A badly fractured (far right, pro-Russian) Radical Party in Serbia.

Yes, the Bush Administration approached Kosovo’s recognition reflexively and without much forethought. But in this case, their decision seems to be paying dividends.

(Why it matters: here and here.)

If you’ve ever wondered what it looks like seconds before you’re destroyed by an air-to-air missile, check out today’s New York Times. The article summarizes a recent UN report which authoritatively declares that the plane photographed above firing at a Georgian spy drone was Russian, thus calling into questions Russia’s self-asserted neutrality in the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict. The UN report goes on to chastise the Russians for shooting down the drone while at the same time upbraiding the Georgians for stoking tensions by flying drones over Abkhazia in the first place.

This throws into sharp relief the near-absurd role the UN creates for itself in these kinds of conflicts. There are many UN staffers who think that an important part of the UN’s mandate is war-prevention, and who view a report such as the one described as the proper stance for the UN to take. “Both of you warring factions are culpable,” the thinking goes, “so please separate and let us guarantee the peace between you until you regain your senses and come to a peaceful settlement.” Unfortunately, such a position does anything but guarantee peace. One only need to consider the Georgian perspective in order to see why that is the case.

Georgians, like the much-aggrieved Serbs viz-a-vis Kosovo, don’t see Abkhazia’s independence as at all legitimate, and absent Russian military presence in the region would re-conquer the territory and put down the rebel leadership with traditionally excessive Caucasian violence. There is little reason to think Saakashvili would seek compromise with the rebels if Russia was not backing them to the hilt—indeed, one can easily see Georgia acting swiftly to retake what it feels is rightly its own territory as soon as the Russian military is removed from the region.

This is not to say that Russia’s role in the conflict has been at all honorable or praiseworthy, or that it is acting on anything more than selfish geo-strategic impulses. But it is important for UN types to recognize that the negotiated settlement they envision themselves able to broker can only come about if Abkhazia’s current territorial integrity is guaranteed by force of arms. Since the UN is not going to want to field a force which could very well get in a shooting war with the Georgian army, they ought to be working on ways to resolve the conflict with Russia constructively engaged on behalf of the Abkhaz. Any other strategy is folly and is more likely to lead to war rather than peace.

The Economist notes:

According to a Russian newspaper report, Mr Putin lost his temper with Mr Bush at a meeting on the final day of the Bucharest summit, telling him: “Do you understand, George, that Ukraine is not even a state.” Claiming that most of Ukraine’s territory was “given away” by Russia, Mr Putin supposedly also said that if the country joined NATO it would “cease to exist”.

So many of my “Russia hand” friends tell me that Russia’s leadership is made up of mafioso goons who nevertheless clearly understand the profit motive above all else. “These people can be bargained with.” Undoubtedly this is true in many cases, but I think most people underestimate nationalistic pride and raw power hunger when they talk about Russia. Russia is far more likely to behave like a 19th century Great Power bully than as a responsible stakeholder in some 21st century post-national global order.

This is not to say that Putin’s point is completely unfounded on its merits—the West treating Ukraine like some inviolable, monolithic entity is a recipe for disaster. But it should be a heads-up to all Western strategists that Russia will not be likely to compromise in any constructive way when it comes to talking about Ukraine’s future.

Marko Hoare thinks McCain would be best for South-East Europe. He dismisses Hillary as a continuation of Bill Clinton’s unfocused performance on the world stage, and warns that Obama is pandering to Serbian and Greek domestic lobbies which are fairly right-wing (as such lobbies tend to be).

I’d like to examine this argument in more detail, and I’ll try to post something longer over the weekend. Briefly, though, I would argue that Hillary is America’s best hope for a smart yet assertive foreign policy; McCain scares me for a variety of reasons; and yes, Obama is the least convincing of the three. I’ll stick to writing about Obama for this post, and hopefully get around to expanding on my thoughts later.

I find Obama most troubling of all, because though I believe that he is the most capable and intelligent candidate, I get the sense that his gifts for oration and inspiration can get the better of him sometimes.

In his letter to the Serbian Unity Congress, he states:

I support and shall help in every possible way development of the dialog between all sides in Kosovo because I believe that peace and stability can be reached only by solutions acceptable for all sides.

Unlike Dr. Hoare, I don’t see this as a pander. I think he has a genuine concern that America’s recent moves in the region are sowing the seeds of a broader future conflict. He is calling for Kosovars and Serbs to get together and work out their differences in good faith. It’s a nice sentiment, and a nice template for solving conflicts in theory. In the practice of international relations, however, we’re frequently not dealing with good faith interlocutors, and a harder-nosed realpolitik is oftentimes called for.

