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The Georgian leader overplayed his hand. He ran as something of a nationalist and promised to bring some of Georgia's renegade provinces back into the fold.

Russia's response was heavy handed to say the least. ...and if the reports I've heard this morning are accurate, Russia can't even hide behind pretenses anymore. Georgia offered to withdraw its troops from its own province--its own territory--if Russia would agree to a ceasefire, and the Kremlin refused to agree to a ceasefire.

My understanding is that this was a long anticipated payback for our support for Kosovo to break away and join Nato. Georgia's been a key ally in the region for a long time, and Russia's been waiting for a justification to do some payback ever since. ...in the bigger trend, it's seen as resistance to anti-Russian policies among the multi-colored revolutions we've seen in recent years too. In Georgia, Ukraine and elsewhere...

Incidentally, someone very close to me is Georgian and has friends and family there and I hope and pray this dissipates as quickly as possible. ...but I don't understand why Russia wouldn't agree to a ceasefire and an effective annexation if it were interested in ending this quickly. God help the good people of Georgia.

I think there are diplomatic things we could do.

Russia's reacting in no small part to the threat that Georgia would join NATO. If Russia were to withdraw or agree to a ceasefire, we might offer to withdraw our support for Georgia to join NATO for some period of time.

Unfortunately, it appears that Russia wants to make an example of Georgia. And the one thing Russia seems to really respond to, at least as its former satellites are concerned, is the threat of humiliation.

We don't have to invade. We don't have to bomb Russian positions. ...but we shouldn't shy away from making threats to protect our allies. Making threats is part of diplomacy.

Western Europe is rich. Let rich countries buy their own goddamn tanks and missiles and guns. I'm fucking tired of seeing America defend other rich countries. We have enough to do lobbing cruise missiles at countries that aren't even a threat to us.

I wish I knew more about this event. That said, based on what I do know, I'm sure the Georgians are no angels. But the Russians have, AFAICT, never really recognized the independence of the Former Soviet Republics and will never accept them as anything other than satellite states. Frankly, the whole thing sounds like the beginning of damn near every European war dating back to at least WW1: "Our Foonian ethnic minority in Baristan is being oppressed by the Baristani government! Therefore, we must invade to protect them. (Crushing the troublesome Baristani government is just a fringe benefit.)"

I just have very little faith in Russia at this point. Russia has never really had an Enlightenment, frankly. They went from Czarist rule - one of the most absolute monarchies in Europe - almost directly to Communist rule and all that that entailed. Their transition to "democracy" has not fundamentally altered their national nature. In some ways it does not surprise me that many Russians express fondness for Stalin; there almost seems to be a neurotic national complex about being perceived as competent and strong.

The sooner we can turn all worldwide government over to hyper intelligent androids, the better.

I think this might be exactly wrong. There's nothing wrong with trying diplomacy, as long as you realize that 'diplomacy' is different from 'do what we say or we'll blow you up.' If we can find some way to get the Russians what they want without them invading Georgia, that's a good thing. Conversely, this might involve not shutting Russia out of the real world; and keeping them engaged might be the key to maintaining this sort of influence. As in, if we convince them that they get more respect from being a member-in-good-standing of the G8, and G8 countries don't do this sort of thing....or, more realistically, that as long as they behave themselves people will incline to take them seriously as world leaders, but when they invade small Slavic republics they'll start getting shut out of leadership councils. Which means we might want to kick them out of the G8; but it'd be better if we can get them to stop now and then not have to do that.

Yeah, well, when WE invade small oil-rich nations that weren't a threat to us we only do it to bring them democracy, see. That makes everything all right.

I should have been more specific. I would have no objection to negotiating them back to their own side of the border.

Since they have invaded, however, they should pay a diplomatic price. That price should start with being shunned. Unless they want to talk about going home, we have nothing to talk to them about - no trade arrangements, no invitations to visit, no cultural exchanges. A nice twist would be if the State Department in the US and its equivalents in other NATO countries would put Russia on the list of countries where it was deemed unsafe to travel.

Aresen,

OK, I can see that. To put some of this in perspective, what sort of diplomatic price should the US pay for invading Iraq?

I'd be perfectly fine with foreign governments making their opposition to US diplomatic initiatives an official policy.

