Editorial: Bush plays losing hand with Russia

President Bush has proposed sending $1 billion in economic and humanitarian aid to Georgia to help that small country on Russia’s border rebuild after its disastrous war with Russia last month.

Bush’s gesture indicates a certain amount of bravado and a commendable fellow feeling for a country his administration has encouraged. But it doesn’t suggest he has learned anything from the embarrassment to the United States the Russian-Georgian conflict represented.

If he were playing poker, it would be as if, after having his bluff called on a losing hand, he doubled his bet next time around after being dealt a hand with no pairs and no face cards. Since he’s playing with the taxpayers’ money, however, he doesn’t seem to care — nor does he seem to comprehend that he is making the U.S. look naïve.

Whoever is most at fault in the Russo-Georgian war — and the likelihood seems to be that Russia lured Georgia into launching the first aggressive move, falling into a trap Russia had set — the incident demonstrated the hollowness of U.S. declarations of friendship and deep and abiding interest in democratizing the countries surrounding Russia.

Because of the ill-conceived war in Iraq, the U.S. simply had no military wherewithal to challenge Russia militarily. Even if it had troops available to deploy, however, it is questionable whether even this aggressive administration would have been willing to risk war with a nuclear-armed country over the fate of a small bordering country that is of little or no real strategic importance to the West but of enormous psychological and geopolitical interest to Russia.

This is not to say that Russia’s interest in controlling what Russian leaders since the time of the czars have called the “near abroad” is entirely justified, or that it wouldn’t be a good idea for eastern European countries to become more democratic and market-oriented. It is simply recognizing the reality that Georgia is more important to Russia than it ever will be to the United States.

Having Vice President Cheney travel to the region to assure leaders in Georgia, Ukraine and elsewhere that the United States really, really cares about them has predictably ratcheted up tension between the United States and Russia. To be sure, Russia has turned rather nasty and aggressive under Vladimir Putin and his successor, Vladimir Medvedev, but there is no reason to go out of our way to pick a fight with Russia.

Russia has already seen a serious capital flight and reduction in foreign investment interest since the war with Georgia. It is still a demographically exhausted country propped up by oil revenues. A quiet trip to Moscow with warnings that it could suffer further economic setbacks would have been more effective at getting it to tone down its aggressive ways than metaphorically puffing up our chests and inviting embarrassment if our bluff is called once again.