Eleven years ago, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security advisor to the US president Jimmy Carter, published a paper entitled A Geostrategy for Eurasia. He argued that Russia would continue to remain the only threat to American global supremacy in the 21st century. He called on the United States government to become proactive in the former Soviet Union, especially places like Ukraine, Transcaucasus and Central Asia, in order to keep the Russian bear in its cage.
His vision for Eurasia in 2050 was rather apocalyptic: a vastly expanded NATO working with China under American supervision, policing Russia, which by then would have been split into several mini-states. Brzezinski has remained committed to this paradigm even after 9/11, criticising the US actions in Afghanistan and Iraq as distractions from dominating the Eurasian heartland.
Brzezinski's views represent a venerable tradition of strategic thinking in the US dating back to at least 1900. It holds that regardless of whether Russia is Tsarist, Communist, democratic or ''Putinist'', it would always be expansionist and threatening to America by virtue of its sheer size, central geographic position, and mammoth resource endowment.
Some ideas and vocabulary of Brzezinski's geopolitics have been incorporated into official White House documents, such as the Silk Road Strategy Act of 1999 and the National Security Strategies of 2002 and 2006. His disciples in high places have included Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice. Nonetheless, successive US administrations have not acknowledged his Russophobic strategy of containment as the driving force for their policies in the former Soviet Union.
Over the past decade, Washington has invested heavily in military presence, projection of soft power, and regime change in that part of the world, especially in Ukraine, South Caucasus and Central Asia. The usual justifications provided by the White House universal commitment to the lofty principles of democracy, energy security and more recently, imperatives of the ''war on terror'' don't withstand scrutiny and have caused growing anxiety in Russia.
The actual US conduct in the South Caucasus is at variance with the rhetorical goals outlined above. Washington's promotion of democracy is like a tap which can be turned on or off depending on whether a particular regime takes a pro-American orientation. In Georgia, the government of Eduard Shevardnadze, which successfully pursued a balancing act between the White House and the Kremlin, was removed in a sort of post-modern coup by Mikheil Saakashvili in 2003. The new regime has proved to be much more authoritarian, resorting to a crackdown on opposition, the destruction of independent media, and even political assassination, but this has not deterred President Bush from praising it as an epitome of democratisation. It is noteworthy that the US has never had any problems with the friendly Government in neighbouring Azerbaijan the only dynastic autocracy to have emerged from the rubble of the Soviet collapse thus far.
The importance of Caspian oil and gas to US energy security is a myth. The region's hydrocarbon reserves were overstated in the 1990s, by a factor of 10. Accounting for less than 1 per cent of global exports in 2008, Caspian oil carries no significance in terms of diversifying US imports or moderating price dynamics.
The substantial US military presence in Georgia and Azerbaijan can be explained in terms of global counter-terrorism only at the cost of taxing one's imagination.
This has led the Kremlin to a logical conclusion: America is out to contain Russia in Eurasia. NATO's relentless eastward expansion, the establishment of American bases across Eurasia, and the deployment of anti-ballistic missiles close to Russian frontiers must be part of a master plan a la Brzezinski.
What we are witnessing in the Transcaucasus at the moment may be the first instance of robust geopolitical counter-containment undertaken by the Kremlin.
Georgia, a United States proxy, acting with or without Washington's approbation, went overboard, attacking Russian soldiers and civilians. Moscow's response was brutal, perhaps disproportional, but certainly decisive.
Until August 2008, Russian leaders tried in vain to counter US moves through diplomacy, appealing to international law and agreements, and using multilateral organisations such as the United Nations. When Russian President Dmitry Medvedev sent troops into Georgia and subsequently recognised the independence of the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, he engaged in precisely the kind of unilateralism that characterised the US Eurasian strategy to date.
On August 31, Medvedev enunciated five principles that will govern Russian foreign policy on his watch. Upon rejecting US hegemony out of hand (we cannot accept a world order in which all decisions are taken by one country, even one as serious and authoritative as the United States of America), he pledged to defend the life and dignity of Russian citizens through all means possible, and identified the former Soviet republics as a zone of privileged security interests of Russia. He moderated the impression by stating that Moscow did not want confrontation with any country and reiterating its commitment to international law, but the imprint of realpolitik in what has already been called the Russian Monroe Doctrine is unmistakable.
Russia has been pushed into the corner by nearly two decades of unwise, myopic and insensitive US policy. China and old European Union countries such as France and Germany refuse to treat Russia as an imperialist beast and play the role assigned to them by Brzezinski in the geopolitical game for supremacy. The sooner the White House learns to treat the Kremlin as an equal partner in Eurasia, abandons the image of Russia as a sui generis imperialist power, and makes clear its own objectives in the post-Soviet space, the less likely containment and counter-containment escalation will occur.
Dr Nourzhanov is a lecturer at the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies, Australian National University.