georgia

Over on our sister blog, openRussia, Patrik Shirak takes both McCain and Obama to task for their simplistic views on this summer's Russia-Georgia crisis. During last Friday's debate, the Republican stuck to his hawkish, cold warrior line on the Kremlin, while Obama declined the opportunity to add much needed nuance to the discussion. Both candidates said nothing of the tortured local history of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, a history that lies inescapably at the root of the conflict. The imperatives of great power grand strategy remained self-evident and unchallenged.

Obama was disappointing more broadly in his cautious acceptance of traditional foreign policy wisdom. On the left-of-centre Foreign Policy in Focus, Stephen Zunes catalogues what could have been. I agree with Zunes that the "success" of the surge needs to be questioned. It was the "de facto partioning" of Baghdad into sectarian neighbourhoods, a process underway before the arrival of additional US troops, that contributed most to the reduction of violence in the city. The other achievement of the surge - the so-called Anbar Awakening of Sunni tribal fighters - had nothing to do with the surge policy itself. Obama may indeed be aware of these trivial matters of fact, but the debate showed clearly that his camp was wary of drifting too far from McCain's message of strength.

Last Friday's debate was Obama's to win. While many observers suggest he "shaded it", his wooden performance hardly constituted a victory. If Obama wanted to put daylight between his weathered opponent and himself, he should have been more forthright with his opinions, more honest to his intellegence, and less deferential to the McCain view of the world. Will it be left to Joe Biden in today's VP debate to more forcefully evoke the alternative foreign policy vision of an Obama presidency? 

The conventional wisdom has it that this month's eruption of violence between Russia and Georgia played squarely into the hands of John McCain. With pundits and hacks fulminating about a return to the Cold War, McCain has ratcheted up the rhetoric, supposedly sending a muscular to the Kremlin. He demanded that "Russia should immediately and unconditionally cease its military operations and withdraw all forces from sovereign Georgian territory." McCain, who has in the past called Vladimir Putin a "totalitarian dictator", went on to belittle the more cautious tone struck by the Obama campaign as "bizarrely in sync with Moscow." Such claims amount to preposterous misrepresentations of Obama's position and are calculated to appeal to the cruder, blustering passions of the American people. It's not just the benighted of the developing world, after all, that seek solace in their strongmen.