I worry that Obama’s proven ability to motivate people in the domestic setting is making him believe that he can replicate this on the world stage. I worry Obama believes that the Balkan tragedy of the 1990’s came about because the Great Powers didn’t insist on negotiations hard enough. I worry that he thinks that the Russians, who are saying very similar things to what he’s saying above on Kosovo, are being honest and sensible, rather than duplicitous and deceitful. I worry that Obama, listening as he does to the Samantha Powers of the world, has an idealistic and naive idea of how the United States ought to behave.

Here’s the clip I wrote about the other day of a journalist on Russian TV ruminating about how former Serbian PM Zoran Đinđić deserved the bullets that killed him:

For whatever reason, I assumed that the comment came out of some sort of round-table discussion program. Delivered as it is, authoritatively, from an anchorman-like figure makes it more outrageous.

Take a second to digest the words of Russian journalist Konstantin Syomin ruminating on the recent events in Serbia on Russian state-run television (as reported by Belgrade’s B92 and translated by me):

It was these very cheering masses, drunk on liberal promises, who mourned the Western marionette (former Serbian PM) Zoran Đinđić’s passing to the next world—a man who destroyed the legendary Serbian army and security services, a man who handed over to the Hague the heroes of Serbian resistance in exchange for abstract economic help, and who for his efforts received a well-deserved bullet.

That’s right: state-run Russian TV celebrates the assassination of a former Serbian Prime Minister, the only real reformer Serbia has had since the tyrranical Milošević. Remember, this is hardly the aberrant opinion of a lone journalist—it’s not like Russian state TV allows things to air that haven’t been carefully vetted.

B92 reports that the Serbian embassy in Moscow has asked for an official apology from Putin over this statement. Hopefully President Tadić will take this opportunity to distance his country from the toxic influence of Moscow, thereby provoking some serious soul-searching among his compatriots as to where they’d like to see themselves in the next ten years.

I’ve written about this before: Russia’s game over Kosovo has less to do with warm feelings viz. the Serbs and has more to do with securing energy monopolies over Eastern Europe, a region Russia clearly sees as its legitimate sphere of influence.

This article by Charlie Szrom in The Weekly Standard lays out the argument as clearly and as cogently as you can hope to read anywhere.

The West should recognize Moscow’s less-than-noble motives in opposing a free Kosovo, and it must blunt the power of the Nord and South Stream pipeline projects. Europe can either accept a grim future under Russia’s thrall, or it can begin walking a difficult, if necessary, path.

Do we care about Eastern Europe falling back into Russia’s orbit? Working through the implications of how you answer that question will yield a coherent policy for the United States. Any other approach will yield confused half-measures and disastrous prevarication.

Robert Kagan is a smart man. Of Paradise and Power was a smart, insightful book. This is a smart, insightful essay proceeding along the same lines of argument.

The supranational, legalistic E.U. spirit is a response to the conflicts of the 20th century, when nationalism and power politics twice destroyed the continent. But Vladimir Putin’s Russia, as Ivan Krastev has noted, is driven in part by the perceived failure of “post-national politics” after the Soviet collapse. Europe’s nightmares are the 1930s; Russia’s nightmares are the 1990s. Europe sees the answer to its problems in transcending the nation-state and power. For Russians, the solution is in restoring them.

Kagan is frequently lumped in with the neoconservatives—and rightly so. But it’s important to note that his argument here boils down to a gritty realist essence. Russia is a rational actor on the world stage trying to maximize its influence in its “near-abroad”. The Europeans need to wake up to the fact that soft power is not terribly effective in such circumstances. And the Americans need to come up with a catalogue of which countries are absolutely critical to their interests and which they can afford to give up to growing Russian influence.

Anatol Lieven has an important (yet in my view flawed) take on the significance of Kosovo in the Financial Times (via Steve Clemons). I don’t feel particularly great right now so I won’t delve into it too deeply, but my disagreement with Lieven comes down to this:

Kosovo’s independence will inevitably have repercussions for the Georgian separatist regions and Nagorno- Karabakh and Trans Dnestr. For the west to say Kosovo is a unique case is empty, given the obvious parallels.

To resolve these issues and restore elementary consistency to its own position, the west does not need to recognise Abkhaz and South Ossetian independence - something for which Moscow is in any case not asking, given the obvious lessons for some of Russia’s own restive minorities.

Russia’s backing of Serbia’s claims to Kosovo doesn’t have anything to do with them feeling that the rules of the international system are being applied arbitrarily—Russians couldn’t care less about fairness or the international system. They are establishing spheres of influence in Serbia through the purchase of a majority stake in the Serbian oil monopoly (Naftna Industrija Srbije - NIS). There are also plans afoot for gas pipelines to Serbia which could end up serving most of Central Europe, thereby pre-empting the Western-backed Nabucco Pipeline project.

This is pure power politics, and should not be mistaken for anything else. It’s about regional influence and energy dependency. Restoring “elementary consistency” to our positions doesn’t matter one whit. Richard Holbrooke had the right idea back in November of last year—Russia needs to be confronted on this.