Articles

U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's visit to Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Georgia this week was intended to reinforce relations with Kyiv and Baku and to restore those with Tbilisi. Georgia's brief war with Russia has negated impressive economic progress, eviscerated the country's U.S.-built military, and shattered expectations of a better future for its people. Many Georgians feel betrayed by Washington in this crisis, but the United States has seen its advice ignored and its assistance wasted.

Romantic nationalism has been a curse in many countries in the past century, notably in 1990s Serbia. Now, Georgia pays the price. Most commentaries on the South Ossetia conflict describe this dispute as starting in 1992, with the Russian-imposed no-war, no-peace status quo destroyed by the recent fighting. This is comparable to discussing the Cyprus problem only from the 1974 Turkish invasion. History matters, and nowhere more so than in ethnic disputes.

The first days of August brought with them news that one of Russia’s great public figures, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, had died at the age of 89. There are a great many reasons to mourn his passing. During his more than six decades in the public spotlight, Solzhenitsyn was an intellectual giant, a courageous opponent of Soviet repression, a crusader against communism’s excesses, and a champion of moral truth in a system that brooked no ideological opposition. For me, however, he was also much more.

Russia chose to fight American-armed Georgia over the territory of South Ossetia - a piece of land the size of Rhode Island and containing only 70,000 people. Why? And what are the implications for the United States and Russia's neighbors?

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is at it again. In late July, Iran's firebrand president used a meeting of the foreign ministers of the Nonaligned Movement (NAM) in Tehran as the platform for a renewed call to arms in the Third World. In his remarks before the summit, Mr. Ahmadinejad blamed the West for everything from the spread of AIDS to nuclear proliferation, and called on the NAM countries to band together to create an alternative to the United Nations as a way of becoming "the pioneer of peace and justice in the world."