Moscow's Dangerous Game
MOSCOW - Interfax says Russia's Medvedev warns of military response to US missile shield in Europe.
One of the producers of CBN's Newswatch program sent me this wire alert this afternoon and asked what I made of it. My email response was:
"not a lot. they're soundings to see just how cowardly the Europeans are. they're probably not sure now. they're a bit shocked at how cowardly they've been over Georgia. so they're going to keep going until someone pushes back."
Since its invasion of Georgia, Russian bluster and rhetoric has felt less like Cold War rhetoric and more like war rhetoric. Of course, bluster and war rhetoric is cheap; just ask NATO and our Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice. But Western and NATO indecisiveness in response to Russian aggression in South Ossetia, in the form of completely empty threats and pronouncements, has to have the Kremlin now wondering just how much they can get away with before the West will actually start to move real armies and fleets to the east.
The great writer and news analyst Spengler, in his flawed but brilliant piece in the Asia Times last week, wrote that "Americans play Monopoly, Russians chess." In explaining how Moscow views as an existential threat the expansion of NATO and the placement of a missile shield on their border, Spengler says,
"American hardliners are the first to say that they feel stupid next to (Russian Prime Minister Valdimir) Putin…The fact is that all Russian politicians are clever. The stupid ones are all dead. By contrast, America in its complacency promotes dullards. A deadly miscommunication arises from this asymmetry. The Russians cannot believe that the Americans are as stupid as they look, and conclude that Washington wants to destroy them."
There are some very dangerous factors at play right now that bear watching:
-Washington's and NATO's failure to come through with an effective response to the invasion of Georgia has now introduced a superpower vacuum all around Russia's eastern and southern borders. NATO protection is now only theoretical. If Russia calculates that the West has no stomach for war, any former Soviet satellite state could be at risk.
-Russia is foolishly posturing that it no longer needs the West. I doubt that the Kremlin actually believes this, but if it does--Putin now says Russia doesn't need entrance into the World Trade Organization--we could face a bad situation in which the Russian military starts acting unilaterally all over Russia's periphery, and then we will see an East-West military showdown.
-Perhaps worst of all is polling that shows the Russian government is scoring major domestic popularity points with the Russian people. This perceived or actual public "mandate" to defend Russian interests and return to superpower status could, more than anything else, tempt the Kremlin to reach too far.
What we're watching now is how real wars sometimes start.
