The Long View 2008-08-17: Some Foolish Little Thing in the Caucasus
Ukrainian troops fighting in the Luhansk region, Jan 2015 AFP
As John J. Reilly notes here, and in his review of Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War, while it is important to have a sense of history, you can also be misled if you think that the past will simply be repeated. For example, with China and the United States jockeying for power and influence in the Pacific, I’ve seen declarations that China is today in the place where the US was in the 1930s, with massive industrial capacity that could easily be turned to war.
Well, maybe. All that industrial production could certainly be turned to such purposes, but I doubt that either China or the US has the capacity for the kind of wars that were fought during the Great Lifetime. That kind of single-minded ability to marshal an entire society’s resources to one end is less and less possible all the time. And China is in a totally different spot than the West at present, at the nadir of the grand cycle of unification wrought by the Ming dynasty, rather than shortly before the crystallization of a universal state, like the West..
Not everything is possible to every culture at every phase of its life, even if the people have the knowledge, the resources, and the incentive to do it. I am not saying that war couldn’t result over Taiwan or the position of the Seventh Fleet, or even that it wouldn’t be horrible. It just wouldn’t be like what we’ve seen before.
John also ventured this prediction about Russia and Ukraine, which turned out pretty decent:
I would expect that a Russian enterprise against Ukraine would take the form of military assistance to the Russophile eastern regions of the country, after they have been encouraged to secede from Kiev. If the secession succeeds and it is clear that there will be no help from the West, the western rump of the country could be acquired after suitable elections. The Russian license for these measures would be Europe’s large measure of dependence on Russian gas and oil.
The problems with this plan: Russia needs to sell gas even more than the Europeans need to buy it; and at the risk of repeating my mistake about Georgia, let me suggest that any Russian military moves against the Ukraine would not be so frictionless as to exclude limited but timely Western intervention.
Some Foolish Little Thing in the Caucasus
Actually, it was about the Balkans that Bismarck said that some foolish little thing would cause a general European war, and about that he was right. A similar point has been made in recent days about the Caucasus because of the Russian invasion of Georgia. Indeed, the 1914 analogy has been extended, with no less a person than Paul Krugman of the New York Times opining that the Russian action may mark the end of the Second Age of globalization, as the outbreak of the First World War marked the end of the First Age of Globalization. The analogy is more misleading than helpful, but it is misleading in interesting ways.
1914, as we will be hourly reminded as we approach the centennial of that ominous year, saw an explosion of the international system that has very special predicates. With all due respect to Niall Ferguson, there was nothing accidental about the outbreak of general war in that year but the incident that finally occasioned it. All the great powers were primed, linked, and ready to go. Mobilization in those days required closing down much of everyday life and calling a large fraction of the male workforce to the colors. This status could not be maintained, and the strategic situation was such that each power had to act without delay if it was to have a plausible chance of a satisfactory outcome.
This is not the state of Europe today, even on the Russian side of the border. It’s always possible to imagine a series of missteps leading to a nuclear exchange, of course, but that is different from a situation where mobilized societies had to act or stand down. Even an exchange of declarations of war today would be an exchange of dead letters; or perhaps, as in the 18th century, an exchange of notices of intention to take some forceful action just as soon as everyone gets back from summer holiday and the war loan is approved by the moneylenders. Perhaps the most important difference from 1914 was the parade of foreign ministers and even heads of state to Tbilisi to offer moral support to the Georgian government. In effect, they were offering themselves as human shields. It is doubtful that their presence had much effect on Russian behavior, since the Russians did not intend to actually annex Georgia, at least now, but their presence was evidence that everyone understood that this matter would not be settled by the arbitration of arms.
This is not to deny that there were postmodern flourishes of historic phrases from the era of genuine Grosspolitik. President George Bush’s assertion that “We are all Georgians now” might have caused a stir, if anyone had still been listening to him. This declaration fit the pattern of his public diplomacy for the buildup to the invasion of Iraq. There was what I think is an unanswerable strategic case for launching the war, but George Bush failed to make it, relying instead on talking points about WMD, which everyone assured him would provide television images that would obviate the need of argument. I very much doubt that the president similarly intends to send an American expeditionary force to Georgia, but he has again chosen the lazy way: making a feeble echo of John Kennedy in Berlin, rather than explaining why it is important to maintain an independent Georgia.
The other problem with the president’s remark is that the merits of the Georgian dispute don’t justify the level of identification with Georgia that he is so offhandedly asserting. Georgia is one of those states (which include a majority of the world’s states, I suspect) whose borders do not make particularly good ethnic or linguistic sense. Newly independent Georgia’s treatment of its minorities exacerbated the situation, and the Russians exacerbated it still more by making sure the minorities knew that they had a foreign patron who might, at the right time, solve their problems by force. The Georgians, for reasons I still find obscure, recently tried to reassert police control over one of the minority enclaves. The Russians responded by occupying a third of Georgia.
I stand by the analysis of this class of incident that I offered in my review of Robert Kagan’s The Return of History (though not, perhaps, the bit where I suggest that, if the Russians invaded Georgia, they would lose). In comparing the early 20th century to the early 21st, as I suggest in that review, we should keep in mind the contrast between the Book of Joshua and the Books of Maccabees (I mention Second Maccabees in the review, but both are relevant). It is a contrast, not of tragedy and farce, but of epic and everyday news; and not even of world-historical everyday news.
And just why is it important at any level to maintain an independent Georgia? Because if it becomes clear that the Russians will be allowed to rearrange post-Soviet space just as they like, then the Ukrainians will make whatever arrangement they can with Russia. The addition of the Ukraine to an unpredictable petrolist Russia would mean that Europe would need to have a serious conventional defense again; and yes, that is a problem for the United States.
I would expect that a Russian enterprise against Ukraine would take the form of military assistance to the Russophile eastern regions of the country, after they have been encouraged to secede from Kiev. If the secession succeeds and it is clear that there will be no help from the West, the western rump of the country could be acquired after suitable elections. The Russian license for these measures would be Europe’s large measure of dependence on Russian gas and oil.
The problems with this plan: Russia needs to sell gas even more than the Europeans need to buy it; and at the risk of repeating my mistake about Georgia, let me suggest that any Russian military moves against the Ukraine would not be so frictionless as to exclude limited but timely Western intervention.
As for the rest of the 1914 analogy, it certainly is true that the world economic network in the last generation has become a great bubble factory; and the great grandfather of all bubbles, the Chinese dirigist economy, is probably about to pop. However, after this event, I would not expect the world to fragment into an anarchy of would-be Great Powers seeking security through autarchy. The world insists on going to hell every few generations, but rarely in the same way twice.
Copyright © 2008 by John J. Reilly
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