The last time Dick Cheney visited the former Soviet Union in May 2006, he spoke as the victor of the cold war–and extended an invitation to Russia to become a partner of the West, on the West’s terms. In Vilnius, Lithuania, he told an audience of the leaders of nine former Soviet republics or Warsaw Pact satellites that Russia was not "fated to be an enemy" and that it "can be a strategic partner and a trusted friend." But he urged that Russia follow the course embraced by its former subjects in the Soviet bloc. "Russia has a choice to make," he said.
 
In the aftermath of Georgia, it looks like Moscow has made its choice. But it was hardly the one Cheney proposed–rather than partnership, Russia has chosen head-on confrontation to reassert its authority over its former empire.

Next week, as Cheney visits Georgia, Azerbaijan and Ukraine he will face an audience very different from the one George Bush faced when he visited the Georgian capital in 2005. Then, Bush promised an adoring crowd that “the path of freedom you have chosen is not easy, but you will not travel it alone … Americans respect your courageous choice for liberty. And as you build a free and democratic Georgia, the American people will stand with you.” Yet as Russian tanks rolled into the Georgian cities of Gori, Poti and Zugdidi there was little that the United States could actually do to protect its erstwhile ally. A U.S. frigate delivered humanitarian aid–including tons of bottled water–to the Georgian port of Batumi last week. The U.S. also flew a 2,000-strong Georgian contingent that had been serving in Iraq back from Baghdad to Tbilisi. Russian troops dug in to positions deep in Georgian territory; NATO did little but issue verbal condemnation of Moscow’s actions. A NATO spokesman also denied reports that there was any increased naval presence in the Black Sea in response to a partial Russian blockade of the Georgian oil port of Poti, dashing Georgian hopes of a show of solidarity from NATO’s navies. Even Turkey, Georgia’s neighbor and closest regional ally, refused permission for large U.S. ships to transit the Bosporus for fear of provoking conflict with Moscow.
 
Clearly, Cheney will have some explaining to do. The vice president aims to send "a clear and simple message that the United States has a deep and abiding interest in the well being and security of this part of the world," according to John Hannah, Cheney’s assistant for national-security affairs. That’s hardly a clarion call to support Georgia.
 
Last time Cheney was in these parts, he invoked cold-war heroes Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II and the dissident leaders of the Soviet bloc who threw off "the stagnation of imperial dictatorship." This time he will doubtless praise Georgia’s mercurial President Mikheil Saakashvili and promise to stand by him as he faces the same imperial dictatorship, resurgent. But the acid test of the U.S.’s intentions will be whether the U.S. can succeed in advancing NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia–something many European members, such as France and Germany, have balked at as a provocative step likely to push Russia into further aggression.
 
Cheney, usually fond of straight talking, will find himself caught in a web of nuance. Washington needs Russian cooperation to contain Iran and North Korea. Practically, there is little the U.S. can do to defend Georgia. Yet at the same time Georgia cannot be allowed to fall to Russian bullying. “We are living in historic times when freedom is advancing, from the Black Sea to the Caspian, and to the Persian Gulf and beyond,” Bush told Georgians in 2005. “As you watch free people gathering in squares like this across the world, waving their nations' flags and demanding their God-given rights, you can take pride in this fact: they have been inspired by your example and they take hope in your success.” If Georgia’s success was inspirational, then America’s failure to defend an ally may have an equal, but much sadder, resonance.

DENVER, Colo. -- Just now at a panel of Barack Obama's foreign policy team (Adam Smith, Tony Lake, Richard Danzig, Susan Rice, Greg Craig, Gayle Smith) hosted by the National Democratic Institute, Rice -- summarizing Obama's foreign policy ideas -- made a derogatory aside about John McCain's call for a "league of democracies." Whereupon Lake dispatched a (mildly worded but unmistakable) rebuke before the audience: "Senator Obama has not taken a position on a concert of democracies, and I think a campaign is not the place to work it out."

Let the ideological jockeying begin!

DENVER, Colo. -- Tom Donohue’s optimism about NAFTA shouldn’t be taken as read on the Democratic Party’s attitude, writ large, toward trade liberalization. Even if the controversial trade agreement survives unaltered, now is a day of rising protectionism. Mark Warner, who spoke at Tuesday's convention proceedings, is a case in point.

