So, ceasefire or continued fighting (reports are contradictory), with the Georgians humiliated and forcibly removed from South Ossetia and Abkhazia and themselves installed, Russia wins hands down. Except, perhaps, for one thing. Russia may have won the battle yet end up losing the war.
...Russia often acts against its own interests and a 'rational actor' model cannot be applied when guessing its next step, nor its interpretation of anyone else's.
The West must bear some blame for this too. The fudge at the Bucharest NATO summit in April - to give Georgia (and Ukraine) the guarantee of eventual membership, but not to grant it the Membership Action Plan (MAP) looked clever at the time, trying to please everyone, but it now appears to have backfired. Georgia has not been given clear enough signals as to what it must do to join and no less important, what it must not do. Had it received them, this may have prevented Mr Saakashvili from taking the reckless action he did on 8 August.
Now the hard and admirable work that Georgia has put into meeting the criteria for NATO entry seems to be in vain. Russia will not (because it cannot) be directly punished for these events, at least in the short term. Not so Georgia: its NATO ambitions now look more distant than ever, in spite of good progress on corruption and defence reform.
But more distant prospects may also be firmer prospects, especially if the map of Georgia has changed. If a more stable Georgia one day emerges from this crisis, it will be more attractive to NATO.
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