But What About Serbia?

GUEST COLUMN: Joshua Foust is a defense consultant with TSI Executive Consulting. He blogs regularly about Central Asia and US foreign policy at http://www.registan.net/.

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Thomas Barnett has quite a history to overcome when analyzing political events. In his books, which advocate unending war against the poor, he has written off the non-military angles of the wars the U.S. fights as “they just need more diplomacy,” while claiming that Iraq would have been a raging success if President Bush had just been more charming so we could have had 40,000 troops from Russia, China, and India… each. And that simply having more international, non-Muslim troops would have somehow avoided the insurgency (Afghanistan rarely if ever makes it into his lengthier expositions, as he relies on brief quips on his blog to substitute for serious thinking about why an actually international occupational war of connection, or whatever it is he calls those things, is currently failing). Barnett has seriously advocated the forcible annexation of post-Castro Cuba as well, and sees little moral issue with states aggressively expanding their territory.

But Barnett’s sins go much deeper. In Blueprint for Action, which contains a rather disquieting section in which he fantasizes about which countries to invade and occupy first, he highlights the Balkans as the model by which the International community should intervene in civil wars and “fix” countries. He envisions the UNSC acting as a kind of grand jury, the U.S. as executioner, and a magical international force composed mostly of Europeans then moves in for the really difficult nation-building and counterinsurgency work that inevitably follows. The former leaders of said “fixed” country then face war criminal charges at the Hague.

Of course this didn’t really work out too well in Serbia… or anywhere else, for that matter. The actual war criminals roamed free for years, some as much as a decade or more, before being caught. And the politics of the Hague make it unlikely any will ever face actual justice for their crimes. While it is nice to see Sarajevo is no longer the hellhole it was in 1993, the Balkans could hardly be called “settled.” Nearly a decade after the NATO-led war there, and even after its halfway-recognized independence, Kosovo still has tens of thousands of foreign troops stationed there to enforce a peace and prevent Serbia from regaining its lost territory. Near the border areas, U.S. government employees are still required to travel in armored convoys thanks to a constant stream of violent activities. It is still not a region that can be called a success, just a mild failure with the potential to erupt into enormous bloodshed at a moment’s notice (such as the violent riots in Belgrade after Kosovo declared its independence).

Which brings us to Barnett’s take on Georgia. While he does us the courtesy of NOT quoting “Back in the U.S.S.R.” like every other blogger whose use of “Georgia on My Mind” and variations result in me instantly refusing to read another damned word they write, Barnett can’t really bring himself to mention his previous advocacy of either nationalist expansionism or armed intervention in civil wars.

You have to suspect that Russia’s strong response to Georgia’s bold effort to subdue South Ossetia militarily is designed to signal something profound to the West on this overall score.

In effect, Russia has largely acquiesced to all sorts of Western “encroachment” (from their perspective, and let’s be honest, that’s basically what it is in terms of economic, political and security integration of former satellites and republics) since the end of the Cold War, but now with Moscow feeling a serious resurgence, we’re getting into different territory in our relationship–meaning Russia will push back…

But clearly Russia’s transgressing the advanced-country norms, not even bothering to make an international case here (which we always do before invading anybody). This is more like Britain and Argentina going at it over the Falklands: outsiders look at it in amazement, wondering what all the fuss is about, while the participants fight over the “olive tree” grove like divorced parents squabbling over a child’s custody (i.e., we simply don’t “get” the history–which is long and ugly). We don’t expect either a Britain or Argentina to behave like that, so the U.S. tries to smooth things over…

Being in the Core doesn’t mean never going to war, especially against Gap nations. Indeed, my whole point in making the original delineation was to point out that while intra-Core war becomes an increasingly distant possibility, wars inside the Gap by Core nations will be anything but. Just look at our record since the end of the Cold War.

The notion of the Core doesn’t presuppose that only America will have permission to do this sort of thing unilaterally. In fact, in both my books, I cited the danger of other Core powers starting to replicate our example if we weren’t careful about embedding our own interventions within an acceptable A-to-Z rule set that the Core as a whole could sign up for, meaning we’d eventually see other Core great powers launching their own efforts inside the Gap–according to their own rules and agendas. To some extent, Russia’s kinetic version is as challenging as China’s non-kinetic version–say–in Africa.

So is he saying using his annoying and over-simplified rip-off of Emmanuel Wallerstein’s World System Theory, that Georgia is a “gap” state, and Russia is a “core” state, so this is kind of expected? According to his ever-changing definition of “core,” which is surely a mark of theoretical rigor, Barnett now defines core as “states the core will never go to war with…” which of course would include Georgia, since they’d never fight any other core state, either. Which means the entire concept is crap.

Indeed, Barnett’s line of thinking is patently foolish, almost as foolish as pretending Russia is even near the same league as the other G8 countries. Moreover, like all of Barnett’s other writings, he is paternistically contemptuous of every other state’s right to think for itself, reducing the entire planet to dumb monkeys who can only copy what the United States does according to the United States’ rules.

Lastly, what serious military or strategic thinker, who routinely brags of his experience at the Center for Naval Analysis and how Sam Huntington once said something nice to him, would contend Russia is a rising power? With the exception of oil prices, Russia has nothing to offer the world—it doesn’t make anything, it can’t produce much of value, its population is growing progressively older and sicker at an increasingly rate, and its political system is really collapsing if Putin can contract it in so short a time. Russia is a dying power, and like most dying powers it is lashing out in fury at its loss of prestige and power.

Really, don’t read Thomas Barnett for insight into Georgia. His verifiably useless theories don’t apply here, and he offers no insight into the countries themselves, their histories, or likely after-action policies. And that applies to pretty much everything he’s ever written.