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66 Opinion
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via SWIFT. The Mir (Peace) payment system was launched in April 2015, a move the Germans are now intending to copy.
Like Nuland saw Yanukovych, Putin sees Merkel as a person he can do business with. The personal chemistry between them is not strong, but they are both pragmatists, both totally on top of their game and both acting from a very clear idea of what is in their national interest. And the bottom line is a multipolar world built on negotiation, debate and compromise that is what Putin has been pushing for all along.
“We also need a new Ostpolitik, that is, a European Ostpolitik that also shows new ways to cooperate with Russia in the interests of all European countries – and not merely those chosen by Russia, given the dangerous silence between Washington and Moscow,” Maas said. “It must take into account the needs of all Europeans... and it must find a balance between security interests, economic cooperation and collaboration on cultural and academic matters.”
COLCHIS:
Georgia’s security conundrum
Michael Cecire of New America
Ten years ago this month, Russia and Georgia fought a brief but ferocious war, which saw Russian forces openly cross international borders in anger for the first time since the Soviet era. Though broadly under-appreciated at
the time, Moscow’s 2008 military adventure would come to
be widely regarded as marking the return of an aggressive, expansionist foreign policy, carrying over into conflicts in Ukraine and Syria, as well as in a broader, extended strategic showdown with the US and Europe.
The decennial of the Georgia-Russia war is a potent reminder of the tragic repercussions of that conflict, the seeming intrac- tability of Western-Russia relations, as well as the uncomfort- able limitations of Euro-Atlantic security architecture, which did little to prevent the Georgia war or to attenuate Russian militarism in the years since. Euro-Atlantic institutions, and particularly Nato, have not effectively managed the widening corridor of Russia-involved security crises in the years since.
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Indeed, Maas’s agenda of an independent military power and independent payments systems, and the calls for a Europe led by a Franco-German alliance that has the same clout as the US could have all been taken from Putin’s own playbook. And Russia will have to play a role in any future multipolar order.
“We are striving for a multilateral alliance, a network of partners who, like us, are committed to sticking to the rules and to fair competition,” Maas concluded. “Our common response to “America First” today must be “Europe United!””
Of course these changes and these new bodies are not going
to come overnight. It is going to be a long slow process, full
of twists and turns, reversals and idiosyncrasies. But merely adding three billion socialists to the capitalist world has unleashed tectonic forces that can’t be contained. It is perhaps, as British Prime Minister Winston Churchill said: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
Tending the graves of Georgian soldiers killed in the 2008 war with Russia at Tbilisi's Mukhatgverdi Cemetery.
Despite the impressive durability of Western engagement in Georgia, and the gratifying symbolism represented by multi- national military exercises like the latest edition of Noble Part- ner, Georgia is as trapped as ever between Nato’s half-hearted overtures on one hand – enough to offer Georgians the faint facsimile of forward momentum, if only just – and the unfor- giving strategic realities of the region, which ever-threaten the fragile stability Georgia has painstakingly won over the years.
In the pale moonlight
Put more bluntly, Georgia is unlikely to join Nato in the fore- seeable future, no matter how much “progress” it makes, given Nato’s acute internal divisions over the question of expansion. While expansion should not be taken lightly, the Alliance’s growing categorical aversion to extending the frontiers of
the liberal democratic space – albeit in the name of retrench- ment – suggests an alliance increasingly unmoored from its founding values. This was a predictable recipe for crisis, and,