Putin's pyrrhic victory

[GHOST OF RONBO]

Napoleon famously said, "When you set out to take Vienna, take Vienna"—a warning against the risks of failure or hesitation in a military campaign. Vladimir Putin did not listen to this advice.

If Russian tanks had rolled into Tbilisi within the first week of the conflict in Georgia, he could have deposed the Saakashvili government and installed a puppet regime, then presented an unprepared world with a fait accompli. By hesitating, however, he has allowed us to turn Tbilisi into West Berlin, a scrappy little outpost of freedom that we will now support with airlifts, military aid, and diplomatic pressure.

So while the Russians are now gloating because they control much of central Georgia and because they have successfully intimidated the French, their invasion of Georgia is likely to turn out, in the long run, to be a failure.

In fact, the main effect so far has been to embolden Moscow's opponents in Eastern Europe, prompting them to break their ties to Russia and to hasten and deepen their ties to the United States. The appearance of the presidents of Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia by the side of President Saakashvili in Tbilisi is a sign that Putin's invasion has galvanized a de facto Eastern European alliance against Russia.

Almost immediately, we have seen the results: Ukraine is now threatening to place restrictions on the movements of Russian warships based in the Black Sea port of Sevastopol, as a first step toward kicking the Russians out of the port—though it is unclear how the Ukrainians would enforce such an eviction, since Putin's Russia seems to answer only to brute force.

But even more interesting is the sudden approval of an agreement between the US and Poland to install a missile defense base on Polish territory. Putin has succeeded in driving Poland and the US closer together, forming a very formidable core for an anti-Russian Eastern European alliance. Whatever Russia believes it has won in Georgia, it may turn out to be a Pyrrhic victory.

"Russia Lashes Out on Missile Deal," Thom Shanker and Nicholas Kulish, New York Times, August 15

The United States and Poland reached a long-stalled deal on Thursday to place an American missile defense base on Polish territory, in the strongest reaction so far to Russia's military operation in Georgia.

Russia reacted angrily, saying that the move would worsen relations with the United States that have already been strained severely in the week since Russian troops entered separatist enclaves in Georgia, a close American ally. At a news conference on Friday, a senior Russian defense official, Col. Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn, suggested that Poland was making itself a target by agreeing to host the anti-missile system. Such an action "cannot go unpunished," he said.

The deal reflected growing alarm in a range of countries that had been part of the Soviet sphere about a newly rich and powerful Russia's intentions in its former cold war sphere of power. In fact, negotiations dragged on for 18 months—but were completed only as old memories and new fears surfaced in recent days.

Those fears were codified to some degree in what Polish and American officials characterized as unusual aspects of the final deal: that at least temporarily American soldiers would staff air defense sites in Poland oriented toward Russia, and that the United States would be obliged to defend Poland in case of an attack with greater speed than required under NATO, of which Poland is a member.

Polish officials said the agreement would strengthen the mutual commitment of the United States to defend Poland, and vice versa….

Stop-and-start negotiations over the arrangement that was sealed Thursday had been under way for almost two years, with the Polish government reluctant to press the deal in the face of strong opposition—and retaliatory threats—from Moscow.

For its part, Washington had balked at some of Poland's demands, in particular the sale of advanced air defense systems that were unrelated to shooting down ballistic missiles.

But in a sign of the widening repercussions of the conflict in Georgia, those concerns were cast aside, as the offensive by Russia's military across its borders was viewed around the world as a sign of Moscow's determination to reimpose its influence across the old Soviet bloc….