For instance, the war situation in Iraq has not yet settled down; Syria's exclusion from the international system has continued; and Iran has the dangerous potential of becoming the focus of an international clash because of its insatiable ambition to become a nuclear power. No need to mention Turkey's problematic relations with another of its neighbors, Armenia.
Our northeastern neighbor Georgia, a country with which Turkey has had no problems for years vis-à-vis bilateral relations, has now become a focal area of a fierce "power struggle" between the Western countries and Russia. Only the result of this power struggle will determine whether Georgia will become a NATO member or not. However, it seems that the winner of the first round of this great power struggle has been neither Tbilisi nor the West, but Russia.
Since having been swept to power four years ago on the back of a popular uprising called the "rose revolution" and welcomed by the West, Georgian leader Mikhail Saakashvili has pledged to bring South Ossetia and Abkhazia back under Georgia's control. This has also been a necessity for Georgia to make the country eligible for prospective NATO membership. However Russian President Vladimir Putin recognized South Ossetia and Abkhazia as legal entities in April, drawing Georgian accusations that Moscow was trying to annex these enclaves. Last week, each side accused the other of armed provocation in South Ossetia. Then, Saakashvili ordered an offensive after receiving reports -- he said -- that the Russian military had neared the border, on Friday. However, on Saturday, as the Russians routed the Georgians in South Ossetia, Abkhazians began to drive the Georgians out from a key position in the Black Sea enclave.
With these bloody developments, alarm bells started to ring more loudly in the Caucasus. The fact that Putin flew immediately from Beijing to North Ossetia has shown the seriousness of the situation in the region. There, he made it plain that Moscow's armed confrontation with Georgia is not simply about South Ossetia, but also about its switch of allegiance to America. "Georgia's aspiration to join NATO ... is driven by its attempt to drag other nations and peoples into its bloody adventures," Putin said in the North Ossetian capital of Vladikavkaz. As a response, Georgia's pro-American president, Saakashvili, accused Russia of launching a full-scale invasion.
All actors in the region know full well that there is much more at stake in the fighting than the future of two small breakaway republics because it is obvious that a much greater conflict than that which is visible is under way in the Caucasus today. One key is the recognition earlier this year by NATO and European Union countries of Kosovar independence from Serbia. As is well known, Russia opposed this. However, it tried to turn the defeat to its advantage by pushing the argument that if the Kosovars could be independent, so too could the Abkhazians and Ossetians. This was a significant development in Russia's reaction to what it regards as steady Western containment.
Moscow has repeatedly accused the West of reneging on post-Cold War assurances that there would be no expansion into the vacuum left by the Soviet Union. Not only have former Soviet satellite states in Eastern and Central Europe joined NATO, but Georgia and Ukraine are also seeking entry. The Georgian Army is being retrained by American military advisers and equipped by the US Army. Meanwhile, Poland and the Czech Republic have agreed to host American missile sites, ostensibly as part of an anti-Iranian shield. The thought of Ukraine and Georgia doing the same gives Russian securocrats real nightmares. In South Ossetia, Russia is drawing a line of confrontation in the sand. If Georgia joins NATO, Moscow is saying, there is no way that South Ossetia and Abkhazia will be part of it.
Now, all observers agree that Saakashvili has taken a big gamble that the crisis will make NATO more, rather than less, likely to welcome him as a partner and that America will recognize him as a fellow warrior in the worldwide struggle for freedom. "It's not about Georgia any more," Saakashvili said. "It's about America, its values: We are a freedom-loving nation that is right now under attack."
Having this perspective, Saakashvili has tried to exploit the fact that Georgia is of great economic and strategic importance to Western Europe because of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline. Although it is located hundreds of miles from troubled South Ossetia, the BTC pipeline is flanked by key Georgian military installations that were among the first targets attacked by Russian jets. Georgia is really a key transit point for oil from the Caspian region destined for Europe and the US. Crucially, it is the only practical route from this increasingly important producer region that avoids both Russia and Iran. However, Russia, which views the Caucasus as its own hinterland or within its sphere of influence, wants Central Asian oil to be exported through its own territory and always opposed the pipeline's construction.
As one of the most important countries for the US strategic interests in the Caucasus, I believe that Georgia has no chance at being successful in reaching its dream of being a part of the economic and security bloc of the West. Russia will never give its consent to the accession of Georgia to NATO. And Georgia and the West could not do that given Russia's opposition. Saakashvili's gamble has no chance at reaching its aim. At least, he lost the first round, and all of us saw that how serious Russia is to prevent Georgia from becoming a strategic and economic part of the Western world.
