Walter Laqueur contributes a new paper to MESH’s Middle East Papers series, on Russia’s Muslim strategy. That strategy, barely coherent, is riddled with contradictions, as Russia vacillates between resentment of the American-led world order and fear of an ascendant Islam. For now, it’s the resentment against the West that dominates the Russian outlook, resulting in a makeshift approach to Islam at home and abroad that may prove inadequate as Russia’s own Muslim minorities and neighboring Muslim states grow stronger. Download here.

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The other week over at ForeignPolicy.com, in a post titled “The ’safe haven’ myth,” Stephen M. Walt offered six reasons to be skeptical of the argument that a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan would pose a significant threat to the United States. On the same website, Peter Bergen rebutted Walt. Running through Walt’s six reasons one by one, Bergen argues that the historical record severely undercuts Walt’s assumptions about how a Taliban-dominated Afghanistan would have little impact on US security.

Bergen is unsparing in his criticism. Yet although he calls Walt’s sixth reason “one of his flimsiest arguments,” he misses just how flimsy it is.

Walt writes, “Sixth, one might also take comfort from the Soviet experience. When the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, the mujaheddin didn’t ‘follow them home.’” Bergen rightly responds that even before the U.S. invasion, Al Qaeda was carrying out attacks on American targets while based in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

But what he might have stated is that self-described mujaheddin in fact did follow the Soviets home, and did so quite deliberately. Afghanistan served to support violent Islamism in former Soviet Central Asia and inside Russia in the Caucasus.

Islamist militants in former Soviet Central Asia—most famously in Uzbekistan, but also in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan—used Afghanistan as a base of training and support and cooperated with the Taliban. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 knocked back these movements for a time. For the past several years their members have been preoccupied with defending themselves inside Afghanistan, and little was heard from them.

The resurgence of the Taliban, however, may have already made it possible for some of these militants to again take up arms in Kyrgyzstan. At the least, others inside Afghanistan are again openly talking of carrying their jihad deeper into Central Asia. For two recent reports, see this one by New York Times correspondent David Lloyd Stern, and this one by The Guardian’s Ghaith Abul-Ahad.

Stern is a long-time friend whom I have known since our days studying Russian as undergraduates, and he has extensive experience reporting from throughout the former Soviet Union. Writing from Kyrgyzstan, he correctly notes that in the past, Central Asian governments have been quite happy to hype the threat of Islamist militants to suppress dissent and justify crackdowns. But as Abul-Ahad reports from within Afghanistan, there exist militants all too willing again to take up arms in the name of Islam against the governments in Tashkent, Bishkek, and Dushanbe as well as Kabul.

Afghanistan’s Central Asian neighbors have unsophisticated armies made up of poorly trained and motivated conscripts, and had a difficult time countering these movements in the late 1990s. It is likely that this time around, their insurgent opponents will prove more capable in combat. U.S. military personnel fighting in Afghanistan have observed a steady and marked improvement in the Taliban’s tactical and combat skills. This is not unusual; practice makes perfect. But it does not bode well for the Central Asians.

Were the United States to withdraw from Afghanistan, there is good reason to believe that the surrounding countries will again face violent insurgencies. This is not to predict a domino effect of toppled governments. States waging counter-insurgency campaigns can compensate for the lack of professionalism of their security forces by applying coercion and repression more widely. Uzbekistan’s security forces in particular are known for their mercilessness, and it is possible that Uzbekistan and the other states could contain their insurgencies by continuing to employ draconian measures. But it is, however, to predict that the misery index in countries bordering Afghanistan will go up. True, some might argue, the United States would not be paying that cost directly, Central Asians would be, and therefore it is not a U.S. national interest. But in that case we should at least be honest about it, and not ignore it in an effort to salve our collective conscience.

The fallout from Taliban-led Afghanistan was not restricted to Central Asia, however, but extended into Russia. Boris Yeltsin’s ill-advised, even criminal, attempt to crush the defiant Mafioso-state of Johar Dudaev by invasion in 1994 ignited a popular insurgency in Chechnya. Joining the Muslim Chechens who rallied to defend their homeland were self-styled mujaheddin who had trained in Afghanistan. Their ranks included Samir Saleh Abdullah Al-Suwailem, a Saudi citizen known more famously as Amir Khattab.

