By Tom Mockaitis
Well, it has finally happened. The crisis born of unilateralism, strategic overreach and bravado has come to pass. With U.S. forces tied down in two protracted wars, American credibility on the international stage at a record low and our dependence on foreign oil painfully obvious, a revitalized Russia is on the move. And the blow has fallen where most analysts expected it would: on America's closest ally in the Caucasus, the tiny Republic of Georgia.
Traumatized by its fall from superpower status at the end of the Cold War, the Kremlin has nursed a growing resentment at a series of humiliations and needlessly provocative moves by the Bush administration over the past eight years. NATO's war against Serbia revealed the limits of Russian power after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The confrontation at Pristina Airport between British Gen. Michael Jackson's Kosovo Force and Russian troops rushed in from Bosnia ended with President Boris Yeltsin backing down, largely because NATO hopefuls Bulgaria and Romania closed their airspace to Russian aircraft that might have flown in reinforcements. The episode should have served as a poignant warning that Moscow would not take another such embarrassment lying down. Conciliation, not confrontation, should have guided American foreign policy in Eastern Europe during the past decade.
Instead, Washington continued to poke the Russian bear with a stick. The first prod came with plans for a missile defense system of dubious value in Poland, supported by radar installations in Slovakia.
The Bush administration justified the deployment as part of its global war on terrorism, assuring a skeptical Vladimir Putin that the defense system aimed to protect the U.S. from attack by a rogue state such as Iran.
Putin didn't buy it. While the White House focused myopically on Al Qaeda and bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, Putin consolidated power in Russia, dealt with Chechnya, and bided his time.
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