by John McCain
The reactions in the hall and in the capitals of the Atlantic Alliance were mostly restrained, expressing disappointment with the tone and substance, but repeating assurances that the West wanted a constructive relationship. Chancellor Merkel was diplomatic, calling Putin “a reliable partner,” but suggesting “we need to speak frankly to each other.” Lindsey offered him a backhanded compliment. “He’s done more to bring Europe and the U.S. together than any single event in the last several years,” he told a reporter. Joe Lieberman criticized Putin’s speech as “Cold War rhetoric.” A White House spokesman expressed surprise, and disputed Putin’s “accusations” before promising to continue “cooperation with Russia in areas important to the international community.”
The American delegation huddled in a nearby control room to discuss how to respond. I was scheduled to speak to the conference the next day. My prepared remarks contained forceful criticism of Russia, a staple of my speeches in Munich for the last several years. The Europeans usually reacted by conceding my assessment was correct, but that we wouldn’t get anywhere with the Russians by saying it to their face and pushing them away. I’m sure they expected me to fire back at Putin with all the indignation I could muster—and I can muster quite a bit when provoked. They might even have appreciated it a bit more than usual this time. Brent Scowcroft noted that Putin had an opportunity to come here and strengthen the arguments of the proponents of engagement, “but he whiffed. It was good he came. He froze himself out.” Two of my foreign policy advisors, Richard Fontaine and Randy Scheunemann, were there, and assumed I would want to toughen up the already tough Russia criticism in my speech. But I decided a more effective approach would be a thoughtful, more-in-sorrow-than-anger response. I confess I liked the idea not just because it would confound expectations in the hall, although that had appeal. I liked it because it was the approach that would make Putin look the worse in comparison. “My God,” you could imagine some Brussels snob remarking, “that Russian has managed to make McCain sound diplomatic.”
I didn’t plan to refrain from criticism. I wouldn’t let Putin’s accusations go unanswered, and I don’t think anyone there wanted me to. But I would make my response almost an aside in a speech focused mainly on other subjects. And I would couch it in terms of “we,” meaning the U.S. and Europe, the West, the Alliance, and not the U.S. versus Russia, as Putin would have it. Two short, temperate paragraphs in a twenty-five-hundred-word speech were all it would need. “I remain concerned about the long-term possibilities of Russian democracy and the direction of Moscow’s foreign and energy policies,” I noted, before pushing back on Putin’s America-the-hyper-power-cowboy theme.
Today’s world is not unipolar. The United States did not single-handedly win the Cold War in some unilateral victory. The transatlantic alliance won the Cold War, and there are power centers on every continent today. Russian leaders’ apparent belief to the contrary raises a number of difficult questions. Will Russia’s autocratic turn become more pronounced, its foreign policy more opposed to the principles of the western democracies and its energy policy used as a tool of intimidation? Or will it build, in partnership with the West, a democratic country that contributes to the international rules-based system? While our hopes are obviously for the latter choice, recent events suggest a turn toward the former. This is unfortunate, and the U.S. and Europe need to take today’s Russian realities into account as we form our policies.
That was it. My brief, diplomatic reproach might have been only slightly less of a surprise in the hall than Putin’s fiery one. But, contrary to my caricature, I can adjust my tone when circumstances call for it. I have spoken to many skeptical audiences in my career, skeptical of my views and skeptical of me. I might not have made converts of all of them, but I could communicate in terms and attitudes they appreciated. I value candor and directness in discourse. I think most people do. But having traveled as extensively as I have, and spoken to as many different audiences as I have, from the Oxford Union to Vietnam’s Diplomatic Academy, I know how to manage subtlety and tactful persuasion when it’s required. The bluntness typical of my Russian criticism was intended to disrupt the widespread attitude that letting Putin get away with some mischief here and there will placate him, and help get his cooperation on important things. It doesn’t. It just convinces him he’s on the right course, and encourages him to go further. The evidence for that could fill volumes.