Khattab was a dedicated jihadist. Before coming to Chechnya, he had trained in Afghanistan and fought in Tajikistan. Although the depth of his tactical prowess has been debated, his charisma was exceptional. By 1996 he emerged not merely as the leading foreign jihadi in Chechnya, but as one of the principal power brokers inside Chechnya.

After the end of the first Chechen war and Russia’s withdrawal from Chechnya in 1996, Khattab teamed up with the most famous of the Chechen warlords, Shamil Basaev. Basaev himself has stated that he had trained in Khost, Afghanistan in the spring of 1994, prior to the beginning of the first Chechen war. Together, Basaev and Khattab established their own camps inside Chechnya where they trained volunteers from throughout Russia’s North Caucasus in guerrilla warfare. Their activities, which extended to involvement in hundreds of kidnappings inside Chechnya and neighboring regions, undermined the elected government of Aslan Maskhadov and created hellish conditions for inhabitants in Chechnya and surrounding areas.

Whether by design or accident, Chechnya and its environs were coming to resemble Afghanistan. Residents were being reduced to having to choose between unbridled criminality or a rudimentary order based on a harsh interpretation of sharia. It is worth noting that during this period in 1997 Ayman al-Zawahiri, described often as the mastermind of Al Qaeda, was arrested and detained in Dagestan for five months. Zawahiri was searching for a safe haven, and had been trying to make his way to Chechnya. Upon being released from Dagestan he then made his way to Afghanistan.

The aim of Basaev and Khattab was to drive Russia out of the whole North Caucasus and unite the region in an Islamic state. To assist their cause they recruited Adallo Aliyev, a famous Dagestani poet, as their figurehead leader. (I met with Adallo on several occasions while he was on the lam in Turkey. Adallo was later amnestied by Dagestani authorities due to his age and stature as a cultural icon. He was the subject of a good overview of the turbulent North Caucasus in Der Spiegel this past July.)

Basaev and Khattab attempted to execute their plan in 1999 and invaded Dagestan, triggering the second Chechen war. Shortly after, the Taliban “recognized” Chechnya to underscore its solidarity. It was, of course, an almost wholly symbolic act, but one that did encourage still more Chechen fighters to identify still more closely with the radical Islam of the Taliban. According to the U.S. State Department, Basaev returned to Afghanistan in 2001, and allegedly also sent Chechens to fight in Aghanistan, returning the favor, as it were.

The second Chcchen war proved to be much more difficult for the jihadists. Khattab was poisoned in 2002, and Basaev was killed in 2006. But from 1995 until about 2001, Chechnya was of immense importance to the jihadi propaganda and fundraising. The example of Chechnya seemingly illustrated the underlying promise of jihad: that a small group of Muslims could defeat a major power so long as they trusted in God and their arms.

After U.S. forces entered Afghanistan in 2001, news accounts were filled with implausible claims of “Chechens” fighting in the ranks of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, to the point that the uninitiated would have thought that the Chechens were a major ethnic group inside Afghanistan, and not a nation of barely a million in the Caucasus. Clearly, these are exaggerations. The best explanation I have seen for this phenomenon is that the word “Chechen” became shorthand among Afghans for any Russian-speaking Muslim. The glory associated with Chechnya’s struggle against Russia up until Chechnya’s pacification popularized the Chechens and endowed them with a mythic reputation vastly larger than their numbers. Nonetheless, a multitide of sources leave no doubt that the ties between the Taliban and jihadists in Chechnya were considerable.

The presence of jihadi training camps inside Afghanistan and the Taliban’s support for foreign jihadists were not the sole or even primary cause of Islamist insurgencies in Central Asia or the Caucasus, but they did contribute to the development of those insurgencies. The only consoling thought one can take from the Russian or post-Soviet experience is the suggestion that even states with limited capabilities can contain jihadist insurgencies, albeit at a high price of repression.

In short, when contemplating the consequences of a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Soviet experience should give us no comfort. To the contrary, that experience would tell us to expect that the return of a Taliban-led Afghanistan will invigorate jihadists and again facilitate the spread of militant Islam inside Central Asia, the Caucasus, and elsewhere.

In his response to Bergen, Walt makes no attempt to dispute Bergen’s critique. Instead, he writes that his original post really was directed toward the omission of any cost-benefit analysis in the debate over Afghan policy. The need to weigh objectives and resources and define clear priorities in policymaking is axiomatic. Given the consistent tendency of policy wonks only to insist that their pet issue deserves a higher priority and greater resources without deigning to explain what issues deserve fewer resources, perhaps this point, however basic, bears repeating.

