The conflict between Russia and Georgia has been brewing in South Ossetia for a long time.  Though technically on Georgian soil, the region is a patchwork of Georgian and South Ossetian villages, and it is governed with near autonomy by a faction of South Ossetian separatists.  The stated goal of the South Ossetian government has always been independence, and, backed by Russia, the South Ossetian militia has recently carried out targeted campaigns against Georgian citizens living there.

The region is a hotbed of ethnic tensions, but the US deserves its fair share of the blame for stoking the fire.  It actively sought out a close relationship with the democratically-elected president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, and emboldened Saakashvili to be an outspoken critic of the Kremlin.  More significantly, the US also helped militarize the Georgian army as it prepared to deploy troops to Iraq.  Russia retaliated by closing the border, cutting off air service and mail between the two countries, and refusing Georgian exports.  The Kremlin has also issued Russian citizenship and passports to South Ossetian adults.

Saakashvili is now the US’s staunchest ally in the region and a symbol of American influence there, but Georgia is only a small part of the Bush administration’s strategy to expand its security interests in the former Soviet states.  Over the past two years, the administration has pressed forward with plans to develop an intercontinental missile-defense shield in the Czech Republic and Poland despite opposition from the Kremlin.  Though the Russian government repeatedly slammed the proposal as an act of aggression and has threatened a military response, the Bush administration maintains that the shield is merely a defensive precaution against attacks by rogue states like Iran and North Korea.  Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice signed a deal to place a radar station in the Czech Republic in early July and negotiated through the summer to position a host of interceptor missiles in Poland.

In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Georgia, the Russian government lashed out at the pro-Georgian bias of the Western media coverage.  A top diplomat challenged the Western media to show “not only Russian tanks, and texts saying Russia is at war in South Ossetia and with Georgia, but also… the suffering of the Ossetian people, the murdered elderly people and children, the destroyed towns of South Ossetia.”  Tabloids similarly accused the foreign press of biased reporting, and even Mikhail Gorbachev — former president of the Soviet Union and no friend of the Kremlin — spoke out against the West in a mid-August op-ed in the New York Times.

All defended the government’s decision to invade Georgia, but the rationale was weak:  They claimed that Saakashvili had committed “genocide” when it shelled the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali on August 7^th, giving Russia no choice but to respond.  In actuality, the death count from that shelling was under 200, and Saakashvili had ordered the attack to defend Georgian citizens against the South Ossetian militia.  Rash, certainly, but not genocide.

It seemed pretty strange at the time that Russia was complaining about its media coverage when it had just invaded another country.  But the US has expanded its influence in the Caucasus to such an extent that Russia probably has a legitimate reason to feel like it’s being gamed in its own backyard.  Clearly, the back and forth went too far, the Russian government felt like it was being pushed into a corner, and it reacted.  The fallout from that decision has been disastrous, but the good news is that neither Russia nor the US has an interest in destabilizing the region for the long term.

At this point, the best way for the US to avoid exacerbating the situation is to let Europe take the lead.  They’ve already started to do so: The 27 leaders of the EU assembled in Brussels on Monday for an emergency one-day summit.  They managed to be (slightly) less paralyzed by indecision and disagreement than usual, closing the four-hour session with a threat to suspend strategic partnership talks scheduled for mid-September unless Russia withdraws its troops to preconflict positions by September 8^th.

If Europe uses this experience to successfully muster its strength, there could be a bright side to this US foreign policy failure.