Georgia’s Messy Breakup
But something else set Georgia apart: it was the only country in the world to love America for what it is now, rather than for what it had once been. And who could have guessed how well the Bush Administration would respond to flattery? No one else had ever tried.
My bet is that Saakashvili, had he remained a lawyer in New York rather than return to Georgia to lead a revolution, would be sporting an Obama button right now. Instead he found himself president of small and fractured country, looked to the right, and found George Bush. And yet watching them together, it's clear that there is an intimate, convivial aspect to the relationship that is more than just realpolitik. Bush may have looked into Putin's eyes and seen his soul, but when he looked into Saakashvili's, he saw his own. As Bob Dylan sang, "If you live outside the law, you must be honest,” and it’s this cowboy refrain that gets to the heart of the presidential disenchantment that lurks in both men’s souls. Which is to say that even as they grew more paranoid, the problem was always without, not within: they were liberators first, always in search of something to liberate.
It never struck me as odd that there were so many of us Americans living in Georgia over the past five years. Our type was ubiquitous throughout the region, particularly where they would have us – that is, where they needed our money. But while Dushanbe or Chisinau is where you ended up – where your embassy sent you, or your grant-making NGO – Tbilisi is where you wanted to be. Of course it wasn't 1920s Paris or Havel-era Prague, as some itinerant zeitgeist-hunters liked to suggest, but the feeling was the same: part of what made Tbilisi exhilarating was that we were essential to what made it fun. Unlike its neighbors, Georgians didn't see us as the face of empire come crashing at the gate. Instead, we were the allies come to liberate them: we were the antidote. Proverbial cab-drivers proffered their most Americanized thumbs-up upon hearing I was American. Old men in the park where I walked my dog – dressed in the same Soviet suits they'd worn during their years pretending to work – called after me, “***molodets***,” ("well done!"), for the accident of being born in the U.S.
My bet is that Saakashvili, had he remained a lawyer in New York rather than return to Georgia to lead a revolution, would be sporting an Obama button right now.
And yet in sheer enemy-of-my-enemy terms, America was the best friend Georgia could have. Yes, there were weapons and aid; refurbished pipelines and all-expense-paid trips to DC. But what America offered, even more than its largesse, was its worldview. And to America, of course it mattered that Georgia worshiped Jesus Christ and the West. It mattered, too, that Georgia was willing to send its American-trained soldiers to Iraq. But Georgia's biggest selling point was always its real estate. Georgia knew it, and so did Russia. It was only America that was able to pretend this wasn't a zero-sum game all along.
One could argue – and I think it is true – that the hearts and minds of the former Soviet Union were America's to lose this past decade. You'd think that Russia would have a competitive advantage after ruling the region for so many years. But when was last time any part of the former Soviet Union genuinely admired the United States? When it was still a part of the Soviet Union. (And besides, Russia is no Germany or Japan: part of being a revanchist superpower means never having to say you're sorry). By the time it fell, communism was a parched idea; by comparison, America offered a glimpse into a world in which markets and democracy were inextricably linked, where the prospect of being able to buy different brands of shoes, and being able to elect your president, were part of the same consumerist fantasy.
And yet whichever way U.S. policy twisted itself, it turned into a failure. There were essentially two strategies employed: push hard on democracy where it looked like it might stick, and soft-pedal where it couldn't, especially where there was oil. But where America pushed, it was kicked out by dictators, and where it didn't, the country's disappointed population equated America with its own corroded leadership. It was lose-lose either way. Then came Georgia.
In sheer enemy-of-my-enemy terms, America was the best friend Georgia could have.
Modeled in part after Estonia's success, Tbilisi gleefully pushed the neoliberal economic policy of an early 1990s Jeffrey Sachs. Soon everything from factories to forests were being sold off to the highest bidders. "We will sell everything but our conscience," said then-economy minister Kakha Bendukidze, who proceeded to do just that, with a little extra for good measure. Young Tbilisi economists – many of them trained in the U.S. – were so enamored of a certain Chicago school of economics that they hung photos of Milton Friedman on wall space Georgians normally reserved for Jesus or their mothers. And even after the bus routes were shut down, and the markets were closed, and inflation shot the cost of living through the roof, Georgians did not blame America as their Russian predecessors had. Instead, they blamed the Georgian government – not for following U.S. policy, but for deviating from it.
