NATO no Answer in the Caucasus

For several years now President Bush has been advocating admission for Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. In response to last week’s Russian invasion of Georgia, both presidential candidates, several former Secretaries of State, and more pundits than I can count have endorsed the move. It’s a terrible idea. Had Georgia been a member of NATO last week the United States would have been obligated by treaty to intervene militarily in her defense. We might well have been fighting Russians. We wouldn’t have done it and neither would any of our other NATO allies. Every president since Kennedy has avoided any direct confrontation with a major power. Even Truman backed down when it became clear that victory in Korea meant war in China. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon both preferred defeat in Vietnam to an expanded war there. Johnson sacrificed his presidency. Nixon declared victory and came home. They were right to be wary. Truman found out the hard way what China thought of an American Army poised on her border.

Soviets installing missiles in Cuba precipitated the single most serious crisis of the Cold War. What makes us think Russians would be any less concerned about the presence of American troops on her frontier today? We could find ourselves once more on the brink of a Russo-American war. We do have strategic interests in the region but military action is just not an option. We need to realize that there are some things in this world we are powerless to prevent. Russian reoccupation of her former imperial provinces is probably among them.

The West can make Russia pay a price however. Russia is able to do this only because increased global demand for oil and gas has revived what had been a moribund economy. But Russia knows she needs more than oil. She needs to be an integral part of the world economic system. She wants to be a dominant part. We can make sure that doesn’t happen, in part by putting on hold her application for membership in the WTO. Russia has been known to use her status as an energy provider as a weapon but her oil and gas have value only if she can sell it at sky high prices. We have the wherewithal to make ourselves independent of that oil and gas within the next few years and to bring prices back down to reasonable levels in the process. We should proceed post haste with every available option. We can do it without damaging the environment. Its time to stop this silly bickering about pristine beaches and wilderness, insisting on no new nukes, and ham stringing ourselves with questionable science about the role of carbon dioxide in global warming. We should take all reasonable precautions but it’s time to get on with it. It is critical to our economic and, as Russia suddenly reminds us, to our military security.

There is another reason for exacting an economic price. China has ambitions for regional hegemony too and may look at Western inaction in the Caucasus as a green light for her own military adventurism. But economic growth is even more important to China than to Russia and China lacks natural resources to fall back on. She will not risk major market disruptions even to re-take Taiwan.

We have economic tools at our disposal that are in the long run far more powerful and more reliable than military force. We should recognize that globalization is on balance a good thing. It has produced unprecedented prosperity and been a force for peace on a scale never seen before. We should be talking about how to deal with it and take advantage of it, not trying to stop it. Else we may find ourselves confronting not just a wolf at the door but a bear and a dragon as well. NATO is no answer.

Vladimir the Great?

The Russians are scaring me. Most pundits pretty much dismiss the idea that the invasion of Georgia is an opening shot in a drive to put the Soviet Union back together but they may be missing the point. Russian imperial ambitions are a lot older than communism and they just might not be dead. On the contrary they may have come roaring back to life last week. We could be about to reignite the Cold War. Nobody wants that, we certainly don’t and the Russians don’t either, but if they can re-annex Georgia with impunity as it appears they can, then what’s to stop them from taking another step, and another and another…This has to end somewhere.

Peter I became “the Great” by ending Swedish dominance in the Baltic region, taking over Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, moving his capital to St. Petersburg, building a navy, and making Russia a power to be reckoned with in Northern Europe. Catherine I became “the Great” by extending the empire through the Ukraine and the Crimea, constructing a Black Sea fleet, and ensuring Russia’s status as one of the “Great Powers” up to WWI. Catherine’s ambitions extended through the Bosporus to the Mediterranean. She even named one of her grandsons Constantine in preparation for his installation on the ancient Roman throne. But Constantinople couldn’t be taken without a dominant naval presence. The great naval power of the day was Britain and the British Navy thwarted the plan, then and for another century and a quarter.
The Russian Empire all but collapsed at the end of WWI but through a series of bloody wars, and in the vacuum left by the defeat of Germany and the Ottomans, Lenin managed to salvage it. It almost fell again in WWII but Stalin survived, went on to extend the empire through most of Eastern Europe, and built a Super Power. Catherine would have been proud. Then in the 1980s the Warsaw pact and eventually the Soviet Union did fall apart in what was essentially an economic implosion. Most of us declared the Age of Empire finally over, dead in the ashes of Communism, Fascism, and Absolute Monarchy. We may have been wrong. Vladimir Putin may be about to prove us wrong.