Then again, if America is to be saved it has to come from Americans. We can't expect a bunch of foreigners to come in and end the damage wrought by a torturer. We tried that shit in Iraq, it didn't work, and every American with an IQ above 30 now realizes that. So maybe I don't want foreigners to try to save us.

Except for oil. Without foreign oil, the US is fucked. And while no individual country could probably declare us persona non grata, if we keep acting like assholes then eventually the rest of the world might come to its senses and make a joint declaration in that regard. We can pick off the smaller countries -- or at least fuck them all to hell, as we're doing in Iraq -- but we can't take on the rest of the world.

Not to start a fight about this, but I find some reactions here a bit amusing. Do you really think it matters one whit in this situation how the world perceives Iraq? Do people really think that if only we had Moral Authority (tm), Russia would be overwhelmed by our diplomacy and Putin would be all "Golly, I feel so bad being aggressive like this, I'm going home now." Really?

The language around diplomatic efforts is shaped by current events, and there is some snickering and 'haha watch this' going on because of Iraq, but nobody should be confused that such things are the actual causes of action or inaction in situations like this. Much like the acquisition of nuclear weapons, the only relevant question is how much it will cost Russia to behave this way.

Just as before Iraq, the rest of the globe is impotent. The only concern Russia has is the US military. That military is tied up in Iraq and that is the relevant point. If our military were not capable of power projection, it would be no different in this situation than our current state of affairs, i.e. Russia would have nothing to worry about.

The 'moral authority' part of it comes in when the US is trying to rally support for some diplomatic initiative.

Russia really does not care if the rest of the world thinks they are thugs. That has been evident since Hungary in 1956. In the Russian mind being feared is the same as being respected.

Militarily, there is probably no possibility of direct intervention. I would not put it past the Russians to use tactical nukes in this situation if they felt it necessary. One of the most frightening aspects of Soviet military doctrine was that field commanders had the discretion to use tactical nukes. There is no reason to believe this has changed in the Putin era. WTF is anyone going to do if the Russians use them in Ossetia? Escalate? The Russians are probably convinced that the west would blink if it found itself 'looking down the silos', so to speak.

Screw Putin. May he taste hellfire.

Jason,

You make a good point. But let's not avoid one extreme only to embrace the opposite extreme. Yes, force is ultimately all important. But force is exerted by people, who have brains and who think this and that and base their projection of force on various factors, including ethical ones, even if ethics is just one means of getting what you want.

While the idea of "moral authority" may be flawed in various ways, world players may want to know that getting on board a particular program will have a particular result for it to be worth their while. Backing the US against Russia may look foolish and hypocritical to world officials' domestic audience in light of Iraq. How BIG a problem or major an issue that is for containing Russia or finding an appropriate response that may contain her in the future I sure don't claim the expertise to know, but my guess is that it's somewhere above zero. Maybe not enough to warrant the attention some here are giving it, but still something.

I think perhaps worse has been our agenda to extend our sphere of influence up under Russia's nose. A policy that I believe was started under Clinton and continued under Bush. Did those folks really believe Americans were that excited by such geopolitical maneuvering that they were scoring political points (I would think that while Americans sure don't mind feeling stronger and more important, most were just not that interested in the scope of NATO, i.e., it was just too esoteric an issue to care about) or was it some sort of bureaucratic fun and mischief? If we really led Georgia to believe we would protect them in such a situation, we've fucked both them and ourselves.

1) If the only thing that really matters is the ability to use force, then the decision to use it ethically probably doesn't matter, which is certainly one way to justify the past several years.

2) That said, if Russia cares about anything other than the US military intervening, then there are ways to get Russia's attention. If nationalist pride matters, then exclusion from clubs like G8 matters. If trade matters, then the ability to negotiate with other countries matters, and our ability to sway those countries matters.

3) If the US military is going to be used for tasks other than defending the borders of the US, then perhaps the way in which it is used should be constrained by the preferences of people outside the US. If we're going to be the world's cops, or (lately) the world's criminals, then other people are going to take notice of how this force gets used. I subscribe to the notion that if I'm going to pay for a bomb to be dropped somewhere outside the US, then I'm going to care what people in the vicinity of the target think. If they don't want me to send off tax dollars to drop a bomb on their house, then I'm going to vote for people who are sensitive to that goal. One could say that I'm a liberal like that, or maybe I just have great respect for the private property of foreigners.