It's been said that there are three kinds of expats: madmen, missionaries, and mercenaries, and Georgia specialized in all three. First to arrive, as always, were the madmen – Georgia-lovers who obsessed over the country in the dryly passionate manner of the professional student of pigeons – and who were duly feted, accepted, and finally absorbed, marrying and converting their way to proto-nationalism.
It's been said that there are three kinds of expats: madmen, missionaries, and mercenaries, and Georgia specialized in all three.
Next up were the missionaries, who saw in Georgia their chance at retribution. Irving Kristol, who may have coined the term, defined neo-conservatives as liberals who had been mugged by reality. These were liberals who had mugged reality. They dug deep into the history and saw their own writing on the wall. They were sensitive Soviet souls who, by wont of their Jewishness and ethnic non-Russianness, had developed grudges that would last either a lifetime or the cycle of a Washington payroll. There was the Romanian Vladimir Socor, a lugubrious specter haunting the Tbilisi Marriott, who had the virtue of seeming to believe everything he wrote; and there was the Russian-born pundit Ariel Cohen, who, when I last saw him, was airily being quoted by a Bloomberg reporter on the validity of Azerbaijan’s elections he had flown in a day too late to watch. They had friends at AEI and DoD; they felt passionately about Israel and Iraq; their employers were “non-partisan” think tanks that favored the categorical statement and the far-right.
Last to arrive were the mercenaries, who spent days meeting Georgian politicians at the Marriott's maroon-walled café and nights getting the full-court Georgian press – a trifecta of feasting, dancing, and Saakashvili – that Georgia reserved solely for lobbyists and consumer-minded travel writers. The mercenaries didn't work for the American government or for Georgia but for themselves, charging such top dollar that it is still unclear who their real funders could be. Chief among them was Randy Scheunemann, McCain foreign policy advisor and former President of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, who lobbied for Georgia through his firm, Orion. (Orion, get it? That’s the hunter constellation, one of the brightest in the sky.) There was oil in the next country over; there was a pipeline to build and NATO to expand. And yet it was in the misty world of Washington influence where they were at their best. (“Yes, but what is it that you actually do?” I asked his bombshell blond Estonian employee more than once before being gracefully deferred.)
Now that the Bush Administration is closing shop, America’s attempt to remake the world into a perpetual Republican convention may be coming to an end. One thing is for sure: the era of the color revolutions – American-backed regime change designed with the global reach of a McDonald's campaign – is now over. In part, it's that the countries in the process of "transitioning" – that optimistically Hegelian idea that briefly seized all U.S. thinking on post-Cold War foreign policy – have now chosen sides.
But the biggest reason is that Russia has made it clear that it will never allow such things again. While Job One of Dmitry Medvedev’s first term has been a detailed mapping of Russian “privileged interests” abroad, Job Two has been pointing out that there’s very little the U.S. can do about it. Is it too much to suggest that we are watching the latest textbook-making geopolitical shift? The seismic reading on terrorism, after all, is decidedly lower than on the genuine return of a bipolar world.
And so it’s America that is being punished here – for turning Georgia into a symbol, but not the symbol that America thinks. Russia doesn't hate Georgia because it's an icon of democracy; it hates Georgia because it's an icon of Russia-hating. Georgia was designed to function as synecdoche and premonition – into part of a whole and as more to come. Under these conditions, can you blame Russia? Imagine, as Medvedev recently did, if Russia had done the same.
Russia doesn't hate Georgia because it's an icon of democracy; it hates Georgia because it's an icon of Russia-hating.
But Georgia screwed up by forgetting one thing: if you live next to the bear, you do not poke it. Maybe you ask the bear to leave you alone, maybe you kick the bear's secret service out of your country or ask the UN to do it for you, but under no circumstance do you poke the bear yourself. This is the first rule of post-Soviet politics. And so, as we sift through the Rashomon-like accounts of who fired the war's first shot, we miss the point: a similar gambit by, say, Moldova or Armenia would have gone completely ignored by Russia. South Ossetia was about the Kosovo precedent and the United States, not about protecting the rights of Russian citizens.
But this is a love story, and a romance can only last so long. Georgia and America may have shared passion, enhanced by the tenderness and narcissism of all brief and dazzling flings, but a bruised Russia could not, and would not, get over the past. Which is to say that Russia has finally done what it has been promising all along. Like a jilted wife, like a wounded lover, like King Kong, Russia has returned to take what is theirs. And they want Georgia.
(Photos by Itar-Tass)