Russian aggression sets wheels of war in motion

It seemed like old times. A come-from-behind win against a cocky Olympic rival was accompanied by a sudden crisis in a place most Americans couldn't find on a map. But now the rivals were French swimmers, and the crisis was in Georgia rather than Afghanistan. Just as it had been before, however, the real enemy was Soviet when the post-Cold War era ended last weekend.

Back in the Clinton years, with cold and hot wars seemingly banished from history's repertoire, I was dean of the National War College. A generation before, Ambassador George Kennan had served there while writing the doctrine of containment that eventually defined American foreign policy. But after the Berlin Wall fell and Gorbachev gave way to Yeltsin, the aging ambassador came to visit. On that memorable day, he was introduced to one of my students, the first Russian Army officer ever to attend a U.S. war college. As containment morphed into glasnost, everything seemed possible, even though Kennan had famously warned that Russian history recognized only enemies and vassals on its borders.

Every editorial writer worth his salt is now revisiting those lines while wondering: What dark influences suddenly overtook the Russians? What about the shadowy soul of our new best friend, Vladimir Putin, whose KGB upbringing once seemed safely behind him?

Kennan might have suggested that victory in the Cold War, no matter how decisive, could hardly last forever. The petrodollars fueling Russia's increasingly oil-based economy dramatically shortened its recovery. But the natural gas pipelines now linking that economy to the heart of Western Europe are self-inflicted Fifth Columns that Lenin's successors could only have envied.

To help underline those geo-political realities, war college students pass beneath a wall-length mural of the globe photographed from space. Its motto: “Everything Changes Except the Geography.” Georgia is at the center of the peninsula connecting the Caspian and Black Seas. While east-to-west oil pipelines make that geography critical, well-advertised Georgian ambitions to join NATO made it decisive. For a resurgent Russia that prefers compliant vassal states on newly estranged territory, armed intervention was the obvious and traditional answer.

Putin clearly understands that effective military force brings useful options beyond dismembering Georgia or even remaining there indefinitely. It is enough that the Russians underlined their political clout by demonstrating muscle that can swiftly strike elsewhere, like the Ukraine or the Baltic states. Their assault on Georgia was a classic, Soviet-style, combined-arms blitzkrieg, enveloping the opponent from several directions.

Tanks, mechanized infantry and amphibious landings played their customary roles, supported by naval and air forces once thought to be rusting harmlessly away. The world has become accustomed to the U.S. style of air warfare with its precision-guided munitions and careful (though imperfect) avoidance of collateral damage. Not so the neo-Soviet bombing of Georgia, where indiscriminate attacks on civilians were both means and ends. Though an ethnic Georgian, Stalin himself would have applauded the educational power of such crudely deliberate intimidation.

The Georgians also experienced cyber-attacks even before the invasion began, just as the Estonians did last year after defying Moscow and uprooting a Russian statue. These “spam-on-steroids” attacks conducted by legions of “botnets” can jam or degrade critical government websites, Internet-based phone services, even public utilities. Those techniques began with what the Soviets called “radio-electronic combat” — the jamming, interception or physical destruction of battlefield enemies. But in both Estonia and Georgia, the Western world learned that cyberwar has now become a weapon of mass disruption to intimidate defenseless civilian populations — routinely and without any apparent moral reservations.

Those troubling precedents, not to mention the security of Eastern Europe, are now at issue —and in August, when hurricanes and wars traditionally begin. The immediate questions — what do we do, with what and to whom — are equally daunting. But as you listen to reporters, diplomats and presidential candidates blathering on, simply recall the Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky, who once likened political conflict to bayonet fighting. If you hit steel, he counseled, pull back. But if you strike only mush, then push forward even harder.