Putin reasoned correctly that no one in the West would intervene militarily in defense of Georgia. Ten years ago economic leverage might have been a factor but not in this day of astronomical oil prices. We have very little leverage of any kind. We can’t embargo the oil and we demonstrated years ago in Korea and Vietnam we would rather lose a small war than risk a big one. So what do we do if Russia begins to pick off another former client state or two? Probably nothing so long as they aren’t members of NATO, which brings us to another problem. What if they are? Four current members are former Warsaw Pact countries. Another three are former Soviet Socialist Republics and had been Russian provinces since the days of Peter. Would we really go to war if Russia decided to reassert its influence in Latvia? I wouldn’t be surprised if Putin tested us on that. The European Union has a problem too. Of the 25 EU states, 8 came from the Communist Block and another two are in candidate status.

I don’t really expect a return to the Iron Curtain but the West has to draw a line somewhere and if it has to be a military one this could escalate out of control. That leaves economics as the only effective tool. The long term answer has to be economic integration. Moscow has to see the disruption of markets as a cost it is unwilling to pay.

Russia already wants to be a member of the WTO but with its new found oil wealth feels able to flex its muscles. Getting oil prices down to reasonable levels could be a big help.

A Tale of Two Visions

In comparing the details of Barack Obama’s energy plan announced this week with John McCain’s Lexington Project it is apparent there is much the two agree on. They both address dependence on foreign oil in the context of global warming. They both want to reduce US carbon emissions and both would use “cap and trade” market mechanisms. Both would encourage research into alternative fuels and promote electric automobiles. Both would offer temporary emergency price relief from $4 gasoline. There are differences of course but there are a lot of similarities.

But the comparison masks a fundamental difference in outlook at the heart of a great national divide that is becoming starkly clear. It looks to be the overriding issue in this presidential campaign. It may very well be the determining factor in what sort of place America will be as we make our way deeper into the 21st century. Will we continue on the trajectory of increasing prosperity that inexpensive energy has made possible? Or will we accept drastic lifestyle changes and reductions in living standards to accommodate unavoidable scarcity? It is the most glaring contrast in vision that I ever remember seeing in a presidential campaign.

Obama believes “We must act quickly and we must act boldly to transform our entire economy – from our cars and our fuels to our factories and our buildings.” McCain thinks we can use domestic resources and technology to produce ”more power, pushing technology to help free our transportation sector from its use of foreign oil, cleaning up our air and addressing climate change, and ensuring that Americans have dependable energy sources.” Obama thinks we have to get by on less energy and is prepared to see prices continue increasing in order to discourage its use. We would certainly have to use less petroleum. His windfall profits tax on big oil will further depress domestic production, as we learned in the Carter administration. McCain thinks we can produce the energy we need, do it cleanly, and do it without bankrupting ourselves. Obama wants to free us from Venezuela and the Middle East. McCain wants us to stop importing any oil, a fundamental difference considering the fungible nature of global oil markets.

Both men want new zero carbon cars. Obama wants to be sure they are made in the US, presumably through protectionist legislation. We would need it. Cap and trade would impose significant new costs on American business and Obama would fund much of his program by auctioning the licenses, another immediate cost to continue operating and a huge new incentive to move production overseas. McCain is a free trader, wants to keep existing tax cuts in place, and generally opposes new ones.

Obama wants to do all this without relying on new nuclear power until the waste problem can be resolved. Since he also opposes the only feasible mechanisms for waste disposal, he effectively means no new nukes. McCain wants a crash construction program on the grounds no other currently available technology is as clean.

While the battle rages China and India continue to expand their economies with little regard for any sort of pollution controls, let alone the still controversial need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. When we recently approached them with proposals for participation in a new CO2 protocol they both said no thanks. They have other priorities. The decision by both presidential candidates to couple the need for energy independence with climate change is an expensive one. If we take all options for increasing supply off the table and pile on new taxes to boot we could end up in the poorhouse.