Why side with Sakaashvili?

Since the Georgian war, the US administration has been notably quiet on the issue of Georgia, perhaps reflecting a debate on the proper policy towards that country. Tbilisi will await the arrival of President Barack Obama's team with interest.

In the aftermath of the Russian-Georgian war, observers in Russia and the West have questioned whether and why Washington believes Georgia is among its fundamental strategic interests. 

On September 3, US Vice President Dick Cheney arrived in Tbilisi bearing gifts for beleaguered Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili.  Cheney announced a comprehensive 1 billion dollar aid package to reconstruct Georgia’s war-torn infrastructure and economy.  Although the details have yet to be confirmed, the United States is also expected to rebuild the remnants of Georgia’s military, too.

Cheney’s visit was aimed at furthering the development of a non-Russian energy corridor and rebuffing Russia’s claims to hegemony over the ‘near abroad’, while also sending Tbilisi a signal of unflagging support.  Washington’s clarion call is due in part to Russia’s increasingly aggressive posturing, particularly Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s characterisation of Saakashvili as a “political corpse”.  Cheney’s visit is a powerful symbolic rejection of Moscow’s apparent refusal to engage with the Georgian president -- who, despite his penchant for self-defeating military adventurism -- remains the democratically elected leader of a state that most (outside Moscow) regard as fully sovereign.    

A marriage of (in)convenience

The story of the United States’ entrenchment in Georgia begins in the Pankisi Gorge, a remote region of Georgia just south of the troubled Russian republic of Chechnya.  During the Chechen Wars, Russia claimed that Tbilisi was allowing Chechen fighters to use the gorge as a support base for their operations -- an accusation Tbilisi consistently rejected.

Yet a curious reversal transpired after the attacks of September 11, 2001: wily former Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze travelled that autumn to Washington and secured for his country the US initiative that would become known as the Georgia Train and Equip Programme (GTEP).  The GTEP was allegedly designed to bolster Georgian troops’ ability to fight Chechen insurgents in the Pankisi Gorge -- the same insurgents whose existence Shevardnadze had vociferously denied just six months earlier. 

As the first permanent Western military presence in the Caucasus since those countries achieved independence, GTEP provided the US military with a small footprint in Russia’s neighbourhood.  It also created an inextricable link between the security of Georgia and the US Global War on Terror.

GTEP has grown far and beyond what its designers had planned.  It has twice been expanded and extended, morphing into the somewhat-Orwellian ‘Sustainment and Stability Operations Programme’, or SSOP, which focuses on preparing Georgian soldiers to deploy to Iraq.  Indeed, before the war broke out over South Ossetia, Georgia was the third-largest force contributor in Iraq, contributing approximately 2,000 troops.

By tying the security of Georgia to the United States’ top two international priorities -– the global war on terror  and the war in Iraq -- Shevardnadze and Saakashvili in effect established a US security guarantee for their state.  Though the absence of direct defence of their nation was a rude shock, the leaders in Tbilisi’s ability to link the welfare of a small, poor, territorially disintegrated state -- let alone one on Russia’s borders -- to the fortunes of the world’s most powerful nation for so long was a remarkable foreign policy success.  

Moreover, thanks to bureaucratic inertia, ‘discursive entrenchment’ (becoming entrapped by one’s own rhetoric) and the United States’ rejection of balance-of-power international politics, it is also virtually certain that Washington will continue to support Georgia, regardless of the consequences for the US-Russian relationship, or the United States’ international standing.