The New World Geopolitical Order: End of Act I

by Immanuel Wallerstein

It would be a mistake to underestimate the importance of the agreement on September 8 between Nicolas Sarkozy of France in his capacity as current president of the European Union (EU) and Dmitri Medvedev, President of Russia.  It marks the definitive end of Act I of the new world geopolitical order.

What was decided?  The Russians agreed to withdraw all their troops from what are called “central Georgian areas” or “Georgia proper,” that is, those parts of Georgia the Russians recognize as Georgia.  These troops are being replaced by 200 monitors from the EU.  This is done on guarantees by the EU that there will be no use of force against South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

The issue of Russian recognition of the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia has been left entirely open.  Sarkozy and the EU’s Foreign Minister, Javier Solana, “hope” that Russia will agree in the future to allow EU monitors into these two areas.  Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, said they had made no such promise and that “all future monitoring arrangements would require ratification by the Abkhaz and South Ossetian governments.”  Lavrov said that Russian troops would remain in the two areas “for the foreseeable future.”  And the secretary of Georgia’s National Security Council, Alexander Lomaia, while applauding the clear deadlines for Russian withdrawal from Georgia proper, did note that “the bad news is that [the agreement] doesn’t refer to [Georgian] territorial integrity.”

This accord was reached between Europe and Russia, and the United States played no diplomatic role whatsoever.  Medvedev charged the United States with having given its blessing to the original Georgian action of entering South Ossetia.  He said that, by contrast, the Europeans are “our natural partners, our key partners.” Georgia’s president received the strong encouragement of John McCain, and Vice-President Cheney flew there to say that the United States was giving $1 billion in aid for Georgian reconstruction.  But Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, explaining why this aid would not include military aid and why there would be no economic sanctions against Russia, said that “if we act too precipitously, we could be the ones who are isolated.”

So, what is the bottom line?  Russia has gotten more or less what it wanted in Georgia.  Its “irrevocable” recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia could well be something it might trade in the future for a basic turn-around in Georgia’s relations with Russia.  If not, not.  The fact is that Europe believes it needs to come to terms with Russia, and has ruled out renewing what the Chinese call “the European civil war.”

The United States finds it has no real cards to play.  Meanwhile, in the Middle East, it finds itself publicly rebuffed by its closest allies.  In Iraq, Prime Minister al-Maliki is being a very tough negotiator about the continued presence of U.S. troops, and it is not impossible, barring further major U.S. concessions, that the current agreements that terminate on December 31 will simply run out.

In Afghanistan, President Karzai is so exasperated with the bombing missions of U.S. special troops that he has demanded “a review of the presence of U.S. and NATO troops in the country,” in what CBS News calls a “harshly worded statement.”  The immediate provocation was an air raid in Azizabad that the U.S. army said had few casualties and attacked a Taliban group.  The Afghans insisted there were no Taliban there and a large number of civilians were killed.  When UN officials and others gave credence to the Afghan version, the senior U.S. general in Afghanistan, David McKiernan, back-tracked on the U.S. position and called for a further high-level U.S. investigation by a general who would come from the United States.

And in Pakistan, President Bush authorized U.S. hot pursuit of Taliban from Afghanistan into Pakistan against the advice of the National Intelligence Council who said it would carry “a high risk of further destabilizing the Pakistani military and government.” The incursion brought what the New York Times called “an unusually strong statement” by the chief of the Pakistani army, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, who said his forces would defend Pakistan’s sovereignty “at all costs.”  Since the U. S. government has been looking on Gen. Kayani as its strong supporter in Pakistan, this is not exactly what the United States has been hoping to hear.

So, ignored in Georgia and under attack by its closest allies in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, the United States is somewhat unhappily entering the realities of the post-Cold War world, in which it has to play by new rules that it seems to find rather unpalatable.

