Was Gorbachev right?

On August 19, the New York Times published an essay by former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev on the West's—and particularly the Western media's—reaction to the Georgian crisis. He writes:

The news coverage has been far from fair and balanced, especially during the first days of the crisis. Tskhinvali was in smoking ruins and thousands of people were fleeing—before any Russian troops arrived. Yet Russia was already being accused of aggression; news reports were often an embarrassing recitation of the Georgian leader’s deceptive statements.

It is still not quite clear whether the West was aware of Mr. Saakashvili’s plans to invade South Ossetia, and this is a serious matter. What is clear is that Western assistance in training Georgian troops and shipping large supplies of arms had been pushing the region toward war rather than peace.

Of course, these are controversial words, and given what seemed to be the grossly disproportionate nature of the Russian response to the Georgian situation, Gorbachev seems at some level to be defending the indefensible. But judging from the reactions on the New York Times's website, the biggest problem with Gorbachev's argument from the American perspective is that he actually has a point.

While the Russian response indeed presents a variety of ethical problems from the perspective of just war theory, the fact remains that the Georgian government and its president, Mikheil Saakashvili, precipitated the conflict by attacking first. One can certainly argue that the Georgians could have been goaded or tricked by Russia into attacking, and this may have been the case. Nevertheless, it is the responsibility of any government to avoid senseless wars that it cannot ever hope to win, and even Georgia's allies in Europe are increasingly seeing Saakashvili's misadventure in South Ossetia as either grossly misinformed or galactically incompetent. The reluctance of American media to broach this topic is profoundly problematic, and Gorbachev is right in pointing it out.

Moreover, Gorbachev's column also reiterates the point that the American policy toward Russia has not gotten over the Cold War, ranging from being blatantly patronizing on the one hand (e.g., forcing American missile defense down the Russian's throats as if they didn't exist) to being unreflectively alarmist on the other (e.g., seeing Russia as a rogue nation bent on destabilizing the world). The New York Times today reports that the Russian bear is once again keeping Washington policy-makers up at nights.

Again, the United States may be perfectly warranted in responding as it has. Nevertheless, making Russia into a pariah state and placing it into the category of Iran, Syria, and others also seems to be something of a self-fulfilling prophecy that doesn't give us many constructive policy options.

“Outrage is not a policy,” said Strobe Talbott, who was deputy secretary of state under President Clinton and is now the president of the Brookings Institution. “Worry is not a policy. Indignation is not a policy. Even though outrage, worry and indignation are all appropriate in this situation, they shouldn’t be mistaken for policy and they shouldn’t be mistaken for strategy.”