Russia, Georgia, the West, and the Cold War

The Cold War was its own thing, and it's really over, but it is still a recent epoch, and as a result we hear echoes all the time. The other day, Vladimir Putin referenced (imprecisely) the U.S. habit during the Cold War of supporting anti-communist thugs in Latin America. Putin's aim was to say that the West may have hoped to do the same with Georgia's current leader, but that this is not the Cold War any more. One of several historical imprecisions here is that during the Cold War the West rarely, if ever, protected any leader in Moscow's sphere of influence, but this doesn't mean that Putin's reference to the Cold War (and how the conflict came out) isn't deeply meaningful. His statement (and a big chunk of the way Russia has handled Georgia the past decade or so) emerges directly from the way the Cold War came out (the Soviet Union lost, and it fell apart) and the way the victorious West, especially the United States, has dealt with Russia and the newly independent states since. Russia has felt doubly humiliated: by the loss of the Soviet empire, and by the way the West has embraced the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The West (EU, NATO) is doing it for the right reasons, but that doesn't make it right in Russia's eyes. In Russian eyes, NATO and EU enlargement are anti-Russian policies, "encirclement," and not a few people in Eastern Europe would say that's exactly right--and quite necessary to boot. I don't want to commit the fallacy (all too common still in analyses of world events) of blaming everthing in the world on the West in general and the U.S. in particular. Most, if not all of the blame for the current shooting goes to Georgia, Russia, and the South Ossetian fighters, and the reasons behind it are complex. And I don't think we should cut Putin (speaking of thugs) any slack either for the way he has reasserted Russia's international position and suppressed domestic dissent. (The West has a role, of course, and it's certainly necessary to evaluate it critically.) All I'm doing, I suppose, is argue that the Cold War indeed continues to be the pre-history of our own time. For someone who is getting ready to teach a couple of courses on the Cold War this fall, perhaps that's acceptable.