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Putin's Rules, or Ours

Is it only a coincidence that Vladimir Putin launched a tank invasion of Georgia inside the week that Alexander Solzhenitsyn died? It was said countless times that Solzhenitsyn's truth-telling began the collapse of Soviet communism.

As Vladimir Putin watched his tanks threaten Tbilisi yesterday, he must have thought that the post-Solzhenitsyn world is fine with him. He and the men in his orbit are unimaginably rich for seeing the world through the bloodless eyes of a Saudi prince.

Unburdened of the exhausting task of enforcing Soviet ideology, Putin's Russia got its hands around the energy-needy throats of Germans, the French, Italians and many other Europeans. London's clubs and the sunshiny resorts of Europe make for pleasant Russian playgrounds. Europe's natural-gas users will pay the tab forever.

The New Russians now in Georgia are shaping a new world with rules based on the old Russian brutalisms. Their political instruments include the eternal silence of murder, routine energy-supply blackmail, and this week a revival of the massed-tank strategies of 1956 and 1968.

Deafening is the sound of scales falling from Western eyes, though it's worth noting how few commentaries about the post-Georgia reality have mentioned the wolves already inside the West -- the terror brigades of radical Islam. Iran's mullahs watch and wait; they'll grab the Gulf once it is clear the West won't resist. Soon?

There is an alternative to this dark opposition, whose goal is to displace the order that served the world well in the 60-year postwar era.

The alternative is Georgia.

After Mikheil Saakashvili was elected president of Georgia in 2004 at age 36, he and his young colleagues began a crash program to integrate their nation into the global world order. Georgia has tried to become both a democracy and free-market economy.

It's worth noting that like Mr. Saakashvili, a Columbia Law graduate who came to the U.S. from Georgia on a State Department Muskie Fellowship, many of his young ministers were schooled at places like Duke, Southern Methodist, Indiana or in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Surely many such foreign students must ponder the evident success of the U.S. The young Georgians did.

They returned to Tbilisi and with Mr. Saakashvili began to erect, piece by piece, a political, economic and financial system that could plug itself smoothly into the ones already running in the West.

On balance, they've succeeded. Growth last year was about 12%. Foreign investment flows have been high.

Much of what they did to make Georgia fit with the world seems pedestrian. They passed laws to enhance property rights. They joined international conventions and institutions affecting arbitration, accounting and ownership. They changed their securities law so corporate insiders couldn't expropriate minority investors. They have pursued free-trade agreements with their regional trading partners. Naturally they want to join NATO. Georgia isn't John Locke's England yet -- the judicial system is notably weak -- but the trajectory is set.

In historical terms, this is essentially what Gen. Douglas MacArthur did for Japan after World War II and Konrad Adenauer did in West Germany. Both were explicit efforts to reorganize a nation to participate in the political and commercial life of the West. "The West," of course, is only a phrase that describes the civilized world's rules of the road during the postwar period. Russia opted out, adopting the Soviet gulag model until 1991.

Georgia is a microcosm of a world of nations now emerging from old systems. In that former, preglobalized world, the West's great powers were on top, and everyone else muddled below. What Georgia represents is an independent nation that has worked hard to be part of the established civilized order, rather than contribute to the chaotic and violent frictions that seem on the verge of constantly overwhelming the world. Putin's Russia is a manufacturer of frictions.

Some argue that Georgia is not a primary American interest. They see Georgia as ultimately a place that transits oil and gas through pipelines from somewhere else to Turkey or onto Europe. Georgia is unlucky geography. This is false.

When this crisis ends, Georgia will be either a model for a world that works or a world whose members do business with knives. Ask BP oil, bereft inside Russia.

If the world's foreign ministries, CEOs, investors and policy intellectuals can't see the implications for their world in Georgia's fate, it's time to reorder our best efforts to playing by Mr. Putin's rules. Many of the West's enemies already have.

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Related Topics: foreign policy | georgia | russia |

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