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Putin traded jobs in 2008 with his chosen successor, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. Russian law at the time prevented him from serving a third consecutive term as president. The law has since been changed, as well as the law limiting a presidential term to four years. It’s now six years. And Putin is running for a fourth term. His brief interval as prime minister didn’t require him to relinquish any real power. Despite being “appointed” prime minister by the new president, he was subordinate to no one for those four years. Everyone knew who still called the shots in the Kremlin. It was Vladimir Putin. And it was Vladimir Putin who decided to invade the Republic of Georgia in the summer of 2008.
I had gotten to know Georgia’s president, Mikheil “Misha” Saakashvili, quite well by then. I had been back in Georgia a couple times since the Rose Revolution, and I had seen Saakashvili when he came to Washington. I had actually first met him years before in 1994, when he was a law student at Columbia, and a young political activist. He was impressive. He won a seat in the Georgian parliament the next year as a member of Shevardnadze’s party, and led an effort to reform the country’s election laws. Five years later, he was minister for justice, the architect of sweeping reforms of Georgia’s criminal justice system, and an anticorruption crusader who resigned to protest the government’s systemic corruption. He started a new party, and when parliamentary elections in 2003 were judged by international observers to have been rigged, he and his party were in the vanguard of protests demanding Shevardnadze’s resignation and new elections. Those peaceful protests attracted hundreds of thousands of Georgians to the streets and became the Rose Revolution. Shevardnadze resigned in November 2003. New elections were held the following January, and Saakashvili, just thirty-six years old then, won a massive majority and became Georgia’s new democratically elected president. He was committed to a program of free market, government, and judicial reform. He released imprisoned dissidents, cut regulations and taxes, privatized industries, imposed transparency on business transactions, began massive infrastructure improvements, fired corrupt government officials and police, ensured public officials made a living wage, ended the bribery-based university admissions system, and began modernizing Georgia’s military. In short, he was a force for open governance and liberal political values who believed his country’s future depended on its association with the West, and not the angry giant to its north. I admired him.
My last trip to Georgia had been in 2006. It was during that visit that we had gone into South Ossetia. Georgia’s problems with ethnic Russian separatists predated Saakashvili’s presidency, but they worsened after his election, a development at least partly attributable to Saakashvili’s pro-Western reputation and Moscow’s displeasure with democratic uprisings in the neighborhood. Aslan Abashidze, a pro-Russian warlord, who ran another autonomous Georgian region, Adjaria, refused to recognize the authority of the national government, and cracked down on local supporters of the Rose Revolution. That precipitated a crisis that lasted five months and appeared on the verge of becoming a military confrontation, when Adjari paramilitary forces, armed and supplied by Russia, took up positions along the region’s border while the Georgian army maneuvered nearby. Moscow backed Abashidze, of course, and Washington condemned him. The crisis was brought to an end by a combination of local protests, economic sanctions, military pressure, and negotiations. Abashidze resigned on May 6, 2004, and fled to Moscow. His success in Adjaria encouraged Saakashvili to confront separatists in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. In South Ossetia the confrontation was violent, as a
rmed separatists fought Georgian armed forces to a draw, and negotiations in 2005 left the status quo in place. Georgia had better luck suppressing a rebellion in Abkhazia’s Kodori Gorge in 2006.
From its first days in office, Saakashvili’s government had pursued membership in NATO as the best guarantee of its territorial integrity. I think in those years Georgia’s eventual admission was assumed to be likely, but not while its government was confronting breakaway regions within its borders. Moscow, of course, was fiercely opposed to the idea. Nevertheless, Saakashvili tried hard to prove Georgia’s value as a military ally to the West, sending large contingents of troops to Iraq and Afghanistan. President Bush paid a state visit to Tbilisi in 2005. As he gave a speech in Freedom Square to a huge and receptive crowd of cheering Georgians, a onetime member of an Adjari separatist party threw a hand grenade at the podium, hoping to kill both presidents. It didn’t detonate.