I actually share some of Walt’s pessimism about the U.S. course in Afghanistan and I can agree that that question of whether our policies might be making things worse rather than better is an urgent one. But what I cannot agree with is the refashioning of history to make us feel better about our preferred policy choices. If Afghanistan is all about bad choices, and I think it is, we owe it ourselves to be honest about how bad those choices are when we debate them.

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The recent Russian intervention in Georgia has made an American rapprochement with Iran highly desirable both for the United States and for the West as a whole. Israel has long opposed such a rapprochement, but this would also serve its interests too. Here’s why:

Europe has become increasingly dependent on Russia for natural gas supplies, and this dependence is only likely to increase. This would not be undesirable, except that Moscow has shown a proclivity for cutting back or halting gas shipments to states with which it has disagreements. To prevent Russia from acquiring leverage over Europe through greater control over its gas imports, the United States and many European governments have sought alternative gas supplies from Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan through pipeline routes bypassing Russia.

Iran has enormous natural gas reserves. Iran could also serve as an alternative pipeline route for Azeri and Turkmen gas for transshipment through Turkey to reach Europe. But Iranian-American hostility has resulted in Washington acting to block American and discourage other Western investment in this Iranian gas pipeline option in favor of a route through the South Caucasus.

Continued Azeri-Armenian hostility over Nagorno-Karabakh, though, prevents pipelines being constructed from Azerbaijan through Armenia to Turkey. This has left Georgia as the sole available route for a gas pipeline from Azerbaijan (and possibly Turkmenistan) to Turkey and Europe that bypasses both Russia and Iran. (An oil pipeline is already carrying Azeri oil through Georgia to the Black Sea, while another carries it through Georgia all the way through Turkey to the Mediterranean.)

But Russia’s successful intervention in Georgia casts doubt on whether Georgia can serve as an alternative to Russia as a pipeline route. The ease with which Russian forces took control of both Abkhazia and South Ossetia, as well as pushed into Georgia proper, demonstrated how readily Moscow could disrupt pipelines through Georgia. There is also the possibility that Moscow could wait until a gas pipeline through Georgia is built, and then take over both the country and all pipelines through it. This would not just frustrate Europe’s efforts to reduce dependence on Russia for gas, but actually increase it. Just the possibility that this could occur may prevent the proposed gas pipeline from Azerbaijan through Georgia to Turkey from being built.

How is Europe going to react to the problem of pipeline routes through Georgia being so vulnerable to disruption or takeover by Russia? Will Europe see dependence on Russia for its gas imports as inevitable and henceforward adjust its behavior so as not to antagonize Moscow? Or will Europe attempt to limits its dependence on Russia through seeking yet other suppliers and supply routes?

Past West European behavior suggests that Europe will do the latter. During the Cold War, when growing West European economies needed more gas but North Africa was seen as an unreliable supplier, Western Europe began to import gas from the Soviet Union. Further, it did this despite American objections at a time when Western Europe was dependent on the United States for protection against a possible Soviet attack.

Europe is now less dependent on the United States for security but increasingly dependent on the importation of gas. Europe, then, can be expected to do now what it did during the Cold War when it needed more gas and doubted the reliability of its existing suppliers: find alternative suppliers. Europe is now, in fact, attempting to increase its imports of gas via pipelines from North Africa as well as of liquefied natural gas (in both of which, by the way, Russia is trying to gain a stake).

Sooner or later, though, Europe is likely to seek to import gas from Iran, especially since: 1) the Iranians have already indicated their willingness to sell it to Europe; 2) Russia cannot interfere as easily in Iran as it can in Georgia; and 3) Iran can also serve as a transit route for gas from Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan.

As Western Europe’s behavior with regard to gas imports from the Soviet Union during the Cold War demonstrated, Europe is likely to buy gas from Iran despite opposition from America (and, of course, Israel). If Europe is determined to buy Iranian gas, then the United States will face two choices: either it can attempt to prevent Europe from doing so, or it can work with Europe by attempting to normalize Iranian-American relations.