Meanwhile, as an ironic but not unimportant footnote, on September 10, a major development in particle physics was celebrated in Geneva when the European laboratory called CERN achieved a scientific breakthrough after 14 years of work and $8 billion in expense.  This was such a major moment in world science that their U.S. counterparts at the Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois opened the champagne bottles at 4:38 in the morning to celebrate.  Nonetheless, Pier Oddone, the director of the Fermilab, admitted this was a “bittersweet moment.”  Until 1993, the United States ruled particle physics.  That year, the U.S. Congress, flush with the self-confidence of having “won” the cold war, believed it was too expensive — and no longer geopolitically necessary — to build the kind of supercollider needed for this new advance in particle physics.  The Europeans made a different kind of decision, and the United States now finds itself in second place here too.

I call this the end of Act I because it has sealed the reality of a true multilateral geopolitical arena.  Of course, there are still further acts to come.  And any faithful playgoer know that Act I merely establishes who are the actors.  It is in Act II that we see what really happens.  And then there’s Act III, the denouement.

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Immanuel Wallerstein is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Sociology, State University of New York at Binghamton.  Among his numerous books are The Modern World-System (1974, 1980, 1989), Unthinking Social Science (1991), After Liberalism (1995), The End of the World As We Know It (1999), and The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (2003).  This commentary was published on 15 September 2008.  © Immanuel Wallerstein, distributed by Agence Global.  For rights and permissions, including translations and posting to non-commercial sites, contact: rights@agenceglobal.com, 1.336.686.9002 or 1.336.286.6606.  Permission is granted to download, forward electronically, or e-mail to others, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed.  To contact author, write: immanuel.wallerstein@yale.edu.  Visit the archive of Wallerstein’s previous commentaries at <www.binghamton.edu/fbc/cmpg.htm>.  These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term

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Russia Pulls the Bulk of Its Forces Out of Georgia

Source:- http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/23/world/europe/23georgia.html

KARALETI, Georgia — The Russian tank creaked and groaned at the checkpoint, its journey north across the new administrative boundary of South Ossetia almost complete. The driver’s face, grease-streaked and tired looking, jutted from the hatch.

A cigarette hung from his mouth.

He swore, uttering the single, unprintable syllable that is the most foul word in the Russian language.

His source of frustration: his T-62 main battle tank, of a sort that first came into service in the Soviet Union in the 1960s, would not turn to the left.

And because it was wedged against brush and trees on the right shoulder of the road in front of the concrete blocks that mark the new internal boundaries of Georgia, its locked steering meant that it was effectively stuck.

“It’s time to blow it up and throw it away,” a soldier standing nearby said.

The Russian Army withdrew the bulk of its forces from Georgia on Friday evening, pulling its armored columns into the separatist enclave of Abkhazia and behind the boundary that the Kremlin has unilaterally defined for South Ossetia, the other enclave, where the war started two weeks ago.

The withdrawal, while it fell short of Georgian and Western expectations, marked the biggest tactical shift of Russian forces since they invaded Georgia, and effectively reopened the country’s main road to traffic, which began flowing, albeit lightly, in the hour before dusk.

It also marked a large step toward scaling back the most ambitious foreign military operation undertaken by the Russian Army since it limped out of Afghanistan, with many tanks of the same vintage, nearly 20 years ago.

The day presented scenes as if from another time.

Among them were moments of candor, joy and exhaustion for the Russian troops now apparently headed home — a destination reached by passing through the Caucasus Ridge via the Roki Tunnel to Vladikavkaz, Russia. It is a drive that can be covered by a tank in several hours, assuming the tank works.

“Everything depends on the road,” said one driver beside an idled armored personnel carrier at the checkpoint’s other end. “We will not stop for exercises, and we will not stop for politics. What the president said, we are following, and everything is going according to the treaty that was signed.”

He smiled. Perhaps there would be no political stops. But he added that maybe there will be “technical stops,” a Russian phrase that smacks of Soviet indirectness. (It means repairs.) Signs of the departure were evident in the morning, when no Russian armored checkpoints were visible at one of the main routes into Gori, the birthplace of Stalin, which Russian forces had occupied for 10 days.

