Looking beyond Georgia

How does one explain anything Russia has done? It often seems the Ultima Thule of paradox itself. Epoch after epoch, Russia has taken its enlightened place among those few, world-shaping nations - only to lapse, at the worst moment, into darkness. In 1839 a French nobleman called Russia "a nation of mutes." A century and a half later a Russian physicist would say, "Russia is not a country, not a people, it is a 1,000-year-long sickness." China, India, France - all places as vexed with interest as Russia. But could they ever be called a sickness?

That's from Chasing the Sea, an always amusing, and sometimes insightful, 2003 travelogue by self-described "adventure journalist" Tom Bissell. The book is nominally about a trip of his to Uzbekistan, but Bissell manages to work in plenty of Russian and Central Asian history, and some none-too-subtle opinions, like the one above.

I'd recommend Russia watchers start to bone up on Central Asia. Sure, everyone is looking at Russia's western flank now - that's where all the action is. But after Georgia, there isn't much for Russia to do in Europe right away - Ukraine is too big and too important to the West for a blatant move by Russia, and the rest of the countries in Russia's western near-abroad seem either too smart to let themselves be provoked like Georgia was or too stable to give Russia much of an opening.

Central Asia, though, is a lot more promising. Despite superficial friendliness, it's pretty clear that Russia and China are intense rivals for access to the region's energy resources. Most of the states in the region have drifted uneasily into and out of alignment with these two countries and the United States. Islamic terrorism is still a threat, the regimes in the region are still less than stable, and maybe most importantly, there are still lots of ethnic Russians spread throughout Central Asia to provide the motherland with an excuse to intervene if security deteriorates. Throw in the fact that no one in the West really likes these regimes - all but Kyrgyzstan are authoritarian, some of the countries emphatically so - and intervention there would be less likely to provoke Western hand-wringing.

If the Russophobes are right, and Russia really is gearing up for a grand return to the salad days of Soviet power, then Georgia could be little more than a warm-up.