Attempting to prevent Europe from buying Iranian gas is highly inadvisable since not only are such efforts likely to fail, but will only result in worsening European-American relations. Nor will doing this result in Iran moderating its behavior toward Israel, since it is doubtful that Europe is going to let Israeli opposition stand in the way of furthering its efforts to reduce dependence on Russia for gas. Further, an American effort to prevent Europe from buying Iranian gas would prevent the United States from being able to exploit the increasing differences between Russia and Iran that can be expected to emerge, especially if Tehran is willing to serve as a transit corridor for Azeri and Turkmen gas.

An Iranian-American rapprochement, by contrast, would help preserve European-American relations as well as allow the United States to benefit from the Russian-Iranian differences that would arise from this. But would Iran moderate its behavior toward Israel for the sake of rapprochement with the United States, especially if an Iranian-European rapprochement seems likely even if Iranian-American hostility remains?

There is reason to believe that it would. For while Europe can provide Iran with much needed cash, Europe is neither willing nor able to provide Iran with help on its security problems to the extent that America can. And Iran has some very serious security problems, including:

1. an increasingly active Sunni opposition inside Iran to the Shi’a government there;
2. the likelihood that a resurgent Taliban will renew its hostility toward Iran, which it actively pursued prior to 9/11;
3. the possible spillover into Iran from the renewed sectarian conflict in Iraq that may well result as the American presence there declines; and
4. the growing Russian hostility toward Iran that can be expected to result from Tehran competing with it as a gas exporter as well as pipeline route for Azeri and Turkmen gas.

Tehran has little incentive to change its behavior toward Israel if Iranian-American hostility continues at a time when American intervention in Iran appears highly unlikely. By contrast, the United States has a far better chance of moderating Iranian behavior toward Israel as a condition for providing Tehran with assistance against the very real threats Iran faces than if the United States remains hostile toward Iran.

Where America’s interests lie, then, should be clear: Opposing European gas purchases from Iran will worsen European-American relations, give Russia further opportunity to exploit European-American differences, and do nothing to moderate Iranian behavior toward Israel. An American rapprochement with Iran, by contrast, would promote European-American cooperation, assist Europe in avoiding over-dependence on Russian gas and Russian-controlled pipelines from Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, and offer a better opportunity to moderate Iran’s behavior toward Israel.

The outbreak of the Russian-Georgian War earlier this month apparently caught Ankara as poorly prepared as it caught Washington. The Turkish Foreign Ministry’s section dealing with the Caucasus reportedly was virtually unstaffed. The head of the section was in Mosul on temporary assignment, the section’s number-two spot is empty and has been for the last six months. The number three was also away on temporary assignment in Nakhichevan and the other assigned section members were on vacation, thus forcing on-duty diplomats from other desks to scramble.

This may surprise. There are abundant reasons for one to expect that Turkey would have been following events in Georgia and the Caucasus with great diligence. The two countries share common borders and intertwined histories. Istanbul ruled large chunks of the Caucasus, including much of Georgia, for centuries, and today there remains inside Turkey a small but vibrant community of Abkhazians and related Caucasian peoples. Russia for most of the past three centuries has loomed over Turkey as its greatest rival and threat, yet at critical times, such as during the Turkish War of Independence (1919-22), it has been a key ally. Today Russia supplies somewhere around 70 percent of Turkey’s natural gas and is Turkey’s second-largest trading partner.

Georgia is a transit point for Caspian and Central Asian oil and gas and as such is critical to Turkey’s ambitions to become an energy hub and to diversify its own energy supplies. As a member of NATO, Turkey has been involved in training and supplying the Georgian military. Finally, given Turkey’s own struggle with Kurdish separatists, other instances of ethno-separatism and border revision logically should command Ankara’s keen attention. In short, both Russia and Georgia are of great strategic, economic, and historic importance to Turkey, and the principles of territorial integrity and self-determination over which the Russo-Georgian War was (nominally) fought are directly relevant to the most sensitive of Turkey’s security concerns.

Turkey’s lack of preparedness for the Russo-Georgian war is not coincidental, but instead reflects a long-standing legacy of Kemalism. The fundamental precept of the foreign policy course laid out by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, summed up in his famous phrase, “Peace at home, peace in the world,” was that Turkey should bury its imperial past, avoid foreign entanglements, and focus on internal development. Thus the Turkish Republic deliberately isolated itself from its neighbors, especially those to its south and east. It cut cultural and other ties across the board, and preferred cordial but distant relations over close involvement and interaction. As a result, Turkey today has a strong cadre of diplomats, professors, analysts and others fluent in English and familiar with the United States and Western Europe, but it lacks the sort of expertise about its own neighborhood that one might assume it would naturally possess given its imperial history. Although challenges to this policy of isolation have emerged on occasion (briefly in the 1950s and perhaps during the early 1990s), a preference for cool detachment and inward focus has remained dominant in the Turkish bureaucracy.

