http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=5414
by Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett
In the wake of http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=5413, John McCain’s neoconservative foreign policy adviser, as well as for long-time Democratic foreign policy hands Richard Holbrooke and Ronald Asmus, Russia’s actions in Georgia are comparable to Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938. For Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Russia’s actions are more reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
But, in reality, today’s Russia is not a resurgent imperial power. In the post-Cold War period, it was Washington, not Moscow, which started the game of acting outside the United Nations Security Council to pursue coercive regime change in problem states and redraw the borders of nominally sovereign countries. In Russian eyes, America’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, including arresting and presiding over the execution of its deposed President, undermined Washington’s standing to criticize others for taking military action in response to perceived threats. And American unilateralism in the Balkans, along with planned deployments of missile defense systems in Eastern Europe and support for “color revolutions” in former Soviet republics, trampled clearly stated Russian redlines.Russia has now, in effect, responded in kind. But, however the political arrangements envisioned in the French-mediated ceasefire between Moscow and Tbilisi are worked out, Washington and its European allies face a far more daunting and important policy challenge—how to pick up the pieces of Western relations with Russia. Meeting that challenge means confronting two longstanding deficits in U.S. policy—a wrong-headed assessment of Russia’s interests and ambitions, and a willful disregard of Russia’s heightened influence and standing on the international stage.
Russia’s leaders correctly judge that, as their country has become richer and more powerful in recent years, it has also become increasingly capable of autonomous action to defend its perceived interests—even when that action runs against U.S. and Western preferences. At the same time, Moscow continues to view partnership with America, and the West more generally, as their country’s best strategic option. But this partnership, from a Russian perspective, must entail give and take, not simply acquiescence to American dictates and unilateral U.S. initiatives.
http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=19606