VIKTOR DRACHEV/AFP/Getty Images

Foolish pride? South Ossetians celebrate Russia’s recognition of their independence.

Foreign Policy: There’s still a lot of debate about just who started the war in Georgia. Russia, of course, claims that Georgia started it, and Georgia says it was provoked by shelling from South Ossetia. Many others see Georgia falling into a long-planned Russian trap. What’s your view? What do you think provoked this war?

Paul Goble: Well, there are two different questions: what provoked this war and what caused it. After the NATO summit in Bucharest, when the United States indicated it would press for Georgia to be included in NATO, the Russian government, as Mr. Putin indicated at the time, was sufficiently angry that Moscow began planning to be able to use force at some point. I believe that [Georgian President Mikheil] Saakashvili gave Moscow the occasion for the use of such force. Had Saakashvili not moved in the way that he did, it would have been far more difficult for Moscow to present itself as acting within the limits of its [peacekeeping] mandate.

However, once the Russian government moved beyond the borders of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and once it moved into parts of Georgia that had never been in dispute, this was an act of Russian aggression, even if the trigger was an unfortunate miscalculation by Tbilisi.

FP: Russian President Dmitry Medvedev writes in Wednesday’s Financial Times that he chose to recognize the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia because “some nations find it impossible to live under the tutelage of another” and because he couldn’t “tell the Abkhazians and South Ossetians… that what was good for the Kosovo Albanians was not good for them.” What do you make of his argument?

PG: Moscow’s effort to blame the West and blame NATO action in recognizing Kosovo doesn’t cut as much ice as I think Moscow expected, but the Russian government continues to make it. It’s significant that the Serbians are very, very unhappy, because in Georgia Russia is doing exactly what it denounced in Kosovo.

Medvedev’s comment can be played elsewhere as well. The country in Eurasia that has the most people who would like to be independent is not Georgia—it is the Russian Federation. In the words of one Chechen I saw quoted the other day, “Are we any worse than the Abkhazians?” So, Medvedev has unsheathed a sword that has two edges.

FP: Medvedev also writes, “In international relations, you cannot have one rule for some and another rule for others.”

PG: Well, he’s just done that, hasn’t he? He said there’s one rule for Abkhazians and there’s another rule for Chechens. I have yet to see a convincing argument on how those two crises are in principle different.

The Russian government is basically saying, “If you’re friends with us, we’ll support territorial integrity; if you’re not friends with us, we will support self-determination for minorities.” That is a pretty heavy-handed approach, and it’s one that at, least so far, isn’t getting much positive support around the world. Indeed, in the first 24 hours, the only political leadership in the world that has supported Russia is Hamas, and that’s hardly much of a recommendation.

FP: So, what’s the difference between Kosovo and Abkhazia and South Ossetia?

PG: I’m not an expert on Yugoslavia, but what I see is the following. The first difference is that Kosovo did not become a client state of someone else. It did not get absorbed by Albania, as Serbs and Russians said would happen at the time. With all due respect, the governments in South Ossetia and to a lesser extent Abkhazia are clearly client states. The South Ossetian government says whatever Moscow wants to be said, and you don’t have that in Kosovo.

The second difference is that nobody went in and said, “We have international peacekeeping responsibilities, and now we’re going to put our forces in so we can recognize this place.” That’s in effect what the Russians did.

FP: But if the South Ossetians and the Abkhazians don’t want to be part of Georgia, why should the West support President Saakashvili’s position? Why is it a good idea to support Georgia’s “territorial integrity”?

PG: Since 1932—since the Stimson Doctrine was articulated when the Japanese seized Manchuria and transformed it into “Manchukuo” as a client state—it has been (largely) consistent American policy that the United States does not recognize territorial change achieved by an act of aggression. So, the issue is not, as the Russians have put it, between simple territory integrity or the right of nations to self-determination. It is whether the United States and Western governments will accept border changes brought about by the use of force. And that’s what has happened in this instance.