There is much to be said for avoiding foreign entanglements, and the reasoning behind “Peace at home, peace abroad” was anything but frivolous. Yet self-imposed isolation carries its own costs. Those costs rose precipitately for Turkey following the end of the Cold War as its neighborhood underwent tremendous political and economic transformation. Ignoring the events taking place around it was no solution. At this time, Turkey’s self-confidence began to grow, and more Turks began to advocate that their country play a more active role in its region. One positive development has been the emergence in Turkey of think tanks, both official and non-governmental, dedicated to foreign and domestic issues.

Old habits and institutional practices die hard, however, and playing an active role in such a complex region is no simple matter. As a way to break out of the old mindset and gain experience in regional affairs without great risk, Turkey has been trying to play the role of mediator in regional conflicts. The architect of this approach is Ahmet Davutoğlu, a former professor and close adviser to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who now holds the rank of ambassador. Thus Turkey has involved itself in negotiations between Syria and Israel. Similarly, Turkey’s Foreign Minister Ali Babacan has at times tried to position himself as a broker between the West and Iran.

Erdoğan in the midst of the Russo-Georgian War tried to apply a slightly more advanced variant of this formula by flying to Moscow, Tiblisi, and Baku and proposing a “Caucasus Stability and Cooperation Platform.” The idea of the platform, which is sometimes also called a pact, is to bring together the three South Caucasian states of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan with Turkey and Russia, and enable them to mediate and solve their conflicts among themselves.

The idea sounds attractive, but it will not go far. Such pacts can work only if all members are willing to prioritize stability and good relations over their other interests. Yet if there is one thing we know, it is that there is no consensus for stability in the Caucasus. Russia just mounted a calculated and successful effort to overthrow the status quo in the Caucasus at the expense of another putative pact member, Georgia. Russia’s war aims, moreover, extend beyond altering the balance of power in the Caucasus, to restoring its position as the dominant power in Eurasia and restructuring its relations with the United States and Europe. Abkhazia and South Ossetia are pawns in a game bigger than the Caucasus. The notion that what Russia and Georgia need in order to come to a mutually satisfactory agreement is a nearby neutral venue for their diplomats to meet verges on the surreal. Perhaps for this reason, the Russian press chose to give short shrift to Erdoğan’s call for a stability pact, and instead interpret his visit as signifying support for Russia in South Ossetia. It was not the finest moment in Turkish diplomacy.

Azerbaijan is another state in the Caucasus that has for some time been voicing an intense dissatisfaction with the status quo. In recent months, Baku has been dropping subtle threats that it might seek to revise it by going to war. In particular, Azerbaijan is dissatisfied with the outcome of the war it fought with Armenian forces over Nagorno-Karabakh (to use the most widespread English rendering of the region’s name), a predominantly Armenian enclave (technically it held the title of “autonomous oblast” in the Soviet Union) inside the Republic of Azerbaijan. The Karabakh War started in 1988, i.e. when the Soviet Union was still in existence, and ended with a ceasefire some six years later in 1994. During the war not only did Karabakh break free of Baku’s control, but Armenian forces managed to seize roughly fifteen percent of the Republic of Azerbaijan’s territory and expelled the Azeri inhabitants thereof, some 800,000 people.

Since that time, Baku has not been able to achieve any redress through diplomatic measures. But thanks to foreign investment in its oil industry it has accumulated some wealth, and has used that wealth to engage in a military build-up. Whether or not Azerbaijan’s military is capable of defeating and driving out Armenian forces and restoring the occupied territories and Karabakh to Baku is by no means clear, but building frustration among Azeris might tempt them to test their luck.

Turkey and Armenia are the two states in the Caucasus that have the greatest interest in preserving and building upon the status quo. The Armenians, i.e. the unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR) and the Republic of Armenia, won the Karabakh War and wish to keep their gains. They would like Azerbaijan and the wider world to acknowledge the de facto independent NKR as sovereign Armenian territory (either as part of the Armenian Republic proper or as a separate republic).

