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.