I won’t go into a lengthy response here as to why so many Belmont Clubbers seem to have so much vested in the idea that Saakashvili’s Georgia was a hapless victim of the big bad Russian bear in the small guns of August 2008, rather than an American client state run amok that expected to be bailed out after it started a stupid, unwinnable war by lobbing GRAD rockets into a sleeping city.

Buddy and most conservatives on foreign policy cling to the claim that Russia issuing passports to the Ossetians was illegitimate subversion, and therefore Saako was guilty of nothing more than being the weaker party trying to reunite his country against a faction supported by a stronger party. I strongly disagree, not only because the Ossetians didn’t want to be defined by the borders drawn by the Georgian-born Josef Stalin to divide them, but also because I could also point to Western indifference to Romania issuing passports to 10% of Moldova’s population and that country’s Soros-esque ‘Twitter Revolution’ being led by Romanian passport holders itching for an anschluss with Bucharest to point out the glaring hypocrisy. I don’t even have to go back to Kosovo where the people we were defending from alleged ‘ethnic cleansing’ didn’t have our passports, didn’t share our religion, and didn’t have a border with us. But then again, who the hell cares about Romania (and by extension the German led EU) coveting Moldova for some Drang Nach Osten? And who remembers Georgia anymore? After the EU Commission report and other evidence mounted that the Georgians started it the issue was quietly buried, and the Russians preferred to move on too.

I think Saako’s status as a Soros stooge, along with that of Yuschenko, ought to have given people the Right pause. Instead time after time they get played like fiddles by the same people who fund Leftists in America that want to destroy the American Right. Am I a Lubyanka spawn for pointing this out, or just someone who recognizes that the paleocons are simply more consistent, in not trusting Washington unconditionally in foreign policy and military adventures as well as domestic social engineering?

Daniel Larison sums it up here, far better than I could. Now I have never met him, but we are both Americans and both Orthodox Christians, which may account for our mutual interest in the glaring blind spots and indifference to facts when it comes to Russia and Serbia on the American Right. And for whatever reason, the lion’s share of paleocons all tend to be either traditionalist Roman Catholic (Buchanan) or Orthodox Christian (Taki). Some more clever sociologist can tell me why.

http://www.amconmag.com/larison/2010/07/17/anti-militarism-and-the-right/

“Now, Jacksonians don’t have to be militarists, and if they weren’t they might serve as such a check. Jacksonians care deeply about national honor; to serve as a useful check on Wilsonian impulses, they would need to oppose the commitment of the national honor when there is no important national interest. So, when conflict between Russia and Georgia erupts, and John McCain (hard Wilsonian militarist extraordinaire) says we’re all Georgians, you’d need to hear the response – “no we aren’t: we’re Americans, and don’t you forget it!” Sounds like a Jacksonian response to me – but that’s not what we heard.”

On the face of it, that sounds right, but as Millman noted there was no Jacksonian backlash against McCain’s pro-Georgian enthusiasm. Why not? There is no way to be absolutely sure, but a likely reason is that when McCain’s “Jacksonian” supporters heard this (if they were paying attention to the August war at all) they took it in the spirit in which it was offered: as a fanatical statement of hostility to Russia. Accordingly, what McCain really meant was, “We are all anti-Russian.” Unfortunately, a great many conservatives and “Jacksonians” would be only too willing to agree. Whenever surveys are done asking ally/enemy questions, a large plurality of conservatives and Republicans still identifies Russia as an enemy.

For many “Jacksonians,” especially those who grew up during the height of the Cold War, Russia remains an easy default enemy, and old anti-Soviet sentiment translates easily into anti-Russian feeling. In other words, sympathy for Georgia functions as an expression of antipathy to Russia. To the extent that “Jacksonians” believe the myths that the U.S. “won” the Cold War and specifically that it was Reagan who “won” it, they see the independent states along Russia’s borders that once were part of Russia before the revolution as monuments of a sort to America’s Cold War “victory.” This is partly why so many conservatives and Republicans find anti-Russian nationalist leaders so attractive: they are reminders of what came from the end of the Cold War, and with the “color” revolutions Ukraine and Georgia potentially represented the second wave of democratization in the post-communist world that could further confirm the “victory” over the USSR. There is also some desire on the American right to recapture the cohesiveness and unity that anticommunism once provided, and I suspect the utterly irrational belief that Russia today is headed towards some “neo-Soviet” empire is a product of the desire to have the old enemy against which conservatives of various stripes could rally.

So in the end, pointing out that Russia in some cases might be the enemy of an enemy to the American Right if not a friend is anathema to decades of careful Cold War conditioning.