Georgian strife causes political rifts

By David Rogers

Politico

September 10, 2008

The fallout from Russia’s conflict with Georgia is producing an unusual split in American politics — not between the parties so much as between the presidential candidates and their colleagues in Congress.

It’s as if the rhetorical pressure on Russia is being left to the campaign trail while back in the Capitol, there is more caution about extending U.S. commitments.

Republican John McCain is harshest toward Russia and was quick to pledge after the August invasion: “Today, we are all Georgians.” But Democrat Barack Obama has never been far from McCain, taking credit for new aid proposals and urging America’s European allies to allow Georgia and Ukraine to become members of NATO.

Contrast this with the scene Tuesday at the House Foreign Affairs Committee, where Republicans and Democrats alike chastised the administration for being too “anti-Russian” in shaping the U.S. response. And even pro-Georgia conservatives, such as Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.), said the lesson of the conflict is that Georgia President Mikhail Saakashvili showed such “bad judgment” falling into a Russian trap that he undermined his case for entry into military alliances with the U.S.

Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman remains the good soldier for Obama, but more than ever since taking over the panel this year, the California Democrat has stepped into the limelight by demanding answers not found in the presidential campaign.

“Here’s the depressing truth,” Berman told his lead witness at the Tuesday hearing, Daniel Fried, assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs. “By all rights, we should be doing everything possible to reassure our friends in the Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic States and elsewhere in the region that they will not fall victim to similar acts of Russian aggression. But at this particular moment in history, the ability to provide that protection is under serious question.”

“The question we must urgently address is what our future relationship with Russia is going to look like. If the primary goal of Russian foreign policy is to thwart the American diplomatic agenda, then how can we expect Moscow to be a reliable partner? ... On the other hand, if Russian behavior is largely a response to our failure to prioritize [the Russia-U.S.] bilateral relationship ... then don’t we need to review and recalibrate how we’ve been handling this relationship?” Berman asked.

Traveling in Europe at the time of the Russian invasion, Berman made a quick trip to Georgia at the urging of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to plant the flag for Democrats, even as McCain was dominating the headlines at home. In the weeks since, Berman has been receptive to the administration’s new $1 billion aid request, for which Obama and his running mate, Sen. Joe Biden, take some credit. And Tuesday’s hearing was expanded to include a second panel of witnesses, including Michael McFaul, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and adviser to the Obama campaign on its response to the Georgia crisis.

Still, in an interview with Politico, Berman was quick to point a reporter in the direction of Michael Mandelbaum, an author and foreign policy expert who warned a decade ago that President Bill Clinton’s policy of NATO expansion risked souring relations with Russia. And Berman is clearly concerned that a first casualty of today’s tensions with Russia would be any hope of progress on multinational efforts to put pressure on Iran to end its nuclear weapons program.

Mandelbaum, a Johns Hopkins professor and the author of “Democracy’s Good Name,” doesn’t hide his frustration. “Our Iran policy has been a casualty of NATO expansion,” he said flatly. The best solution to the current standoff, he said, may have come from the satirical newspaper The Onion, which ran the mock headline “U.S. Advises Allies not to Border Russia.”

“We can’t walk away, we can’t go forward, we can’t stand where we are,” Mandelbaum said. “This is a mess for whoever is president.”

“It’s not free anymore. I would like to know whether McCain or Obama want to put U.S. troops in Georgia and the Ukraine.”

Sen. Dick Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who just came back from a 15-day trip to Europe and the Caucasus, is more upbeat.

“Michael’s a good scholar, but I think the NATO thing has worked pretty well. I was really pleased in Brussels with the degree of unity, given all the qualms,” Lugar said. But he added with a smile that the Polish officials he met were less impressed by NATO’s Article 5 pledge of mutual support than the fact that by accepting the presence of a U.S. missile defense system, Poland would also get Americans stationed within its borders.

“We like Americans sitting around those missiles, and that’s why suddenly after 18 months we signed,” Lugar said, recounting the Polish argument.

But Lugar also conceded that U.S. diplomats had counseled Saakashvili not to take military action, “that the bait was out there and he was likely to be trapped by it, which he was.” And the memory of this error, for many lawmakers, can’t be entirely erased by the Russian response.

“The problem is that you are potentially tying us to a defense arrangement with a state whose head of state has exercised bad judgment,” said Royce. After hearing his committee colleagues, Rep. Bill Delahunt (D-Mass.) said, “I think there is a real unease with this ‘We’re all Georgians now’ and identifying ourselves exclusively with Georgia.”

Delahunt added: “We reward this kind of behavior with $1 billion despite the fact that Fried, who is testifying in here right now, made every effort to tell him not to go.”

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), a one-time speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan, was most outspoken, accusing the administration of driving Russia away even though it has been more open to U.S. relations since the fall of the Soviet Union.

“It is not anti-Russian to ask Russia to refrain from invading its neighbors,” Fried snapped back in one exchange. But the assistant secretary was more subdued in rejecting Berman’s thesis that the tensions had already killed hopes of enlisting Russia to put pressure on Iran related to nuclear arms.

“As some point I’d like to hear your hopes in this regard,” Berman said.