Strongman, The

a Russian who looked very happy about the situation. It can be pointed out that Georgia’s NATO aspirations have been knocked for six, or that Russia has allegedly ‘increased its security’, and is now building a new naval base in Abkhazia. But without doubt Russia’s security interests would have been better served by having a peaceful relationship with Georgia.
    In the end, the tragedy of Georgia and its war with Russia may come down to the personal tragedy of one mercurial and deluded man. Nino Burjanadze, formerly a close ally of Saakashvili, says he ‘rushed into war totally convinced he would defeat the Russian army. The last time I spoke to him was five days before the war began, and I said to him: “If you start this war it will mean the end for my country, and I will never forgive you.” ’ But another question is why Saakashvili’s supporters in the West, especially in the United States, while cautioning him against starting a war, at the same time encouraged his belief that he could get away with it. Angela Merkel and others knew about his impetuousness, yet NATO recklessly insisted on promising his country (and Ukraine) membership – even though that made Russia feel insecure. To this day, no serious attempt has been made to visualise a future in which all the countries of Europe and North America might act together to ensure their security, rather than imagining that the security of some can be built at the expense of the security of others.
    The events described in this chapter illustrate better than any in the past 12 years the failure of Russia and the West to understand one another and to take one another’s concerns and fears into account. Bush preached and lectured. Putin raged and menaced. America said that Russia must give up its ‘sphere of influence’ in its ‘near abroad’. Russia said that America should stop acting as if it ruled the world. Bush accused Putin of communist-style authoritarianism. Putin accused Bush of Cold War thinking. Both were right. The result was inevitable.

 
    11

RESETTING RELATIONS WITH THE WEST
    Repercussions of the Caucasus war
    The Russians were livid with the West for siding with Georgia over a war that it had started. They lashed out at everyone in sight, demonstrating a fragile grip on reality. The Georgian attack on Tskhinvali was compared to the 9/11 attack on the United States. In the true tradition of Russian conspiracy theory, Vladimir Putin declared that the Americans had instigated the whole conflict in order to shore up the position of Senator John McCain, Barack Obama’s Republican rival in the American presidential election.
    The foreign minister Sergei Lavrov claimed that certain foreign powers decided to use Saakashvili ‘to test the strength of Russian authority’ and ‘to force us to embark on the path of militarisation and abandon modernisation’. The minister insisted the Russians had done nothing more than take out positions from which the Georgians could attack them. Speaking to the British foreign secretary David Miliband on his cellphone, Lavrov referred to Mikheil Saakashvili as a ‘fucking lunatic’.
    The Russians appeared to be oblivious to the fact that they were in the international doghouse having invaded and occupied a large part of a neighbouring country. At the end of August, President Medvedev made his first – of several – attempts to draw weighty conclusions from the war. He enunciated five new ‘principles’ of Russian foreign policy, some of which had alarming implications. Principle number four declared that defending the lives and dignity of Russians, wherever they might be , was the priority. This included ‘protecting the interests of our business community abroad’. Anyone who committed an aggressive act against them would be rebuffed, Medvedev promised. Point five declared that there were regions where Russia had ‘privileged interests’. This appeared to include all the neighbouring post-Soviet countries, where ethnic Russians lived. Medvedev pointedly did not use the expression ‘sphere of influence’ – but that is essentially what he meant. It implied that former Soviet republics such as Estonia and Latvia, now members of the EU and NATO but with large Russian minorities, were officially considered part of Moscow’s domain. The new policy was, perhaps, the precise opposite of what one might have expected a chastened Russia to adopt following the Georgia crisis.
    Showing no sign of