The Russo-Georgia War and the Challenge to American Global Dominance
Monday, October 13, 2008 at 21:11 Herbert P. Bix
The five-day Russo-Georgian War in the Caucasus brought into sharp focus many conflicts rooted in the region's history and in aggressive US-NATO policies since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Notable among these were the military encirclement of Russia and attempts to control energy resources in areas long dominated by the Soviet Union. The net effect was to hasten a dangerous new era of rivalry between the world's two most powerful nuclear weapons states, one which will be shaped hereafter by the current global recession and the changes it is bringing about in the economic practices of all states.
President Bill Clinton's resort to force in Kosovo in 1999 was crucial in precipitating this situation. At that moment the US moved to thrust aside international law and the primacy of the Security Council. Clinton justified war as a matter of establishing a more humane international order, and every civilian death that resulted from it became "unintentional collateral damage," morally justifiable because the end was noble. By substituting a quasi-legal, moral right of humanitarian intervention for the long-established principles of national sovereignty and respect for territorial integrity, US-NATO aggression against Serbia prepared the ground for the Bush administration's unilateral military interventions. Now, bogged down in illegal, unjust wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the US government suddenly appears to have rediscovered the usefulness of norms of international law that it had denied in Kosovo. But it invoked the principle of state sovereignty selectively, attacking Russia for its intervention in Georgia while simultaneously sending its own armed forces and aircraft on cross-border raids into Pakistan.
Russia appears to be the big winner in the US-NATO-backed war in the Caucasus.
Herbert Bix, author of Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, which won the Pulitzer Prize, teaches at Binghamton University, New York, and writes on issues of war and empire.
He wrote this article for Japan Focus. Posted on October 10, 2008.
