From Kosovo to Abkhazia

Over the past few weeks, the Russians have used America's reccent actions in Kosovo again and again as a precedent for their own recognition of the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia this past Monday. (In February of this year, the U.S. recognized Kosovo as an independent state over the objections of Serbia, to which Kosovo had belonged until then.)

As insistent as the Russians have been in pushing the Kosovo analogy, however, I happen to think they are still selling their own case short. In Kosovo, afterall, the U.S. had no compelling national interest whatsoever. This little country is nowhere near our border, its citizens do not hold U.S. passports, and neighboring Serbia did not constitute anything even vaguely resembling a threat to our security. (On that last point, however, the reverse is definitely not true: we bombed Serbia in 1999, even though there was no clear-cut evidence of any Serb-on-Kosovar ethnic cleansing--as Washington claimed. How could there be? The Kosovar Serbs were outnumbered by the ethnic Albanians nearly ten to one!)

But consider now Russia's predicament in the Caucuses:

• The expansion of NATO right up to Russia's very borders would indeed constitute a direct threat to their national security. And even if you are of the opinion the we can be trusted not to abuse our "forward-leaning" position there at some point in the future (by, say, stationing ABM's in Georgia, as we just did in Poland after unilaterally abandoning the Nixon-era ABM treaty), why should Russia trust us? Years ago, would we ever have tolerated any attempt on Russia's part to expand the Warwaw Pact to include Mexico or Canada? I know it's a stretch to imagine such a thing, since neither Mexico nor Canada would ever have wanted to go along with this. But supposing the Soviets could have engineered some sort of coup or revolution in Mexico which brought a far left-wing regime to power there? Well, that's exactly what happened in Cuba, wasn't it? And you know how we responded there. Even before there was any talk of putting missles on the island, we tried to overthrow Castro during the failed Bay of Pigs landing. I'm with the sceptics on this one: expanding NATO eastward was and remains a dangerously provocative policy.
• And what about the rights and national aspirations of the South Ossetians and the Abkhazians? Are they any less deserving of independence and personal security than the Kosovar Albanians? Even if the Russians are being cynical is raising the point (and I'm sure they are), that doesn't prove them wrong. What, afterall, were our motives in Kosovo? I have just made the point that it surely couldn't have been about our national security, since neither Kosovo nor Serbia are anywhere near our border. Could our actions there, perhaps, have had something to do with our desire to make permanent our military presence in the Balkans to act as a way-station for all of our activities in the Middle East and the Caucuses? (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Bondsteel)

I think the Russians would help their case much more if they asked questions like these, rather than going on about U.S. election conspiracy theories, as Putin did earlier today (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/28/georgia.russia2).

Playing Poker With the Bear

Today's article by 'Spengler' on the Asia Times website ("Americans play Monopoly, Russians chess," at: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/JH19Ag04.html) makes a compelling case that opening a military base in some new country is often regarded by American strategists (especially Neo-Cons) as an end in itself. He writes:

...Russia is playing chess, while the Americans are playing Monopoly. What Americans understand by "war games" is exactly what occurs on the board of the Parker Brothers' pastime. The board game Monopoly is won by placing as many
hotels as possible on squares of the playing board. Substitute military bases, and you have the sum of American strategic thinking.

The Russians, meanwhile, are the consummate chess-players: they ponder every move carefully, trying to anticipate how friend and foe alike will react. Only when they are sure that the odds are in their favor do they make their move.

I once had a very similar thought myself: Americans play poker, while our rivals and enemies play chess.

While chess is a game of long-term strategy, poker is all about short-term bluffing. Expanding NATO all the way to Russia's border, without having enough troops to deal with the blow-back, would be a good example of a recent U.S. bluff.

Poker players also get a new hand every round (a "new deal," in case you ever wondered where that phrase came from). Their bad luck--even their mistakes--from the last hand never carry forward to the next, unlike chess, where one desperate move frequently leads to another. The failure of our ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, have strengthened Iran. But this, in turn, seems only to have made the Neo-Cons all the more determined to attack Iran. Our blunders in the Middle East may yet force us into an even bigger catastrophe over there.

In the final assessment, I think our foreign policy would be a lot better off if our rulers started thinking more along the lines of chess, and less like desperate poker-players in a Vegas casino. Foreign policy, like chess, is one long, continuous game; it is not a serious of disconnected little 'deals' with no long-term implications.

But alas, chess requires a capacity for long-term strategic thinking that seems to be in short supply in the U.S. these days. In today's Washington, the Kennans and Kissingers have given way to the Cheneys and Wolfowitzes--a development I regard as most unfortunate.

Credit Crash

The recent subprime mortgage meltdown (and related financial troubles) in the U.S. got me to thinking about the nature of a credit economy generally--and let there be no doubt: ours is definitely a credit-based economy. The average citizen has a negative savings rate, the Federal Govenment is hopelessly in debt, and our country as a whole has had an unfavorable balance of trade for decades now, even when the dollar is weak. In fact, the only reason we are able to afford all those imports is because the Chinese and other foreign nations have long been willing to use the profits they make off us to purchase U.S. savings bonds, giving our government more spending money on the one hand, while making the dollar artificially expensive on the other. Modern America seems positively premised on the idea of borrowing large sums of money indefinitely.

Economically speaking, credit acts on an economy the way a stimulant acts on the human body. This has been widely appreciated at least since the Federal Reserve Board was created in 1913 and given the effective power to adjust interest rates to stabilize the money supply. John Maynard Keynes in the 1930's advocated temporarily lowering interest rates (along with cutting taxes and increasing government spending) during a recession or depression in order to stimulate borrowing and, with it, consumer demand. But no one ever thought of this as a permanent, day-in-day-out growth strategy until the 1990's, when Alan Greenspan took over.

Abusing credit, the way we have been doing, is just like abusing speed. At first, it was a temporary pick-me-up meant to fend off recessions; but ultimately, it became the great cure-all, helping us to cruise along from one market bubble to the next. Now, as I watch Bernanke hurl more Fed money into the economy in a desperate attempt to create more 'liquidity', I can't help but get the feeling that our country is as hopelessly addicted to cheap money as it is to cheap oil.

And it looks like credit-addiction can be as nasty as any crystall-meth habit. Ever higher doses (that is, lower interest rates) seem to be yielding less and less of a bang. Why, a few years ago, rates actually nearly went to zero, yet median income stagnated and in some cases, actually declined. And despite today's low Fed discount rates and big-ticket Wall Street bailouts, we're nowhere even close to the end of the current recession. Isn't that what dope-fiends call 'tolerance': when ever greater amounts of a drug produces ever weaker highs?

Another, even more frightening effect of speed addiction is the manic, delusional and often violently paranoid mentality that descends on the user. So much of the needless belligerence of the past few years, like the invasion of Iraq, the hyping of the Iranian bomb and all the airport strip-searching going on now strike me ridiculous--if not alltogether dangerous in themselves. I now wonder if the fact that we as a nation have come unmoored from any sense of what a real economy is anymore--something based on production as well as consumption--has made it impossible to understand what our true national interests even are. Is the dominance of the Neo-Con ideology--both haughty and paranoid at once--somehow related to this surreal economic existence of ours?