Russia had been openly hostile to the Georgian government from its inception, and intensely so since 2006. Putin seemed to have a special animus for Saakashvili, who wasn’t the kind of person to show elaborate deference to the strongman of a hostile power. Misha was smart and committed and he had guts. He was a proven reformer and, I believe, genuinely committed to advancing liberal political values, and certainly to allying Georgia with the U.S. and Europe. He also had a not entirely undeserved international reputation, and not just in Russia, as an impulsive, hardheaded risk-taker. I recognized that aspect of Misha’s personality, but I admired his courage and vision, too, and appreciated the sincerity of his regard for the U.S. We had become friends, and I was seen in Washington as Georgia’s leading supporter in the Senate. I was an advocate for Georgia’s eventual entry into NATO, and a frequent critic of Putin’s intimidation of the Saakashvili government, which he conveyed primarily by encouraging the militancy of separatists in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. I believe that by early 2008 Putin planned to provoke a war with Georgia.
His first move was to establish official ties with separatist authorities in April, for all practical purposes recognizing them as the legitimate governments of separatist territories. A Russian jet shot down a Georgian reconnaissance drone over Abkhazia that same month. Putin accused Georgian peacekeeping forces occupying the Kodori Gorge of preparing to invade Abkhazia, and threatened to retaliate. He deployed more “peacekeepers” to Abkhazia, permitted as part of the negotiated settlement of the separatist war there in 1993. Then he sent additional peacekeepers that exceeded the agreement’s limits, claiming they were unarmed and didn’t count against the total. In July, violent incidents in South Ossetia were bringing things to a boil, including an attack on the head of the Tbilisi-supported government, and the kidnapping of four Georgian soldiers. Georgia recalled its ambassador to Russia after Moscow ordered four military jets to overfly the territory. Russian troops conducted exercises in the northern Caucuses that same month, ostensibly to train peacekeepers, but in reality to prepare for an invasion. When the exercises concluded, the Russian soldiers didn’t return to base. They stayed near the border.
August began with Ossetians blowing up a Georgian police truck and shelling some towns along the border. Georgians responded by shooting up some border checkpoints. Events spiraled from there, with exchanges of artillery and rifle fire intermittently continuing for several days. Saakashvili attempted to call Medvedev on August 6. The Russian president refused the call, and the worst shelling of the conflict to date continued through the night. The Georgians believed Russian forces had already entered South Ossetia. Saakashvili ordered a unilateral cease-fire the evening of the 7th. The Ossetians ignored the move and resumed artillery attacks. Around midnight the Georgians responded by shelling the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali. A few hours later, they marched three columns on the city and surrounding heights. Moscow denounced the Georgian “aggression.” As they approached the city, Georgian soldiers exchanged fire with Russian peacekeepers at their base camp, and the fight rapidly escalated. The next morning, August 8, Russian forces poured into South Ossetia, and launched a missile attack on a Georgian resort town near the border. The Russian air force began bombing targets in the area. That afternoon, Russian air and artillery attacks had joined the fight for Tskhinvali, and Georgian air defenses succeeded in destroying a few Russian aircraft. Two Russian tank columns reached the city and started shelling Georgian infantry. Georgia gave up the offensive on Tskhinvali late on August 9, and began withdrawing. Saakashvili declared another unilateral cease-fire on the 10th and announced that he was pulling his forces out of South Ossetia. Russia ignored it. Russian planes indiscriminately bombed Gori, a Georgian town near South Ossetia, and the Russian army occupied the town on August 13. They attacked and occupied a key Georgian Black Sea port. Russian soldiers and Abkhazian separatists attacked Georgian soldiers in the Kodori Gorge and forced them to withdraw. Russian planes bombed Tbilisi and Russian troops threatened to march on the capital. Moscow waged a sophisticated cyber and disinformation campaign against the Georgians as well, giving the world its first good look at a form of warfare the Russians would prove adept at, which we would see again in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, and, it pains me to say, in an American presidential election.
