Georgia: A Chance for New Mistakes

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Public debate on the Russia-Georgia conflict has been awash in historical analogies. Do they explain and guide policy formulation or just rationalize political behavior?

Some decades ago a wise professor counseled us that “those who don’t know history repeat the mistakes of the past.” But he quickly added that “those who do know history make new and different mistakes.”

In 1938, following his successful annexation of Austria, Adolf Hitler demanded incorporation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland into Nazi Germany to “protect the rights of the German minority” living there. The rest of Europe, led by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, did not challenge the Nazi dictator, opting at the Munich conference for peace rather than confrontation.

By 1939 war had become inevitable, as the only way to stop Hitler’s megalomaniacal conquests. The lesson of that war for Western leaders was never again to appease aggressors in their early probes, for that would only whet their appetites to conquer other countries, like dominoes, on the road to global hegemony. “No more Munichs!” became the watchword, echoing Churchill’s condemnation of Chamberlain: “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor, and you shall have war.”

Post-war Western policies toward the Soviet Union and its satellites were shaped by “containment,” the 1947 brainchild of George Kennan. It gave birth to a chain of alliances encircling the Soviet bloc to send a clear message to Stalin and his successors: “Not another inch!”

Nearly two decades after World War II, the United States became entangled in Vietnam. Like Korea in 1950, Vietnam was seen as a domino paving the way for Communist domination. Ten years and more than a million military and civilian deaths later, the United States faced defeat by a fiercely determined nationalist leader, Ho Chi Minh.

Even though it turned out that Vietnam was in the pocket of neither Moscow nor Peking,

“No more Vietnams!” became the antithesis to “No more Munichs!”

Fast forward to 1979: An Iranian student mob with approval of the fundamentalist regime of Ayatollah Khomeini, occupied the US Embassy in Tehran and held its American staff hostage for 444 harrowing days. The traumatic Vietnam experience counseled against an American invasion cum entrapment in Iran. But was Khomeini analogous to Hitler and Carter to Chamberlain?

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the domino logic turned historical analogies to regional settings. The First Gulf War became an early test. Was Iraqi-occupied Kuwait a falling domino clearing the way to Saddam Hussein’s regional supremacy? Was Saddam another Hitler? Was regime change through invasion and occupation to be preferred over monitoring Saddam’s Iraq through control of the skies, sanctions and containment? George H.W. Bush opted for a regional form of containment.

In the Clinton years, the wars of Yugoslav succession were another instance of the West having to choose between containment and regime change. Was Slobodan Milosevic a regional Hitler? Were his militarist attempts to prolong Serb domination of the former Yugoslavia to be compared to Hitler’s “protection” of Austria and of ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia?

The runup to the Second Gulf War painted Saddam as a regional Hitler. Regime change, first talked about by the Clinton Administration, was carried out by the second Bush Administration. It was trumpeted as a step toward regional stability, creating a bastion of democracy in the Arab heartland to counter the excesses of Islamofascism whether of Al-Qaeda or Iranian origin. And as the occupation dragged into its sixth year, it was perhaps inevitably characterized by its opponents as a Vietnam-style quagmire.

Still the historical analogies flow freely. Kosovo was saved from the fate of the Sudetenland by brave Western action to support the Kosovar right of self-determination.

But are South Osettia and Abkhazia best compared to the Sudetenland? Or to Kosovo? Or even to Kuwait? Is Georgian President Saakashvili trying to do to them what Milosevic was stopped from doing to Kosovo? Is Russian Prime Minister Putin asserting historical Russian spheres of influence in the Caucasus? Or “protecting the rights of Russian citizens”? Must Russia be stopped from doing the same with Ukraine and even Poland and the Baltics?

Historical analogies may help illuminate current realities, and even to avoid repeating mistakes of the past. But their slavish application misleads through oversimplification.

The reality is that each situation is unique. It requires deep knowledge of local conditions, good intelligence, patience, prudence and a bit of good fortune – often the ultimate arbiter of human success and failure.

But even then, be assured that we will “make new and different mistakes.”

Theodore Couloumbis is vice president of the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy and professor emeritus at the University of Athens, Greece; Bill Ahlstrom is an executive at a US multinational; Gary Weaver is professor at American University’s School of International Service; these views are their own.
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