WASHINGTON (IPS/GIN) - Just days after the outbreak of war between Russia and Georgia, the debate in Washington over how to view the crisis historically became nearly as contentious as the debate over how to respond to it politically.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin Photo: MGN Online
Prominent neoconservatives and other foreign policy hawks portrayed Russia’s offensive into Georgia as an echo of 1930s Nazi expansionism—an interpretation that has been hotly contested by a number of liberals and conservative realists.
But the question of what sort of concrete action the U.S. should take in the Caucasus has proved far messier, as both camps remain split about the proper response to the Russian offensive.
Since Aug. 12, when Russia sent troops into the restive Georgian region of South Ossetia, neoconservatives in the U.S. compared Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin with Adolf Hitler, and the Russian incursion with Germany’s 1938 annexation of the Sudetenland.
“The details of who did what to precipitate Russia’s war against Georgia are not very important,” began a column in the Washington Post by prominent neoconservative Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the Project for a New American Century. “Do you recall the precise details of the Sudeten Crisis that led to Nazi Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia?”
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s famously unsuccessful attempt to appease Mr. Hitler by ceding the Sudetenland in the 1938 Munich Agreement has become a central reference of neoconservative foreign policy doctrine. “Appeasement,” “Munich,” and Prime Minister Chamberlain’s name itself are often taken as code words signifying the ineffectiveness of compromise and diplomacy—and the necessity of military force—in dealing with the U.S.’s enemies.
Republican presidential candidate John McCain also seemed to be alluding to the lessons of Munich in a Aug. 12 speech. Mr. McCain claimed that the U.S. had “learned at great cost the price of allowing aggression against free nations to go unchecked.”
Mr. McCain is advised by Mr. Kagan and joined him in proposing a League of Democracies to counter powers such as Russia and China.
At a panel held Aug. 13 at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute in Washington, Munich analogies abounded.
Ralph Peters, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and prominent foreign policy hawk, mocked the Aug. 13 peace agreement between Russia and Georgia brokered by French President Nicholas Sarkozy.
“President Sarkozy has landed in Paris holding in his hand a piece of paper guaranteeing peace in our time,” Mr. Peters said, eliciting widespread laughter from the audience. Once again, the reference was to a statement of Prime Minister Chamberlain’s following the Munich conference.
Mr. Peters ended his remarks by making the Putin-Hitler analogy explicit.
The Hitler and Chamberlain analogies have long been staples of neoconservative rhetoric, but their application to the situation in Georgia has triggered a backlash.
Joe Klein, a prominent centrist political pundit who has become involved in a series of rancorous disputes with neoconservatives in recent months, mocked Robert Kagan’s use of the Sudetenland analogy. “When a column begins like this … the author has got to be a neoconservative pushing for the next war,” he wrote in a blog post entitled “It’s Raining Nazis.”
Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center, advocated U.S. assistance to the Georgian regime in the National Interest, a journal which is today known as a bastion of foreign policy realism. But Mr. Simes urged policymakers to “disregard the hysterical diatribes of (Georgian President Mikheil) Saakashvili’s American champions, who protest too much—perhaps because their irresponsible encouragement of the Georgian president was a contributing factor on the road to the war.”
At the American Enterprise Institute panel, Mr. Peters was blistering in his criticism of the U.S. response to the war but stopped short of calling for direct military action. He recommended measures such as expelling Russia from the G-8 and World Trade Organization and revoking Russia’s right to host the 2014 Winter Olympic Games.
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