'I learned it from watching you!'

POST: War in Georgia: Misreading Ossetia -- Chronology Matters, By Patrick Armstrong, Russia Blog, August 10, 2008

Good post from the Russia Blog. My favorite line involves the "same lazy imitation of existing memes" re: Russia, echoing my bit about resorting to Cold War interpretations when it's not like anybody in the West is that eager to run this part of the world. Given that reality, the question isn't, "How do we counter Russian imperialism?" But rather, "How do we get Russia in the right place regarding its role here?" When I think Core-Gap (old concept here), my original construct was: clear rules inside the Core on war and peace, few if any inside the Gap, and a clear need for an avowed rule set for those situations when the Core feels the need to intervene inside the Gap (which happens a lot). There is the tendency to think this situation "redefines" the intra-Core rule set. It does not. It simply highlights the lack of progress in generating the Core-wide rule set regarding interventions in the Gap. We are somewhat guilty in this regard. We have modeled behavior for Russia that they further interpret in ways we don't like. But like my wife talking about my older son ("Where do you think he gets that?"), we have to realize that making primacy a strategic goal has had its costs under Bush-Cheney. We spawn imitators over time, and we won't like that pathway one bit, because out imitators will do things (big surprise!) in ways that totally benefit themselves and make things harder for everybody else. And yeah, we've been way too guilty of that ourselves. In short, we see a symptom here of something larger. We can deal with that larger reality or we can all point at the symptom and say, "That's the real problem!""
Tom Barnett