The 2008 presidential hopeful was once the face of centrist liberals. He was a hugely successful businessman (cell phones) and the Democratic governor of a red state. He belonged the Democratic Leadership Council, wrote articles with titles like “The Sensible Center,” and endured the ire of the party’s left wing. His answers to a 1996 questionnaire support free trade.

But in tonight’s speech, he threw red meat to anti-free-traders. Warner’s summation of world affairs: “Two wars, a warming planet, an energy policy that says let’s borrow money from China to buy oil from countries that don’t like us.” And at the climax:

If you can send a job to Bangalore, India, you sure as heck can send one to Danville, Virginia and Flint, Michigan and Scranton, Pennsylvania and Peoria, Illinois. In a global economy, you shouldn’t have to leave your home town to find a world-class job.
Let me tell you about a place called Lebanon—Lebanon, Virginia. Lebanon is in the coalfields of southwest Virginia, and everyone in that whole town could fit right here on the convention floor. Lebanon is like many small towns in America. It has seen the industries that sustained it downsized, outsourced, or shut down. Now, some folks look at towns like Lebanon and say, “Tough luck. In the global economy, you’ve lost.”

“Outsourcing,” even if it makes American goods and services cheaper in the aggregate, is not something politicians can ever get behind. But their critiques of it lie on a scale, and Warner’s has, over recent years, moved from the mild pole to the fiery one.

By Zachary Kussin

As Jason McClure writes in this week's magazine, piracy off the coast of Somalia has become a major maritime headache. Just last week, on Aug 20, another three vessels -- a Malaysian palm oil transport, a Japanese tanker, and a German cargo ship -- were hijacked. The machine gun-carrying pirates threatened uncooperative crewmembers with death, locked them up and steered the vessels to pirate bases on the northern Somali coast. Shortly thereafter, they began ransom negotiations with the ships' owners. The Gulf of Aden, which lies off Somalia and leads to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, is now considered to be the world's riskiest area for international shipping, according to the International Maritime Bureau, a non-profit organization dedicated to fighting marine crime. So far in 2008, 15 vessels have been hijacked off Somalia alone.

Lawlessness and heavy traffic -- 7.5 percent of world shipping passes through the Gulf each year -- makes the area a fat target for pirates. They can operate in Somalia's territorial waters with impunity. The Somali government, unable to patrol the Gulf on its own, asked the United Nations for help back in June, and the result was Resolution 1816, which allows the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Pakistan and Canada to help patrol the dangerous waters. The measure will help cargo containers and other commercial ships, of course, but its intended beneficiaries are the ships delivering humanitarian assistance to Somalia, which depends on food aid to feed close to three million of its desperately poor inhabitants.

The multilateral initiative hasn't lived up to expectations, however. In its three months on the job, the Canadian security contingent, which will head up the patrol until December, has helped prevent just two hijackings. And as of now, no naval force has agreed to take over from Canada once its six-month rotation is up. Pottengal Mukundan, the IMB's director, attributes the lack of participation "to items in other nations' foreign policy agendas, such as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which surpass piracy." For now, ship crews will have to keep rolling the dice, or avoid the Gulf of Aden altogether.

DENVER, Colo. -- When times are bad, Democrats tend to sour on trade. So when Austin Goolsbee, an economic adviser to Barack Obama, reportedly told Canadian government officials that Obama wouldn’t really “redo” NAFTA (despite campaign claims), the campaign had to repudiate his comments. Obama also opposed the Colombian and South Korean free-trade deals. Yet while the American business establishment might see this as a red flag, Tom Donohue, the lead spokesman for American business, doesn’t take it too seriously. To him, Goolsbee’s comment was a “Kinsley gaffe”: when someone accidentally tells the truth.

Donohue told me he’d come to Denver to find common ground with Democrats (global warming, infrastructure investment) and remind them that, when they don’t see things his way, the Chamber—which represents three million companies—“can raise a lot of hell.” But he wasn’t lying awake at night imagining the death throes of free trade under President Obama. So Obama isn’t likely to “renegotiate” NAFTA? “When he started campaigning he might have been, but when he’s finished he won’t be,” Donohue says. “When he looks at NAFTA and sees that the largest sources of oil and gas are Canada and Mexico, he’ll forget all about a redo.”

