The Death of 1989

The invasion of Georgia shines an alarming light on the nature of political thinking within the Russian leadership. The Russian leadership is conventionally seen as conforming to a nineteenth-century notion of national interests, together with a mid-twentieth-century style of ethnic solidarity. In the controversy over the separatist regions of Georgia, Russia does face a matter of national interest, if national interest is conceived in the geographical and ethnic styles of the nineteenth and mid-twentieth century. Still, Russia has other interests, too--regional peace and quiet, a continued healthy business atmosphere, the assurance that catastrophic events will not take place. These additional interests ought to outweigh the geographical and ethnic ones, or so you might suppose. To shake up half the world on behalf of two breakaway enclaves smaller even than Schleswig-Holstein does not appear to make sense, in a conventional calculation. And yet, the Russian leadership has decided otherwise. Why?


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