By early afternoon, Russian convoys were visible on the shoulders of the primary east-west highway. And by evening, the Russian checkpoints were almost all abandoned on the highway and this road, which is the main route to Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital.

By this time, the earth rumbled with passing armor.

From both directions along the road into Gori and then here at this checkpoint — the last spot at which they could be observed by a Westerner in Georgia — soldiers grinned and waved as they passed by on their armored vehicles and trucks.

Others sat stone still, rifles cradled across their thighs. One looked at the small group of Westerners standing with cameras and raised his middle finger.

The Russian incursion into Georgia had already energized the world’s corps of military attachés, who have been provided a rare chance to see the Russian Army operating in the field.

There has beensome chuckling about it, even as there are worries about the security implications of Russia’s newfound confidence: the armor is old, the airstrikes inaccurate, the tactics slow and centralized.

Gen. Maj. Vyacheslav N. Borisov, the self-labeled “commandant” of the Gori region, was just short of obese, often gave off a faint whiff of cognac and even in videotaped interviews seemed to swear for punctuation.

But for those weaving in and out of the convoy, as it headed toward Russia with Georgia’s military broken at its feet and Georgia’s government surviving only because Russia did not move on the capital, there were alternate ways of viewing the army in the field.

The Russian Army’s state of readiness might fall well short of Western standards. But it proved more than able to handle its mission of routing the Georgians. And many Russian troops, after several years of emphasis by former President Vladimir V. Putin on developing units of volunteers and not conscripts, looked fit and alert.

The soldiers also found support among many of the Georgian people in the conflict zone. One of the most curious elements of the fighting and the cease-fire period has been that while Georgians in the capital called for the Russian Army to leave, many survivors of the looting and intimidation in the conflict zone spoke highly of the Russians, saying they helped keep looting in check.

As the soldiers left, it was also clear that Russia’s sense of its mandate over the areas it was withdrawing forces from was still strong, and that many troops would remain. A platoon could be seen dug in about a mile off the road and 20 miles west of Gori, the city in central Georgia that had been under Russian occupation, and checkpoints remained on the highway, including one on either side of the city.

The presence of these troops, each wearing a new patch that identified them as “Peacemakers of the Georgian-Ossetian Conflict Zone,” left the Kremlin with a powerful lever over Georgian economic and social affairs.

For Friday, however, the withdrawal, if less than what Georgia sought, opened traffic on the country’s main road and allowed Georgia’s police to return in force to Gori. Police trucks, their lights flashing, raced into the city at nightfall.

Shortly before they arrived, one major, who stood at the checkpoint waiting for two stuck vehicles to get back on the road, said that the fighting against Georgia had been “a war that cannot be understood.”

“This was not a serious war,” he said, shaking his head.

Later, he approached a reporter to amend the answer. About five days ago, he said, nine Russian soldiers were killed in an ammunition accident. And he said that he himself knew 30 people who had died since the fighting began.

Olesya Vartanyan contributed reporting from Tbilisi, Georgia.

The Russo-Georgian War and the Balance of Power

Stratfor, August 12, 2008, By George Friedman
The Russian invasion of Georgia has not changed the balance of power
in Eurasia. It simply announced that the balance of power had already
shifted. The United States has been absorbed in its wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, as well as potential conflict with Iran and a
destabilizing situation in Pakistan. It has no strategic ground forces
in reserve and is in no position to intervene on the Russian
periphery. This, as we have argued, has opened a window of opportunity
for the [2]Russians to reassert their influence in the former Soviet
sphere. Moscow did not have to concern itself with the potential
response of the United States or Europe; hence, the invasion did not
shift the balance of power. The balance of power had already shifted,
and it was up to the Russians when to make this public. They did that
Aug. 8.

Lets begin simply by reviewing the last few days.

On the night of Thursday, Aug. 7, forces of the Republic of [3]Georgia
drove across the border of South Ossetia, a secessionist region of
Georgia that has functioned as an independent entity since the fall of
the Soviet Union. The forces drove on to the capital, Tskhinvali,
which is close to the border. Georgian forces got bogged down while
trying to take the city. In spite of heavy fighting, they never fully
secured the city, nor the rest of South Ossetia.

On the morning of Aug. 8, [4]Russian forces entered South Ossetia,
using armored and motorized infantry forces along with air power.
South Ossetia was informally aligned with Russia, and Russia acted to
prevent the regions absorption by Georgia. Given the speed with which
the Russians responded within hours of the Georgian attack the
Russians were expecting the Georgian attack and were themselves at
their jumping-off points. The counterattack was carefully planned and
competently executed, and over the next 48 hours, the Russians
succeeded in defeating the main Georgian force and forcing a retreat.
By Sunday, Aug. 10, the Russians had consolidated their position in
South Ossetia.

On Monday, the [5]Russians extended their offensive into Georgia
proper, attacking on two axes. One was south from South Ossetia to the
Georgian city of Gori. The other drive was from Abkhazia, another
secessionist region of Georgia aligned with the Russians. This drive
was designed to cut the road between the Georgian capital of Tbilisi
and its ports. By this point, the Russians had bombed the military
airfields at Marneuli and Vaziani and appeared to have disabled radars
at the international airport in Tbilisi. These moves brought
[6]Russian forces to within 40 miles of the Georgian capital, while
making outside reinforcement and resupply of Georgian forces extremely
difficult should anyone wish to undertake it.

The Mystery Behind the Georgian Invasion

In this simple chronicle, there is something quite mysterious: Why did
the Georgians choose to invade South Ossetia on Thursday night? There
had been a great deal of shelling by the South Ossetians of Georgian
villages for the previous three nights, but while possibly more
intense than usual, artillery exchanges were routine. The Georgians
might not have fought well, but they committed fairly substantial
forces that must have taken at the very least several days to deploy
and supply. Georgias move was deliberate.

The [7]United States is Georgias closest ally. It maintained about 130
military advisers in Georgia, along with civilian advisers,
contractors involved in all aspects of the Georgian government and
people doing business in Georgia. It is inconceivable that the
Americans were unaware of Georgias mobilization and intentions. It is
also inconceivable that the Americans were unaware that the Russians
had deployed substantial forces on the South Ossetian frontier. U.S.
technical intelligence, from satellite imagery and signals
intelligence to unmanned aerial vehicles, could not miss the fact that
thousands of Russian troops were moving to forward positions. The
Russians clearly knew the Georgians were ready to move. How could the
United States not be aware of the Russians? Indeed, given the posture
of Russian troops, how could intelligence analysts have missed the
possibility that the Russians had laid a trap, hoping for a Georgian
invasion to justify its own counterattack?

It is very difficult to imagine that the Georgians launched their
attack against U.S. wishes. The Georgians rely on the United States,
and they were in no position to defy it. This leaves two
possibilities. The first is a massive breakdown in intelligence, in
which the United States either was unaware of the existence of Russian
forces, or knew of the Russian forces but along with the Georgians
miscalculated Russias intentions. The United States, along with other
countries, has viewed Russia through the prism of the 1990s, when the
Russian military was in shambles and the Russian government was
paralyzed. The United States has not seen [8]Russia make a decisive
military move beyond its borders since the Afghan war of the
1970s-1980s. The Russians had systematically avoided such moves for
years. The United States had assumed that the Russians would not risk
the consequences of an invasion.

If this was the case, then it points to the central reality of this
situation: The [9]Russians had changed dramatically, along with the
balance of power in the region. They welcomed the opportunity to drive
home the new reality, which was that they could invade Georgia and the
United States and Europe could not respond. As for risk, they did not
view the invasion as risky. Militarily, there was no counter.
Economically, Russia is an energy exporter doing quite well indeed,
the Europeans need Russian energy even more than the Russians need to
sell it to them. Politically, as we shall see, the Americans needed
the Russians more than the Russians needed the Americans. Moscows
calculus was that this was the moment to strike. The Russians had been
building up to it for months, as we have discussed, and they struck.