In fact, the real bogeyman of business is “card check,” a proposed rule that would allow unions to organize more easily, partly by forgoing secret ballots. Unions, he says, will spend $500 million on this election, and he’s desperate to have enough business-friendly senators to keep a filibuster. “More Democrats than Republicans remind me of the importance of that, because they know if they’re owned by trial lawyers and the unions, they won’t be around long.”

Notably, there are no Obama advisers secretly telling businesspeople that Obama won’t really sign card-check legislation.

By Andrew Bast

This weekend witnessed a worrying twist of fate in Bolivia. Voters went to the polls in a national referendum on the country’s leadership, and President Evo Morales won in a landslide. He took more than sixty percent of the vote, higher even than the fifty-three percent he won in the 2005 presidential election. His enthusiasm was unguarded. "I dedicate this victory to all the revolutionaries in the world," he proclaimed in a nighttime victory speech from the balcony of his presidential palace in the capital of La Paz. He had reason to celebrate. The vote cemented his leadership and gave momentum to what could likely be his landmark accomplishment in office, rewriting the country’s constitution.

The twist is that voters not only cast ballots on the president, but on their local leaders as well, and a coterie of opposition governors in the country’s wealthy eastern provinces--Morales’ chief adversaries--also won in the referendum. For months they have been organizing against Morales. The departments of Santa Cruz, Tarija, Pando and Beni have all voted to become more autonomous from the central government, challenging Morales’ centralization of power in La Paz, his land reform initiative and his reengineering of the constitution. “The outcome of the vote in Bolivia is likely to only deepen the wounds between two fiercely antagonistic political projects,” says Michael Shifter of the Inter-American Dialogue. “Each side will be tempted to dig in even further.” How Morales plays his so-called revolutionary hand will very much determine Bolivia’s future. Morales would be wise to watch his autocratic ally, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, for what not to do; better to err on the side of democracy and demonstrate real skill as a politician.

Bolivia’s provinces, especially Tarija, are rich in natural gas, making the situation all the more volatile. After taking office, Morales nationalized the industry, straining tensions to the breaking point. Recently, autonomy protests in the provinces have turned violent, and the memories of the 2003 protests over the country’s natural gas reserves, which left eighty people dead, ousted President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada and helped bring Morales to power, are still fresh. The issue is as raw as any in the country and could give rise to conflict once again.

A resolution seems distant. Morales has said publicly that he is prepared to talk with the governors, though no one knows what, if any, concessions he would be willing to make. From the outside, the U.S. State Department has said it "stands ready to assist" the discussions, despite its tormented relationship with Morales’ government. Spain, Bolivia’s once-colonial administrator, has also offered to help nudge talks along. The most promising pledge came this week from the Organization of American States, which is headed by the Chilean José Miguel Insulza and had a major success earlier this year when it passed a resolution in March to resolve the standoff between Hugo Chávez and Colombia. In Bolivia, negotiations are the next logical step, but with both sides boosted by big wins at the polls, when, where or on what terms are all big question marks rather than agenda items.

In addition to touting his success as another victory for the revolution, Morales has said that his presidency “starts a new Bolivian history.” Indeed, he is the first indigenous president to be elected in Latin America, and his proposed constitutional reforms would lend political representation to the long-disenfranchised indigenous majorities in the country. But his presidency is not a revolution. It is the result of votes and process and democracy, and with that recognition comes the undeniable fact that he cannot write off the past, no matter how much he may want to.

After a stinging defeat of his Venezuelan constitutional reforms in December, Morales’ staunch ally Hugo Chávez last week decided to instead issue his reforms by decree, subverting the democratic process. Morales would be wise to learn from his mentor, namely that such autocratic strategies make for bad so-called revolutions. Changing Bolivian history could mean bringing the country together, not fanning the flames of autonomy by strong-arming the opposition. Since they have popular support in their provinces, the governors’ grievances deserve a fair hearing, and if Morales has the political skill to bring them into the fold, 21st-century socialism in Bolivia could establish a sound democratic foundation. Considering the way that Chávez’s project is being left behind by less bellicose leaders like Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, Morales’ aim may be morally admirable, but his method will have to be more independently minded.