Welcome Back to the 19th Century

By JOSEF JOFFE
FROM THE WALL STREET JOURNAL EUROPE

Wait a minute, isn't this the 21st? Chronologically, it is. But last Friday, Russia -- like the mad scientist Emmett Brown in "Back to the Future" -- thrust us backward by about 150 years in the Caucasus: into the age of imperialism and geopolitics, resource wars and spheres of influence.

It was strictly 19th-century when Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin casually announced that "war has started." In the old days, such pronunciamentos were routine; war, to recall Clausewitz, was just the "continuation of politics with the admixture of other means." (For the specifics, look up: the Crimean War, Prussia's conquest of Germany, the Balkan Wars; then go farther afield to the Spanish-American and Russo-Japanese wars.)

But this is the 21st century, isn't it? At least in that vast swath extending from Berkeley to Berlin and to Beijing (with an outrigger in Moscow), anything "geo" could only refer to "economics." Welfare had replaced warfare. Tankers had replaced tanks, balance of payments the balance of power. At least in the Berlin-Berkeley Belt, all of us were playing win-win games, wheeling, dealing and consuming.

Chanting "no more war," we worried about "soft politics" and "soft power": how to battle AIDS and desertification, SARS and subprime crises. Sure, in international politics, it was still hardball -- the eternal struggle for influence and advantage, but without the ultima ratio. Basically, we in the West didn't think that somebody in the bleachers would empty an AK-47 at us.

Say hello to Vladimir Putin and his stand-in Dmitry Medvedev. By attacking Georgia, they have raised the curtain on a post-World War II premiere. They have launched the first real war in "Greater Europe" since 1945. (The 1990s clashes in the Balkans were secessionist/internal wars; the invasion of Prague in 1968 was, if you pardon the expression, an act of "bloc recentralization.")

But the Caucasus is the real thing: armies marching, fleets circling, rockets flaring. Many are blaming "hot-headed" President Mikheil Saakashvili for having baited the bear, and he is no angel, for sure. Didn't he go first by ordering his army into South Ossetia?

But in 1939, they also blamed the "hot-headed" Poles for refusing to placate Hitler, and so he just had to flatten Warsaw on Sept. 1. They also castigated the Czechs, a "faraway country of which we know little" for being so obstinate in resisting German demands on the Sudetenland.

Apologists for Russia can point to lots of mitigating circumstances, starting with the biggest one of Christmas Day 1991, when the hammer-and-sickle flag over the Kremlin went down for the last time, and up went the Russian tricolor. Poof, and a whole empire from the Baltic to Kazakhstan was suddenly gone. Yes, that chilled the Russian soul, and so did Georgia's love affair with the United States. How dare Georgia, the birthplace of Stalin, sidle up to the EU and NATO?

In the greater scheme of things, though, Georgia's geopolitical crimes pale against a simple historical truth: 8/8 is payback for 12/25, when the Soviet Empire expired.

That, as Mr. Putin has told us, was the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century," and ever since he was anointed neo-czar in 2000, he has been working hard, and as time went by ever more ham-handedly, to reverse the verdict of the Cold War -- to regain what Russia had lost.

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So, forget about Mr. Saakashvili's bluster and bumbling; think "revisionism" and "expansionism," terms beloved by diplomatic historians trying to explain the behavior of rock-the-boat states. A revisionist power wants back what it once had; an expansionist power wants more for itself and less for the rest. The R&E Syndrome is a handy way to explain all of Mr. Putin's strategy in the past eight years. Draw an arc from the Baltic to the Caspian and then start counting.

Moscow has unleashed a cyberwar against tiny Estonia, formerly a Soviet republic. It has threatened the Czech Republic and Poland with nuclear targeting if they host U.S. antimissile hardware on their soil that could not possibly threaten Russia's retaliatory potential. It has exploited small price disputes (normally resolved by lawyers screaming at each other) to stop gas deliveries and thus show Ukraine, Belarus and former Warsaw Pact members who runs the "Common House of Europe," to recall Mikhail Gorbachev's famous phrase.

Mr. Putin has always reserved the harshest treatment for Georgia. Tbilisi's mortal sin was the attempt to get out from under the bear's paw and snuggle up to the West. Ever since, Moscow has tried to subjugate Georgia or to split it up. It was either undermining the government by cutting off trade and gas, or putting the whole country on the butcher's block. Hence Russia's support, including arms and troops, for the secession of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Reports from the fighting suggest that Russia's war aims go way beyond driving Georgian troops from South Ossetia. According to President Saakashvili, the Russians have captured the city of Gori in central Georgia, cutting the country into two. Moscow denies this.

The object is pure 19th-century: domination plus winning the resource war. Georgia is the "last of the independents," so to speak, a critical conduit of oil and gas that goes around Russia into the Black Sea and (with a planned gas pipeline) via Turkey into the Mediterranean. It is no accident that Russian planes are bombing throughout the country, and narrowly "missed" pipelines. The message to the West is: "You don't really want to invest in energy here."

If Moscow gains control over Georgia, it is "good night, and good luck" to Europe. All of its gas and oil bought in Eurasia (minus the Middle East) will pass through Russian hands in one way or the other.

So, in the Caucasus, we are not observing restless natives turning faraway "frozen conflicts" into hot ones. Who ever heard of Abkhazia? And isn't "Ossetia" some kind of caviar? No, these are the flash points of the 21st century's Great Game, and the issue is: Who will gain control over the Caspian Basin, the richest depository of strategic resources next to the Middle East.