Armenia in addition would like to see Turkey lift the blockade it imposed in 1993 in response to the Armenians’ seizure of Azerbaijani territory. That blockade has stunted land-locked Armenia’s economic development, leaving it dependent upon Georgia and Iran for surface routes to the outside world. The disruption caused by Russia’s invasion to the operations of Georgia’s ports, rail lines, and roads (ironically, Turkish goods are among the biggest commodities imported along those roads into Armenia) has hit Armenia’s economy especially hard. and underscored Armenia’s isolation and fundamental vulnerability. Indeed, even before this most recent war, it was clear that Armenia’s lack of relations with Turkey had left it excessively dependent upon Russia—an unhealthy situation for any state pretending to sovereign status. (Indeed, with Armenia already virtually in its back pocket, one might imagine that Russia may seek to woo Azerbaijan to its side by compelling Armenian concessions on Karabakh.)

For its part, Turkey since the end of the Cold War has benefited in numerous ways from the retreat of Russian power and had reason to be generally satisfied with the state of affairs in the Caucasus prior to this war. The big exception is the state of its relations with Armenia. Although Turkey was one of the very first states to recognize Armenia’s independence in 1991, it never followed up to establish relations. Several difficult issues divide the two states. One bone of contention between them is Turkey’s insistence that Armenia definitively renounce any claims on the territory of the Turkish Republic. Another is Armenia’s insistence that Turkey recognize the massacres and deportations from Anatolia of Ottoman Armenians during and after World War One as a genocide. A third is Turkey’s demand that Armenia withdraw from the territory of Azerbaijan that it occupies.

A fourth issue is, of course, the blockade. Although the imposition of the blockade was greatly appreciated by Azerbaijan, which sees itself as the victim of Armenian aggression, it has harmed Turkey’s image worldwide by reinforcing the stereotype of the “Terrible Turk” as a bully. This is something the Turks, never mind the Azeris, find particularly irksome given that it is the Armenians now who are occupying territory seized in war. Turkish support for Azerbaijan has impaired Turkish efforts to counter the lobbying by Armenian diaspora groups of legislative bodies worldwide to classify the mass deaths of Ottoman Armenians in 1915 as genocide. Opening the border with Armenia, some Turkish officials believe, would enable Turkey to thwart these efforts more effectively.

Economics provides another incentive for Turkey to open its borders. Turkey’s east is isolated, distant from markets, and remains underdeveloped. Opening the border with Armenia would provide a boost to the local economy by enabling cross-border trade. It would also make available better routing options for oil and gas pipelines from the Caspian and export corridors to the Caspian and beyond, and thereby provide a boon to Turkey’s national economy as well.

In a gesture intended perhaps to break the stalemate in Turkish-Armenian relations, the Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian invited his Turkish counterpart Abdullah Gül to come to Yerevan on September 6 to watch the national soccer teams of the two nations play a World Cup qualifying match. Gül, some Turks hope, will seize the moment to initiate a major shift in the region’s diplomacy. Gül has not yet committed. Were Gül to do so, it would mark a significant change not just in Turkish-Armenian relations, but even more so in Turkish diplomacy, which has a tradition of working slowly and with exceeding caution, and of letting opportunities slip by.

Indeed, with Russian forces now inside Georgia, both Turkey and Armenia (as well as Azerbaijan) probably already have missed an opportunity to overcome their differences and to chart a path toward more secure and prosperous futures for their societies. The Russian state, whether in its Tsarist, Soviet, and contemporary forms has demonstrated substantial skill in manipulating ethnic and other cleavages on its borderlands to weaken its competitors. It is worth remembering that Russia was involved in the emergence of all of the conflicts mentioned above (Turkish-Armenian, Azeri-Armenian, Ossetian-Georgian, and Abkhazian-Georgian) among others. That is not to say that Russia invented these conflicts. Hardly. At times Russia has expended considerable efforts to contain and resolve them. But Russia is not an outsider to them and possesses an intimate familiarity with them—a familiarity that it can, has, and will deploy to its advantage.

Strength is a relative thing. Sapping the cohesion and power of one’s potential rivals is often as effective, and occasionally even more useful, a method for overcoming them than is building up one’s own strength. There are more fissures for Russia to exploit in the Caucasus. The Turkish-Armenian-Azerbaijani fissure is an easy one to exploit. For reasons of history, memory, and culture, all of these societies remain deeply conflicted regarding relations with each other. Pushing the buttons to poison the atmosphere and disrupt any move toward reconciliation is not difficult.