French president Nicolas Sarkozy helped negotiate a cease-fire agreement on August 12 that the Russians would eventually observe, but not with any haste. A subsequent agreement brokered by Sarkozy set the terms for the exchange of prisoners and the withdrawal of Russian forces from Georgia over the next month or so. They wouldn’t leave Abkhazia and South Ossetia, of course. They were effectively lost to Georgia. Medvedev recognized their independence on August 26.
The West’s reaction to Russia’s aggression was, if not uniform, mostly based on the same opinions. In short, Russia was the aggressor and had provoked the war, but Misha was a fool for taking the bait and giving Moscow a pretext to invade. Moscow should, of course, be reprimanded, but nothing too punitive should be considered that would jeopardize long-term interests at stake. I think that view was shared by many in the U.S. as well. Misha learned how few friends he really had in the West. I was one. But there were not a great many others. The Bush administration denounced Russia’s aggression, but decided against a military response or rushing arms and equipment to Georgia, although it did send a C-130 loaded with humanitarian supplies to Tbilisi, and left it parked on a runway the Russians had been preparing to crater. We also airlifted Georgian troops fighting with us in Afghanistan back to Georgia so they could defend their country. Administration officials claimed it signaled to Russia not to press the attack any further, and it worked. Maybe. The administration imposed some sanctions on Russia, including suspending meetings of the NATO-Russia Council, which was conceived to facilitate consultation and cooperation between the rival powers. I thought it was an inadequate response, and more likely to boost Putin’s confidence than make him regret his aggressiveness. All the sanctions were dropped the following year, as part of the Obama administration’s “reset” of relations with Russia.
Misha should have been shrewd enough to know what the Russians expected him to do and not have done it. But that didn’t make him the aggressor or mitigate the ruthlessness and perilous implications of Putin’s actions. He had shown the world that he would use force, in this instance a conventional military invasion, to command a sphere of influence in his “near abroad.” And the West had mostly shrugged. That’s on us, not Misha Saakashvili, whatever his flaws. We would see it again, Putin’s use of force, and his exploitation of frozen conflicts to keep neighboring countries in his orbit. Russia’s military hadn’t fought particularly well in Georgia. Putin would see to it that its deficiencies were corrected. He would use it again to instruct a former republic in the limits of its independence or to improve Russia’s standing in the world as a rival to American power. After Georgia, he had reason to believe he could get away with it.
I was the presumptive Republican nominee for President when Russia invaded Georgia, and most commentator
s credited my knowledge of the subject and of that part of the world, and acknowledged that my early skepticism about Putin appeared prescient. But that didn’t mean that every comment I made in reaction to the crisis wouldn’t be scrutinized skeptically by the press and liable to be exploited by the Democrats to limit whatever advantage I had for having more extensive national security experience than my opponent. This was before the global financial system collapsed. Foreign policy was still a relevant issue to voters, and Obama and I were running neck and neck in most polls.
I reacted to Russia’s invasion by accusing Moscow of being the aggressor, and trying to rally support for the victim. “Today, we are all Georgians,” I exclaimed at the outset of the invasion. I did scores of interviews explaining why the attacks on Georgia threatened our interests and the rules we established for the post–Cold War order, and why Putin should be made to answer for his transgressions. I repeated my call to bar Russia’s participation in G-8 summits. I had urged that action regularly for the last five years, and it had been mostly ignored. Now I was assailed by foreign policy experts with Democratic proclivities and even a few who leaned Republican for making such a provocative recommendation. Didn’t I understand, they huffed, that pulling Russia into Western institutions was the only way to civilize it? Well, not if Russia rejects the institutions’ norms, deriving benefits from the association without accepting the obligations that come with them. Fareed Zakaria, whom I like, called it “the most radical idea put forward by a major candidate for the presidency in twenty-five years.” Goodness. As it happened, Putin would invade another neighbor in 2014, having had six more years’ exposure to the civilizing effects of association with the West. After he seized the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine, many of my more vociferous critics in 2008 joined the chorus to kick the Russians out of the G-8, which, happily, the Obama administration finally did.