Various conservatives have jumped on my support for President Obama’s attempt to negotiate with Russia–and my belief we should keep in perspective Russia’s various attempts to intimidate its near-neighbors. My favorite is Michael Goldfarb, who served as a McCain pistolero during the campaign and now blogs for the Weekly Standard. As we saw last year, Goldfarb has a penchant for reinventing history–and now he defends McCain’s “We are all Georgians” blurt, and criticizes Barack Obama for calling on both sides to cool it.
But, of course, Obama was right. According to the Organization for Security Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and British monitors on the scene, the Georgians–whose democracy is an inspiration, but not a vital national interest of the United States–foolishly provoked the Russian assault. Furthermore, Goldfarb slags me for pointing out that the Abkhazians (and the Ossetians, for that matter) see themselves more as independent ethnic entities than part of Georgia. Ethnic atomization has been a distinctive part of the post-Soviet crackup–and I, for one, don’t know where to draw the line: Should Chechens get their independence, the Ossetians, the North Ossetians, the Abkhazians? Or is this an internal Russian affair? Reality dictates the latter. We’re not going to go to war over Georgia–although McCain might well have, which is why we’re lucky he lost.
Finally, I love these guys who go after me on motes of dust, but don’t engage on the larger point. Let me repeat: Russia is not the Soviet Union. Except for its nuclear arsenal, it is in no way, shape or form a credible rival–which is why we should be doing what Bush neglected to do: buying up and negotiating down as much of the Russian arsenal as we can. Furthermore, Russia has the potential to be very helpful to us in both Iran and Afghanistan. We should see if we can exploit that, rather than ginning up a rivalry that was always overstated–as Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to say, the Soviet Union was a “sham”–and is now twenty years out of date.