By penetrating deeply into Georgia, Russia is signaling to the West: "We will!" Alas, neither the U.S. nor the EU was prepared for the return of the 19th century. They thought that Clausewitz was dead once and for all, that it was win-win games now and forever, that Russia, lured by respectability and riches, would turn into a responsible great power. Apparently, George F. Kennan, the diplomat and historian, had it right. To him is attributed a very apropos aphorism: "Russia can have at its borders only vassals or enemies."

But the issue runs a lot deeper as of 8/8: What are Russia's borders? Will it be satisfied with Georgia? As Prince Gorchakov, Russian chancellor, put it in 1864, in the midst of the Russian conquest of the Caucasus: "The greatest difficulty is to know when to stop." And what is the regime's character? Government by, for and of goons?

At least we now know one thing: Dreams of multipolarity, of governance by committee, are premature. Revisionist powers are never responsible. Which goes for China, too. Though it pursues a "peaceful rise," it also wants more for itself and less for the common good. Indeed, it was China and the other wannabe-superpower, India, that buried the Doha Round and thus any chance for expanded free trade.

Which leaves us with the two usual suspects, America and Europe, to take care of global business. And with NATO, the alliance supposedly doomed by victory in the Cold War. With 8/8, Messrs. Putin and Medvedev have given the old lady more steroids than might have been consumed on the way to the Beijing Olympics.

Mr. Joffe is publisher-editor of Die Zeit and a fellow of the Institute for International Studies and the Hoover Institution, both at Stanford.

Why Tony Blair
May Be Having a Laugh

By KYLE WINGFIELD

When Gordon Brown returns home from his summer vacation, he may find that the locks at 10 Downing Street have been changed. The downward political spiral of Britain's prime minister quickened after a special-election loss in his native Scotland last month. Meanwhile, Labour backbenchers are bickering and ministers are not-so-subtly jockeying to replace him. For the first time in nearly two decades, the Tories are ascendant.

And somewhere, Tony Blair is having a good laugh.

AP

Blairism, so reviled as the root of Labour's problems -- and by extension of Britain's -- remains the driving force in U.K. politics more than a year after its namesake's retirement. It, more than party lines, is what divides Westminster these days.

First consider post-Blair Labour. Mr. Brown's premiership, which began in June 2007, might be summarized as one long spell of dithering: over calling snap elections last fall (in the end, he didn't); over nationalizing mortgage lender Northern Rock (he did, but too late); over planned tax hikes (he's dropped most of them to quell voter rebellions). But his biggest vacillation has been over pressing forward with Blairism.

A quick aside here: Blairism is better known as New Labour, the movement that turned a formerly unelectable party into a vote-winning juggernaut as of 1997. But Mr. Brown either abandoned or never really bought into some of New Labour's central tenets. For example, he rejected Thatcherite economics which Mr. Blair had embraced -- namely, low headline tax rates and disciplined spending -- as well as using competition and choice to revamp the National Health Service and education. New Labour minus the convictions and personality of Mr. Blair isn't really new.

The cost of ditching Blairism was most brutally exposed in a memo by Mr. Blair himself that was leaked to the press this month. The memo was reportedly penned in September, three months after Mr. Brown took office. Referring to himself, Mr. Brown and New Labour by their initials, Mr. Blair says "GB" created a "lamentable confusion of tactics and strategy" by trying to "define [himself] by reference to TB i.e. this was not the era of spin, we are going to be honest, the style would change etc.

"Strategically," Mr. Blair continued, "the consequence was twofold: a) we dissed our own record -- instead of saying we are building on the achievements, confronting new challenges, we joined in the attack on our own ten years -- a fatal mistake if we do not correct it and b) because we were disowning ourselves as a government, we junked the TB policy agenda but had nothing to put in its place."

He concluded by noting that "The choice is and always was between GB running as the change candidate or as continuity NL. . . . By trying to be change, he . . . never [played] the game that gives us the only chance of a 4th term."

Inside the Brown government, the senior minister who seems to best understand the party's need to get back to Blairism is David Miliband, the foreign secretary.

Mr. Miliband is a former aide to Mr. Blair. He also is the author of a July 30 op-ed in the Guardian that has been widely interpreted as the launch of a leadership campaign against Mr. Brown. In his op-ed, Mr. Miliband refers four times to 1997 or the past 10 years, and following through with the work that began then. He doesn't mention Mr. Brown even once. That article preceded the leak of the Blair memo by four days, leading many to conclude that Mr. Miliband is the front man for a Blairite counter-counterrevolution.

An even bigger vindication of Blairism can be found in David Cameron's Conservative Party. For what is Cameronism if not Blairism?

This charge is admittedly a cliché, but it's a conception that the Tories themselves have promoted. In May 2007, shortly after Mr. Blair announced his retirement, shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne said, "As the prime minister leaves office, there is an agreement between him and ourselves about the way forward."

Mr. Osborne may be correct, but not all Tories are happy about this. Tax cuts, for example, still sound good to many Conservatives -- not least after taxes have steadily crept up under Labour. The state share of the economy is now larger in Britain than in Germany. Yet the "Cameroons" have pledged to "share the proceeds of growth" between higher spending and only small tax cuts.

All of this will come to a head when Britons next vote -- no later than May 2010, but potentially sooner if Mr. Brown is pushed out and his successor recognizes the need for a new mandate. Labour may be booted out of No. 10 whenever the next election is held. But Mr. Blair's influence will be felt for a long time to come.