Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Europe Accepting Russia's Anschluss of Abkhazia?


Perhaps not as strong as that, but the fact they are avoiding a confrontation with Russia as she moves in thousands of soldiers is more than a little surprising. Even disturbing. For all their talk of wanting to preserve Georgia's border integrity they do...nothing.

I am not saying that the Georgians are sweet and innocent as far as their government goes. However, arbitrarily carving off chunks of other countries by great powers for themselves I thought was a no-no these days? Or has the clock been reset?

If so, the 21st Century is going to be a wild ride!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Error of the slippery slope.

I understand the error. After all, the problem occurs in our personal lives all the time. No one vice is worth avoiding, or tough decision worth making, or whatever, but the accumulation would lead to disaster.

Except that most of us manage to avoid the disasters.

The same follows for international relations.

Noel

Will Baird said...

Unless, of course, you have someone hell bent on doing the one thing the he shouldn't with weak resistance from the outside and a nation backing him.

Anonymous said...

I'm not making myself clear. Russia's government is doing what it is doing. Even if that turns out to be annexing Abkhazia, it does not follow that any sort of precedent will be set for other more strategic or more contended parts of the world.

The fallacy of the slippery slope is the idea that allowing Russia to scarfle up Abkhazia makes it any harder to stop Moscow should it later try to munch on, say, Estonia.

Noel