What Russia wants in Georgia
August 19, 2008 | By Nathaniel Ward
Nearly two weeks ago, Russian forces crossed into Georgia, a staunch American ally in the Caucuses. While fighting has largely stopped, Russian forces remain on Georgian soil despite Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s promises the troops would withdraw.
Heritage Foundation expert Ariel Cohen explains that Russia has five goals in its campaign against Georgia.
- Expulsion of Georgian troops and termination of Georgian sovereignty in South Ossetia and Abkhazia;
- “Regime change” by bringing down President Mikheil Saakashvili and installing a more pro-Russian leadership in Tbilisi;
- Preventing Georgia from joining NATO and sending a strong message to Ukraine that its insistence on NATO membership may lead to war and/or its dismemberment;
- Shifting control of the Caucasus, and especially over strategic energy pipelines, by controlling Georgia; and
- Recreating a 19th-century-style sphere of influence in the former Soviet Union, by the use of force if necessary.
This campaign could serve as a prelude to subsequent actions elsewhere in Eastern Europe, Cohen warns. In particular, Russia could turn its sights on Ukraine, which controls the strategic Crimean peninsula and has a substantial ethnic Russian minority.
Russia’s latest adventurism demonstrates that it wants to reestablish itself as a great power, Heritage’s Peter Brookes argues in his New York Post column. “Today’s Kremlin is cocky, nationalistic, rich and bent on asserting Russia as a great power with distinct interests — not only in its neighborhood or ‘near abroad’ — but across the globe.”
At the bottom of his article, Brookes provides a useful summary of Russia’s interests, alliances and recent troublemaking.
Cohen urges the United States and its allies to continue their opposition to the Russian incursion. They “need to send a strong signal to Moscow that creating 19th-century-style spheres of influence and redrawing the borders of the former Soviet Union is a danger to world peace.”
Georgia’s ambassador speaks at Heritage
“The last few days have shown without a shadow of doubt that Russia is using this moment to project the message to the world that it is back as an imperial power and the free world is powerless to respond,” Georgian Ambassador Vasil Sikharulidze told a standing-room-only crowd in Heritage’s Allison Auditorium Monday.
Sikharulidze urged the free world to stand up to Russia’s aggression, which he said “can and must be resisted. The power of the free world requires unity. Otherwise, if they sense weakness and disunity, we will find ourselves in much direr circumstances very soon.”
During the event, a Georgian government official called in to answer questions from the audience, which included a number of television crews. Sikharulidze also provided up-to-the-minute reports on Russian positions.
The media turns to Heritage on Georgia
As the events in Georgia unfolded, the media turned to The Heritage Foundation’s experts for their insights and analysis.
Television and radio shows quickly called Heritage for the conservative take on the Russian invasion. Our experts appeared on national programs on CNN, Fox News, Fox Business Channel, PBS, Reuters TV, Cox TV, C-SPAN, CNN Radio, the Talk Radio Network, Westwood One and NPR. They also took to the airwaves on local stations including KFAQ, KMBZ, KOA, KOMO, KPAM, KRLD, KSLR, KVI, WAVA, WBT, WTIC, WTTG and WWTN.
Heritage experts Ariel Cohen, Helle Dale, Yevgeny Volk, James Carafano, Peter Brooks and Nile Gardiner got the word out in the print media. They were quoted in such publications as the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor, the Moscow Times, National Review Online, the New York Post, the New York Sun, the Politico, Radio Free Europe, the St. Petersburg Times, London’s Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times (in several different articles and editorials).
Several news agencies, whose articles are syndicated nationwide, also spoke with Heritage experts about Georgia: the Associated Press, McClatchy News Service and Agence France-Presse. And Heritage research also caught the attention of the websites of the New York Times and Washington Post.
You can read a transcript of Ariel Cohen’s appearance on PBS’ “News Hour” online.
Other Heritage work of note
- Protect America. Poland’s new deal with the United States to host missile interceptors “is in the best interest of all the members of NATO on both sides of the Atlantic,” Heritage’s James Carafano argues. Including Poland in the missile defense shield will both help deter Iran’s missile threat and, just as importantly considering recent events, send a message to Russia that Poland “will not kowtow to Russian demands that make no sense.”
- Protect America and Entitlements. It’s a common claim on the Left that military spending is surging to the point that it’s impacting our economy. Heritage’s Conn Carroll refutes these spurious claims with two simple charts. One shows that military spending remains far below where it stood in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s; the other shows how dramatically spending has increased on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security over the same period.
- Health Care. One proposal for health care reform would have Congress create and regulate a national health care “market”—one in which the government itself is a “competitor.” This is merely a prescription for government control of health care, warns Heritage’s Bob Moffit. Instead of allowing consumers to choose the health insurance plan that best suits them, this scheme would create a perverse arrangement whereby the government both regulates and provides health coverage. “The likely incentives for government officials would be to set rules to advantage the government's own health plan and to disadvantage the private health plans,” Moffit argues.
In other news
- Distressingly large portions of the population favor a return to the Fairness Doctrine, the pernicious government regulation that silenced conservative voices in the name of “balanced” opinion. At a Heritage Foundation event last week, FCC commissioner Robert McDowell even noted that some seek to impose these regulations on the Internet—which has thrived precisely because its content was not micromanaged by bureaucrats.
- Inflation seems to be on the rise, as wholesale prices rose in July at the greatest clip since 1981.
- Iran has conducted a test-launch of a rocket it says will be used to deliver satellites to orbit.
- Pakistan’s President, Pervez Musharraf, has resigned.
- Faced with rising gas prices, some school districts are curbing bus service or even cutting back the school week to four days.
- Certain non-profit organizations are looking to the federal government to fund their work. Non-profits often provide vastly superior social services than government agencies, so this could be a step in the right direction, though we should remain vigilant against expansions of government regulation and control. The Heritage Foundation neither seeks nor accepts any government funding.
Coming up at Heritage
To attend these or any other events at Heritage please RSVP at Heritage’s website. Or you can view these events live online. All times are Eastern.
- On Wednesday, August 20 at noon, Gen. Victor Renuart joins Heritage to discuss future challenges for Northern Command, which he oversees.
- On Thursday, August 21 at 11:00 a.m., a panel of experts examines the violence in China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region, about which the Chinese government has been less than forthcoming.
Nathaniel Ward is the Editor of MyHeritage.org—a website for members and supporters of The Heritage Foundation.