This is a country that recently killed Alexander Litvinenko in England in a gruesome and almost transparently traceable way. I think it'd be easy to overestimate how much that regime cares about intangible foreign disapproval.

EDIT: emphasis added. If we go to something tangible like trade over this, we'd better expect backlash from Russia.

This is oversimplified. Ability to harm is the base from which all other diplomacy can grow. If you have no ability to harm, you have no ability to negotiate with someone who decides not to play nice. You and me and Putin all see the ethics of force differently. People could make decisions perfectly justifiable under some ethical thought processes (like spreading democracy) you might find reprehensible. It is a lot muddier than ethical vs. non ethical use of force, especially on the international stage. The deterrent is what matters.

About Wednesday of last week, I got a request from a coworker in our Paris office to build a terrain dataset for a trial of our microwave network planning tool. It didn't have any clear labelling, and it wasn't clear where the data was for when I put it together. I finally got it built on Friday morning, as the news was talking about the Russian offensive really heating up, and I was recoginizing some of the terrain in the maps as disturbingly familiar.

This dataset I was working on was for the Russian Caucasus, and includes Chechnya, North Ossetia, South Ossetia, and Abkhazia. There aren't any significant expansions of the data into Azerbaijan or other parts of Georgia. It's kind of creepy.

I really hope somebody is just planning to build a nice, non-violent telecomunications network using this data. 8-(

Who all are clients for your Paris office? I hope that would include at least one news agency.

I'm arguing with the EU, mostly. They want sign-off authority over assets they didn't pay for. They play the consensus card as a way to get without giving. At least, in my more cynical moods that's how I see it.

I have yet to figure out why we need a sphere of influence in Georgia or that area. There are lots of countries that don't have spheres of influence very far beyond their borders yet they are able to buy and sell all sorts of things on global markets.

Holy crap! Never thought of it, but yep, that is creepy.

So, if we didn't have a sphere of influence the Swiss couldn't buy oil? India wouldn't be able to get Japanese electronics?

You're assuming that in the absence of a global military superpower there would be no other means for dealing with piracy--no local government efforts, no Blackwater--Bluewater Edition, etc.

Moreover, even if we stipulate the need for a global effort against pirates, that still requires far less military power than the US projects around the world, and it certainly doesn't necessitate US military involvement in land-locked countries. We could always just station naval forces around the world, and the treaties under which those naval bases are obtained could stipulate that we don't get involved in anything else: We take care of pirates and that's it, and we renounce all other interests.

Maybe that's not the best arrangement, but my point is that we don't need to be a global empire with stakes in every single conflict on the face of the earth if the main point is to facilitate open shipping lanes.

Also, the navy is just an example.

I'm just not sure that I see what your point is. Currently we have said "hey stop it" and ferried a Georgian battalion out of Iraq back to Georgia. It is highly unlikely that we will do anything more, except repeat "hey stop it" and provide behind the scenes support. It is not in the cards for us to provide troops to Georgia.

I, for one, have no problem with some level of collective security. Stopping one country from invading another is a good thing, and we should be willing to use military force on occasion to do it. This is not one of those occasions. However, we should put pressure on Russia to end its invasion as soon as possible before it becomes a humanitarian and economic disaster. There are already IDPs streaming into Tblisi.

There would never be a blue water mercenary force. Too expensive to patrol the seas. And those are called pirates. Unless they are privateers, which means they are the same thing as a navy. If, for example, Exxon were to pay for them privately, they'd still be the U.S.'s responsibility, legally almost indistinguishable from a navy under international law.

Frankly, the idea of using mercenary forces in a modern context to defend a nation and keep the peace is absurd, and nothing of that sort has ever existed in history. War is not a money making enterprise. Even if you could have one or ones large enough to do so, they would be sovereign, and not whatever state were to hire them.

That's like saying that because the current level of crime in New York is low, we should get rid of the police force, and if crime comes back, replace it with locally funded autonomous police precincts. Piracy might be small now, but bigger operations could exist without the navy's presence. Just like they did back in the old days. You wouldn't actually have to sell stolen goods, you could just hold a few supertankers ransom for a few days until Japan or China or whoever coughed a few hundred million or a couple billion dollars as a better option than having their economy die.

