Keeping Georgia on Your Mind

By Horace Jeffery Hodges

Small states bordered by great powers require more distant, more powerful friends. This truism of foreign policy has implications being spelled out before our eyes in Georgia, a small state bordered by the great power Russia.

In fact, from 1800 till 1991, excepting a brief three years following the Bolshevik Revolution, Russia's border encompassed Georgia entirely.

Only in 1991, with the collapse of the Russian-dominated Soviet Union, did Georgia reemerge as a sovereign nation, and it immediately looked to the West for a powerful friend, thinking to find one in the United States.

Every such friendship, however, comes with a price. Georgia's price? Contributing about 2,000 troops to the American coalition in Iraq, but in turn receiving military training from U.S. instructors. Not a bad tradeoff, perhaps.

Still, the Georgian nation desired stronger guarantees, naturally, and applied for inclusion within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

America supported the Georgians, but France and Germany blocked NATO from offering membership to that nation. Given Georgia's instability due to its ethnic complexity in an ethnically diverse region where Russia claims legitimate national interests, opposition by France and Germany was understandable.

That rejected application left Georgia with a still hostile Russia, a putative American friend, and no formal military alliance.

Had Russia remained economically weakened for a longer period, Georgia might have found sufficient time for strengthening its bonds with the West and might even have formalized a military alliance, if not with NATO then with the United States.

Russia, however, because of its rich gas and oil fields, has benefited from the European need for energy and the worldwide rise in fuel prices, enabling it to regain some of its former power.

It still lacks any convincing ability to project hard power globally, but across its own borders, it can again project significant military power.

Georgia, therefore, has discovered itself in an unenviable position of weakness facing Russian power and would have done better to avoid reacting to separatist provocations in the breakaway region of South Ossetia.

The Georgian military's attack upon Ossetian separatists has provided Russia with the justification required for intervention, and we now see the surely foreseeable result in Georgia's effective loss of South Ossetia, as well as in its profound humiliation, a denigrated status that it shares with the United States.

What does all of this mean for South Korea? Presumably, Russia has no revanchist aim on any part of Korea, so territorial claims are not an issue in relations with Russia. However, some local great powers might have issues about territory, and the Korean Peninsula remains divided, leaving South Korea relatively small and weak as a country.

Koreans dispute Dokdo with Japan, but China is the rising great power in this East Asian region, and while it might have no expressed territorial claims upon Korea, it has in times past dominated Korea through its political, economic, and military power, even going so far as to claim Korea as a vassal state.

Moreover, China even now claims for itself the ancient kingdom of Goguryeo, against Korean protests, and an impartial observer can hardly fail to notice that Goguryeo's territory extended more than halfway down the Korean Peninsula, thereby encompassing all of North Korea, a small, economically weak state profoundly dependent upon China.

That ought to focus South Korea's long-term geopolitical reflections regardless of what China might have in mind.

The Georgian case, therefore, ought to remind Koreans of the foreign policy truism noted above and move them to nurture their longstanding alliance with their powerful, distant friend, the United States.

Americans have national interests in the Korean Peninsula, of course, or they would not be here ― and interests of state are a positive thing, for they promote stable relations ― but none of those interests even remotely includes territorial claims. Indeed, the U.S. strongly supports Korean reunification.

Americans thus find themselves perplexed by many Koreans' insistence that the United States opposes reunification. Equally perplexing has been the recent brouhaha over American beef.

Why so many Koreans believed that the American ranchers were shipping to Korea the beef that American consumers supposedly refused to eat was mystifying to Americans. And I prefer not even to broach the issue of that excessive anti-Americanism that I observed in the autumn and winter of 2001 or in the late summer and autumn of 2002.

In the face of such Korean beliefs and attitudes about the United States, Americans could be forgiven for inferring that many if not most Koreans would prefer to have no military alliance with America.

Probably, this inference is not correct, but if Koreans truly want that alliance, this desire could surely be made clearer on the part of all South Koreans. How? By maintaining a steady focus on South Korea's national interests. In what way? Just keep Georgia on your mind.

The writer is currently employed full-time at Ewha Womans University, teaching courses on essay composition, research papers, and cultural issues. He obtained a doctorate in history of science at U.C. Berkeley. He can be reached at jefferyhodges@yahoo.com. The views expressed in the above article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of The Korea Times.