Russia exerts tremendous influence over Armenia, and considerable influence over Azerbaijan. Turkey, too, is vulnerable to Russian pressure. Already Turkish businessmen are fretting over the way increased scrutiny by Russian customs of their goods is harming Turkish exports and are wondering if such scrutiny is intended as a message to Turkey to refrain from close cooperation with the United States against Russia.

Keeping Turkey, Armenia, and Azerbaijan at loggerheads serves Russia by neutralizing the power and options of its Caucasian neighbors, keeping them dependent, and blocking the development of the Caucasus as an alternative corridor for energy and trade. It also serves varied domestic interests in each of those states. But it does nothing for those societies aside from depriving them of options for future development.

It is not clear that Russia’s defeat of Georgia will restore it to the position of hegemon in the Caucasus, but it will increase Moscow’s ability to play the role of regional spoiler. Although many Turks and Armenians retain doubts about the propriety of closer relations between their countries, important constituencies inside the governments and societies of the two nations recognize the multiple benefits better ties would bring. Their difficulty is convincing others that improved relations are, in fact, conceivable. Thus were Gül and Sarkisian to meet this September and announce together that they intend that their states should, together with Azerbaijan, overcome their differences, their words would have a real impact.

As the larger, more senior, more established, and more powerful state, Turkey is the better candidate to take the lead in the drive toward reconciliation. But it is not likely to happen. With Russia inside Georgia, and the Caucasus reverting again to a theater of Great Power confrontation, time is running out. Boldness is required. Yet whereas Moscow drew from its imperial collapse the lesson that fortune favors the bold, Ankara took from the Ottoman experience the lesson that extreme discretion is the better part of valor.

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Georgia’s attempt to gain control of South Ossetia by force on August 8 was ill-considered for several reasons. First, it led to a punishing Russian counter-attack that has crippled Georgia’s military capability. Second, it reduced to virtually nil Georgia’s chances of restoring its sovereignty over South Ossetia and the other breakaway region of Abkhazia for the foreseeable future—both because of the enhanced Russian presence in both territories, and because Tbilisi’s resort to force confirmed the fears of the Ossetian and Abkhazian peoples about Georgian chauvinism. (During a similar offensive against Abkhazia in August 1992, Georgian officials threatened that the Abkhazian nation might be “left without descendants” and that “we can easily and completely destroy [their] genetic stock.”) Third, it dealt a grievous blow to Georgia’s chances of joining NATO—again probably for the foreseeable future—because neither the Europeans nor the Americans will want to risk involvement in armed conflict with Russia.

Nevertheless, because of the region’s critical energy reserves and pipeline networks, because of the fact that the Caucasus has reverted to its 19th-century status as a front line between the Islamic and Orthodox worlds—a front line that will help define global politics in the coming century—and because of the need to contain Russia’s increasingly aggressive neo-colonialist aspirations more generally, the United States cannot afford the temptation to disengage.

Effective American engagement, however, will require more than maintaining a robust political and security presence in Georgia so that its sovereignty is not further compromised. The central challenge in the Caucasus—on both sides of the Russian Federation’s borders—is how to address the suppressed but deeply held and often conflicting nationalist aspirations of the multitudes of peoples living there. This will require reaffirming one traditional tenet of U.S. foreign policy, and reconsidering another. The principle that needs to be upheld is genuine political liberalization, so that minority groups feel less compelled to take up arms or turn to Russia for help. The principle that needs to be reconsidered is the commitment to the territorial integrity of existing states. Its mechanical application is simply unrealistic given prevailing conditions in the Near East, as already evidenced by the U.S. recognition of Kosovo’s independence, and by the proliferation of similar entities throughout the region.

If Georgia can be induced to renounce aggressive chauvinism definitively in its dealings with other national groups, then the prospect of good-neighborly relations with the Ossetians, Abkhazians and others may materialize—perhaps even within some kind of confederal or commonwealth framework. At the very least, it will present the peoples of the Caucasus with an attractive alternative to what Russia has to offer. Such a challenge to the repressive political and territorial status quo would put Moscow on the defensive, with profound implications far beyond the Caucasus.

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