A Little War that Shook the World

A Little War that Shook the World: Georgia, Russia and the Future of the West
By Ronald Asmus
Palgrave Macmillan £20, 272 pages
FT Bookshop price: £16

Science, according to the philosopher Thomas Kuhn, “destroys its past”. No sooner does a new theory appear on the scene than its rivals are vanquished. Oddly, this is not so with the study of current affairs. Two interpretations of the same event can hang about in the media ether for weeks, months, even years.

The 2008 war between Russia and Georgia is a case in point. A year and a half after the guns fell silent, two utterly contradictory versions of the war continue to circulate in media reports and in the official statements of politicians and governments.

One is that Georgia’s president violated international law and provoked a justified Russian response by assaulting South Ossetia, while the other is that Russia thundered over the border on a flimsy pretext in a war of imperial subjugation. It is hard to think of another recent event that has been subject to more global scrutiny, about which the facts have remained so elusive.

A Little War that Shook the World is an attempt, and a worthy one, to close this gap. Although Ronald Asmus does not hide his pro-Georgian allegiances, he is for the most part fair.

Conceding that Georgia fired the first shots, Asmus nevertheless asserts that this is not the relevant question – Georgia “allowed itself to be sucker-punched by a Russian leadership”, he writes, and fell into a carefully laid trap. The real causes of the war, Asmus argues, were not the events of that day or of the week leading up to the night of August 7 when Georgia’s president Mikheil Saakashvili ordered his forces to bombard the city of Tskhinvali with Grad missiles and invade South Ossetia, starting the war that cost Georgia a fifth of its territory.

Instead, an explanation is found in the geopolitical context of a resurgent Russia seething over US recognition of Kosovo and wanting to torpedo Georgia’s bid to join Nato announced earlier that year. Moscow, in other words, was desperate to provoke a hot-headed Georgian president into a bad miscalculation.

Asmus gives Saakashvili’s version its due, and probably swallows it too uncritically. However, while other experts have attempted to answer the question of whether Saakashvili had legal justification for starting a war, no one so far has tried to explain what was going on in his head at the time. Asmus provides a credible answer.

Unfortunately, A Little War was published just before the release of the report on the war commissioned by the European Union and written by the Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini. It argues that Saakashvili could not offer legal justification for his actions, though Tagliavini contends that Russia overreacted.

This omission is a pity. It would have been beneficial to see Asmus tackle the areas where his analysis diverges from the report (something he did in a later article in The New Republic magazine). Asmus, for instance, portrays Saakashvili receiving intelligence about a Russian troop build-up in South Ossetia prior to his decision to attack. The Tagliavini report, however, says that the Georgian leader’s claim could not be “sufficiently substantiated”.

Meanwhile, it is true that Russian-backed South Ossetian militias shelled Georgian villages for a week leading up to the war, but Georgian militias were simultaneously shelling Ossetian areas. Western observers located in Tskhinvali threw up their hands and blamed both sides. This is not to let Russia off the hook; but, at the very least, it was not obvious who was trying to provoke whom.

Overall, Asmus’s argument is convincing. But, to an observer like myself, who spent days in August 2008 driving between Gori and Tskhinvali watching the skies for Russian bombers, the question of who fired the first shots is not to be glossed over.

Charles Clover is the FT’s Moscow bureau chief