The Western Encirclement of Russia

To understand Russian thinking, we need to look at two events. The
first is the [10]Orange Revolution in Ukraine. From the U.S. and
European point of view, the Orange Revolution represented a triumph of
democracy and Western influence. From the Russian point of view, as
Moscow made clear, the [11]Orange Revolution was a CIA-funded
intrusion into the internal affairs of Ukraine, designed to draw
Ukraine into NATO and add to the encirclement of Russia. U.S.
Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton had promised the Russians
that NATO would not expand into the former Soviet Union empire.

That promise had already been broken in 1998 by NATOs expansion to
Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic and again in the 2004
expansion, which absorbed not only the rest of the former Soviet
satellites in what is now Central Europe, but also the three Baltic
states, which had been components of the Soviet Union.

The Russians had tolerated all that, but the discussion of including
Ukraine in NATO represented a fundamental threat to Russias national
security. It would have rendered Russia indefensible and threatened to
destabilize the Russian Federation itself. When the United States went
so far as to suggest that Georgia be included as well, bringing NATO
deeper into the Caucasus, the Russian conclusion publicly stated was
that the United States in particular intended to encircle and break
Russia.

The second and lesser event was the decision by [12]Europe and the
United States to back Kosovos separation from Serbia. The Russians
were friendly with Serbia, but the deeper issue for Russia was this:
The principle of Europe since World War II was that, to prevent
conflict, national borders would not be changed. If that principle
were violated in Kosovo, other border shifts including demands by
various regions for independence from Russia might follow. The
Russians publicly and privately asked that Kosovo not be given formal
independence, but instead continue its informal autonomy, which was
the same thing in practical terms. Russias requests were ignored.

From the Ukrainian experience, the Russians became convinced that the
United States was engaged in a plan of strategic encirclement and
strangulation of Russia. From the Kosovo experience, they concluded
that the United States and Europe were not prepared to consider
Russian wishes even in fairly minor affairs. That was the breaking
point. If Russian desires could not be accommodated even in a minor
matter like this, then clearly Russia and the West were in conflict.
For the Russians, as we said, the question was how to respond. Having
declined to respond in Kosovo, the Russians decided to respond where
they had all the cards: in South Ossetia.

Moscow had two motives, the lesser of which was as a tit-for-tat over
Kosovo. If Kosovo could be declared independent under Western
sponsorship, then [13]South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the two breakaway
regions of Georgia, could be declared independent under Russian
sponsorship. Any objections from the United States and Europe would
simply confirm their hypocrisy. This was important for internal
Russian political reasons, but the second motive was far more
important.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin once said that the fall of the
Soviet Union was a geopolitical disaster. This didnt mean that he
wanted to retain the Soviet state; rather, it meant that the
disintegration of the Soviet Union had created a situation in which
Russian national security was threatened by Western interests. As an
example, consider that during the Cold War, St. Petersburg was about
1,200 miles away from a NATO country. Today it is about 60 miles away
from Estonia, a NATO member. The disintegration of the Soviet Union
had left Russia surrounded by a group of countries hostile to Russian
interests in various degrees and heavily influenced by the United
States, Europe and, in some cases, China.

Resurrecting the Russian Sphere

Putin did not want to re-establish the Soviet Union, but he did want
to re-establish the Russian sphere of influence in the former Soviet
Union region. To accomplish that, he had to do two things. First, he
had to [14]re-establish the credibility of the Russian army as a
fighting force, at least in the context of its region. Second, he had
to establish that Western guarantees, including NATO membership, meant
nothing in the face of Russian power. He did not want to confront NATO
directly, but he did want to confront and defeat a power that was
closely aligned with the United States, had U.S. support, aid and
advisers and was widely seen as being under American protection.
Georgia was the perfect choice.

By [15]invading Georgia as Russia did (competently if not
brilliantly), Putin re-established the credibility of the Russian
army. But far more importantly, by doing this Putin revealed an open
secret: While the United States is tied down in the Middle East,
American guarantees have no value. This lesson is not for American
consumption. It is something that, from the Russian point of view, the
Ukrainians, the Balts and the Central Asians need to digest. Indeed,
it is a lesson Putin wants to transmit to Poland and the Czech
Republic as well. The [16]United States wants to place ballistic
missile defense installations in those countries, and the Russians
want them to understand that allowing this to happen increases their
risk, not their security.

The Russians knew the United States would denounce their attack. This
actually plays into Russian hands. The more vocal senior leaders are,
the greater the contrast with their inaction, and the Russians wanted
to drive home the idea that American guarantees are empty talk.

The Russians also know something else that is of vital importance: For
the United States, the Middle East is far more important than the
Caucasus, and [17]Iran is particularly important. The United States
wants the Russians to participate in sanctions against Iran. Even more
importantly, they do not want the Russians to sell weapons to Iran,
particularly the highly effective S-300 air defense system. Georgia is
a marginal issue to the United States; Iran is a central issue. The
Russians are in a position to pose serious problems for the United
States not only in Iran, but also with weapons sales to other
countries, like Syria.

Therefore, the United States has a problem it either must reorient its
strategy away from the Middle East and toward the Caucasus, or it has
to seriously limit its response to Georgia to avoid a Russian counter
in Iran. Even if the United States had an appetite for another war in
Georgia at this time, it would have to calculate the Russian response
in Iran and possibly in Afghanistan (even though Moscows interests
there are currently aligned with those of Washington).

In other words, the Russians have backed the Americans into a corner.
The Europeans, who for the most part lack expeditionary militaries and
are [18]dependent upon Russian energy exports, have even fewer
options. If nothing else happens, the Russians will have demonstrated
that they have resumed their role as a regional power. Russia is not a
global power by any means, but a significant regional power with lots
of nuclear weapons and an economy that isnt all too shabby at the
moment. It has also compelled every state on the Russian periphery to
re-evaluate its position relative to Moscow. As for Georgia, the
Russians appear ready to demand the resignation of President Mikhail
Saakashvili. Militarily, that is their option. That is all they wanted
to demonstrate, and they have demonstrated it.

The war in Georgia, therefore, is Russias public return to great power
status. This is not something that just happened it has been unfolding
ever since Putin took power, and with growing intensity in the past
five years. Part of it has to do with the increase of Russian power,
but a great deal of it has to do with the fact that the Middle Eastern
wars have left the United States off-balance and short on resources.
As we have written, this conflict created a window of opportunity. The
Russian goal is to use that window to assert a new reality throughout
the region while the Americans are tied down elsewhere and dependent
on the Russians. The war was far from a surprise; it has been building
for months. But the geopolitical foundations of the war have been
building since 1992. Russia has been an empire for centuries. The last
15 years or so were not the new reality, but simply an aberration that
would be rectified. And now it is being rectified.

References
1. http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/russo_georgian_war_and_balance_power
2. http://www.stratfor.com/geopolitical_diary/georgia_russia_twilight_hour
3. http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/georgia_russia_hostilities_erupt_south_ossetia
4. http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/russia_moscows_four_options_south_ossetia
5. http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/georgia_russia_checkmate
6. http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/georgia_timeline_events_aug_11
7. http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/georgia_russias_response_united_states
8. http://www.stratfor.com/geopolitical_diary_putins_new_old_russia
9. http://www.stratfor.com/geopolitical_diary_putins_jab_west
10. http://www.stratfor.com/geopolitical_diary_ukraine_elections_and_orange_reversal
11. http://www.stratfor.com/russian_reversal_part_1
12. http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/kosovar_independence_and_russian_reaction
13. http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/georgia_russias_response_united_states
14. http://www.stratfor.com/russia_putins_cfe_gambit
15. http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/georgia_russia_operations_over
16. http://www.stratfor.com/russia_using_missile_defense_geopolitical_lever
17. http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/iran_tehrans_view_crisis_caucasus
18. http://www.stratfor.com/global_market_brief_europe_loosens_energy_ties_bind_russia