No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

52 WAR BREAKS OUT IN GEORGIA

SOCHI WAS THE high point of our last year with Putin’s Russia. By the summer of 2008 tensions were growing over Kosovo, and the ever-simmering Russian hatred of Georgia was reaching a boiling point.

The denouement on Kosovo had been approaching since our discussions with Russia and NATO regarding the Conventional Forces Treaty the year before. The Balkans, which had been dubbed the “powder keg of Europe” for the early twentieth-century wars that had begun there, was relatively quiet for the bulk of our term. Some countries—Albania, Croatia, Macedonia, and Slovenia—were doing rather well, economically and politically. Bosnia and Herzegovina was and still is a mess, with three presidents and three separate security forces. The Dayton Accords had signified the end of the tragic Bosnian war, but they had also established two governments and one autonomous district: the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is populated mostly by Bosniaks and Croats, and Republika Srpska, populated by Serbs. A third self-governing district belonging to both the Federation and Srpska, the Brčko Municipality, is mostly Muslim. I tried, in 2005–2006, to coax those substates toward constitutional reform to strengthen the integration of the state. By constitutional requirement the presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina must be occupied by three individuals: one rotating chair of the presidency and two other members. The head of state must consist of one Croat, one Serb, and one Bosniak. When, in 2005, the three presidents showed up at the State Department, I knew that it was a fool’s errand to try for greater integration. I had to make sure that each one spoke in turn, and I needed to address all three, by name, every time I spoke. This is going nowhere, I thought. And it didn’t. The constitutional referendum to consolidate the government failed in 2006, but Bosnia and Herzegovina was no worse off than it had been before we tried.

Conversely, the problem of Kosovo threatened to break into another open conflict. During the 1990s NATO air campaign to remove the murderous Slobodan Milošević from power, the Albanian Kosovars, who constituted more than 90 percent of the population of the region, were subjected to ethnic cleansing. Milošević’s Serbian troops evacuated entire towns—forcing the women and children to march to Kosovo’s borders while slaughtering the men and dumping their bodies in mass graves. In total, Milošević’s troops forced 1.3 million Albanian Kosovars from their homes. When he was finally stopped by NATO and deposed, the United Nations established the Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) to control the region and manage conflicts. Several diplomatic efforts failed to adequately resolve Kosovo’s status situation. So in 2007 the highly respected Finnish former president Martti Ahtisaari, acting on behalf of the United Nations, tried once again to find a solution to the problem. When he could not, he presented the Comprehensive Proposal for the Kosovo Status Settlement (also known as the Ahtisaari Plan), a report that effectively recommended eventual independence for the Kosovars.

We were firmly in support of the Ahtisaari proposal, and I asked Ambassador Frank Wisner, a seasoned retired diplomat, to act as special envoy to help us implement the plan. The French, British, Germans, and most of the other Europeans were united behind the effort. The Russians, though, were adamantly opposed, taking the side of their allies the Serbs. The Europeans and we were unable to come to agreement with Russia and decided that we had no choice but to back independence for Kosovo. That resulted in a messy process. It wasn’t possible to go to the Security Council for a vote establishing an independent Kosovo; the Russians would surely be joined by the Chinese in a veto, since Beijing was worried about the secessionist precedent for Taiwan and Tibet.

The only choice was to manage the problem in a way that prevented violence, convincing as many countries as possible to recognize Kosovo. Our task was to hold the allies together in the face of Moscow’s resistance and to deliver a decision before the Kosovars became impatient and took to the streets. And I felt strongly that we needed to find a way to placate the Serbs, for whom I had some sympathy. The Serbians had elected a Western-oriented president, Boris Tadić, who wanted badly to integrate into Europe and NATO.

Dan Fried was the point person for the diplomacy, working closely with Wisner, Judy Ansley on Steve’s staff, and with the Pentagon. The United States had troops in the region, and there was great concern that any violence might embroil them—and the much more substantial European contingents—in a civil war. The other major concern was that Belgrade might try, little by little, to annex the upper third of Kosovo, where the radical Serbs lived. I was pretty sure that Moscow didn’t want that, but the Russians weren’t very helpful in restraining their ally’s incendiary talk.

As the summer of 2007 wore on and the Kosovars became more agitated, I pressed the Europeans to act. Our idea was that we would recognize the new state in concert and bring as many others along as possible. The NATO allies, particularly the French and the Germans, kept stalling, hoping for a miraculous change of heart in Moscow. