weekly theme — it’s hard to see events in Georgia playing out a way that helps either Obama or McCain. Both today promptly echoed the White House’s plea for a cessation of hostilities and a negotiated settlement. But in all three cases it was just that, a plea, and it underscored America’s current impotence to intervene.
Everything depends, however, on how far Putin intends to go. If, having wrested control of South Ossetia’s capital city back from Georgia, he stops there, big power agitation will doubtless content itself with grumbling. If, however, he goes on to seize South Ossetia, such a move would show up NATO (and the White House) for the paper tigers that, bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq, they currently are, and would thus radically change the balance of power in the oil-rich region.
And if, in a worst-case scenario, Putin doesn’t halt his offensive at South Ossetia’s border but goes on (as a large part of him must be itching to do) to overrun Georgia itself, world tensions will suddenly be screwed up to breaking point.
In that event, the happy warrior, John ‘Bomb-Iran’ McCain, will find himself in his element at last, to the consternation — and perhaps a grave blow to his presidential aspirations — of Obama the Negotiator.
And such is the world we live in, that all this may have become clear by the time you read this.