F^3: I'm not suggesting the use of mercenaries to keep the peace in place of national armed forces. Rather, I'm suggesting something more akin to private security guards for businesses.

No. As thoreau pointed out above, the amount of naval force is more than adequate. The problem is the failed states, which cannot police their own coastlines yet will not allow the US or any other state to take action to suppress the pirates operating out of their territory. Right now, there isn't the political will to force the point.

Fighting piracy is not like fighting the War on Drugs - there is no willing market for the pirates' services, so it is not a large scale profitable enterprise. [The 60s and 70s did see some air piracy (hijacking) for profit, but all states soon agreed that there was no interest in providing safe haven to the hijackers. Now the only hijackers are outright terrorists on suicide missions.]

If piracy does get to be too much of a problem - and it is getting that way in the Java strait - the suppression will be a combined operation of the Chinese, Japanese, American, Indian and Australian navies, with the Indonesian and Vietnamese navies as tag-alongs to give them the authority to take out the bases inside those countries' territories.

Yeah. Because global warming affected irrigation and the quality of the land and whatnot, these people turned to piracy for their livelihood. I seriously wouldn't be surprised if such an argument is ever made.

If piracy were the only issue based around US power projection, you'd be right. But there's a lot more. If you look at hegemony theory, the Hegemon (Hi!) enforces the rules of the system, frequently at cost to itself because it maintains its relative position in the system. Others (Hi, EU!) free ride off the benefits of the system while undersupporting the actual maintenance of it. The system extends far beyond simple things like navigable sea lanes, but even to cultural touchstones, a lingua franca, and common norms of business. While none of these directly involve force, it always follows power projection on the part of the hegemon.

Why is there an Olympics? Because the Greeks once ruled the waves. Why did they stop for a long time? Because the Romans ruled the waves. Why is there a World Cup of Football? Because the British Navy ruled the waves. Why are we capitalist, and not mercantilist? Because the British Navy ruled the waves.

Why does much of the world use the Internet? Because the US Navy rules the waves (and the Air Force rules the skies). Why are nations able to easily exchange currencies not backed by gold? Because the US Navy rules the waves (and the Air Force rules the skies).

Could this stuff happen if we'd disarmed and retreated after World War II? Maybe, but it's very doubtful. Or it would be a quaint idea in a Hungarian radical's mind. Or it would happen on schedule 200 years from now as the Japanese Restored Empire brings a much more enlightened co-prosperity sphere to the world, influenced heavily by those crazy Americans who beat them and then left and the wonderful British they introduced them to.

You have to separate the existence of the system from operations within the system. Within the system, our Iraq misadventure has cost us dearly. Within the system, things like moral standing (measured over the last fifteen years or so, see the Suez Crisis or Rainbow Warrior or the chemical facilities in Libya for how morally upstanding our EU friends are over longer time horizons) matter. We can't just bully around the UK and keep the system intact, because they have lots of room for action within the system. It's only at the edges of the system (Hi, Georgia!) that our military has more direct influence.

That doesn't really suit our temperment as a nation. City On The Hill and all that.

This is the central problem of international relations from where I'm sitting. I hate supplying freerider services to the rest of the world, but I have no confidence that any other nation or group of nations would step up to the plate. We pay for the world's medicine and security and I don't know what to do about it. I'd like to just stop doing it, but the costs could be enormous, and a stable state may just be the US hegemon.

Jim Henley actually suggested (mostly seriously) that we start free-riding off of Europe's versions of the FDA. We could still do the R&D, and we could still have our own process for approving drugs, but we could also say that any drug approved in Europe is approved here. The idea is that there would be two paths to the US market, not 1. Since a lot of drugs are developed here first but approved first in Europe, this might make sense for bringing drugs to market. Plus, while liberals are generally afraid of shrinking the US regulatory state, if we say "Oh, we're going to follow the Europeans" they might be OK.

So company could get a drug approved in Europe, show up in the US with a stamped TPS report (new cover sheet too) saying that all the regulatory hurdles have been crossed, and then they get to sell it here. But if they don't like the verdict of the Europeans, they could still go through the FDA. The net result would be a smaller FDA that only handles the stuff that Europe doesn't like, and more drugs on the market faster.

This has the distinction of being one of the few libertarian proposals that regards EU regulators as a good thing.....