The EU Concedes to Russia

I take no pride in being right about Russia, at least not today. European Union French President M. Nicholas Sarkozy said in a statement to Moscow on Friday that Russia must withdraw its troops from Georgia proper and Georgia must withdraw its troops to military bases no later than October 1, 2008. Russian peacekeeping (his words, emphasis added) troops would be replaced by 200 UNOMIG (United Nations Observer Missions in Georgia) and OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) international observers. The UNOMIG and OSCE observers will investigate in Georgia proper only and Russian troops will be allowed to remain in South Ossetia and Abkhazia as per the September 12, 2008 agreement reached between Sarkozy and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev.

It was a deferential move for the economic superpower to cede these sizeable regions of the Georgian State to Russia. It is frankly, reminiscent of Neville Chamberlain's concession of Czechoslovakia to Germany in 1938. Except that, to Paraphrase Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, if Russia had meant to capture Tbilisi, their forces could have done so in as little as four hours (given how they steamrolled over them in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, I doubt he was exaggerating).

Clearly, taking over Georgia proper was not one of their aims. Had this been the case, it is unlikely that the Russian strategy would have focused so heavily on expelling Georgian troops from the breakaway regions with such intensity - if at all. Given their air superiority over Georgia, they could have easily razed Tbilisi to the ground in a matter of hours and had Georgian President Mikheil Sakaashvili in custody in a matter of days.

Why did the EU not define Georgian territorial integrity to include the breakaway regions? If my more conservative readers can stomach it, I would like to indulge in some educated speculation. Surely, the EU watched the United States, as did Russia, when their friend and ally, Mikheil Sakaashvili, called for their military assistance and received only weak reprimands aimed at Russia from President Bush and Senator McCain, and most recently, either an inadvertent or a veiled threat from Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Sakaashvili, clearly unimpressed with Senator McCain's empty threats, called him out. Though aid has been sent to Georgia, American sabres - though rattled - remain firmly in their scabbards.

There was a very good reason that the French and the English engaged in a policy of appeasement with Germany in the 1930s: they didn't want a Second World War. The first had been horrible. The machine age had unleased horrible weaponry, munitions that disfigured soldiers so profoundly that it found its expression in a new genre of feature-length films in the twenties: horror. But if the thought of another mechanized war with Germany was horrifying to England and France, staring down the business end of the Russian nuclear arsenal must have them in a solid state of panic.

If the EU has any grasp of the history of the past two decades, a few facts are doubtlessly, not lost on them. First, the United States military doesn't move at lightning speed. That's not a bad thing. Operation Desert Shield prepared our troops well for Operation Desert Storm - it only took them four months. But Russia was able to mobilize within hours, and defeat American and Israeli-trained (and armed) Georgian troops within five days. Further, in his candidacy for President, John McCain (who is ahead according to Gallup Polls, as of Sunday) has resisted talk of withdrawing from Iraq. George Bush's drawdown is still 8,000 troops heavier than pre-surge levels. And even Barack Obama's strategy for withdrawal ties up our forces in Iraq until 2010. There simply is no plan on the table that allows the United States the ability to spare the military personnel necessary to honor NATO in the event of a Russian invasion, no matter what.

That leaves the threat of American interceptor missiles, one that has Putin aiming nukes at Europe (again) and negotiating for Western real estate with Castro (again) and Chavez to park ICBMs closer to the US (again). It is also a threat that makes it in Russia's best interests to take advantage of Europe while the United States is busy elsewhere.

So who in NATO will stand up to Russia, should they decide to play rough? The British are still strong, but they can't take on Russia alone. Their greatest advantage - naval power - would do little against a nation that is (and whose neighbors are) mostly landlocked. US troops in Europe have been cut by half (to around 25,000) since 2006. The French haven't had a strong military since Napoleon, and Sarkozy's concessions to Russia speak volumes about the EU's attitudes toward Russia. Finally, Georgia already had been promised membership with the EU at the time of the conflict; clearly Sakaashvili was counting on that when he rolled the dice on forcing South Ossetia and Abkazia back into the fold. But no one came to his rescue.

Whether this was because the EU recognized they were being used in his game with Russia or simply realized that Georgia simply wasn't worth the risks inherent in going to war with a re-vitalized Russia, no one in NATO - outside the United States - even breathed the word war. And if it were simply a matter of the United States being busy elsewhere, it would have been enough for the EU to flinch. But there is a lot more going on in the United States than two foreign occupations.

The U.S. banking system, which has been built up primarily through an assembly-line mortgage system, drove housing values to inflate as much as 300%. The bubble, of course, burst. Indy Mac in California suffered a 1929-style run-on-a-bank: the Fed took over. Bear Sterns Cos. collapsed: the Fed loaned JPMorgan and Chase the money to buy them out at a bargain basement interest rate. Then Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae had to be bailed out. Friday, Lehman wanted the same deal Bear Sterns got; the Fed told them they were on their own.

Which tells us the well is running dry. What we know of modern warfare is that it requires a strong economy. The Big War turned the United States - temporarily - into a socialist country. We mobilized for war: women went to work in munitions factories and young men joined, or were drafted, into the military. Rationing was imposed. By the end of it, soldiers came home, dreading the poverty of the Great Depression, and were shocked to find a revitalized economy.

Times have changed. War doesn't create new jobs anymore; corporations, beholden to their investors to maximize profits, either outsource or build outside of the United States. The Keynesian economic policies that hauled us out of the Great Depression required government investment into the economy, and while the movement to "privatize" as much of the government as possible is certainly attractive to the free market purists, the long term evidence isn't promising.

Certainly the EU is aware of the US's economic woes. The bailout of Freddie and Fannie is little more than band-aid on a compound fracture. At least one economist (Michael Hudson) has indicated that the bailout exists solely to prevent the two mortgage giants from collapsing - and taking the economy with it - prior to the elections in November. Further, Michael Hudson alleges that these bailouts will protect Bush supporters from something that anyone responsible for a fraction of this destruction would inevitably face: prison. So if Angela Merkel (who, incidentally, is opposed to Ukraine and Georgia obtaining NATO membership) and Nicholas Sarkozy are at all forward thinking and aware in the present, the US isn't looking so healthy. And given the EU's dependency on Russia for oil and natural gas, the old NATO alliance may not seem so important to them lately.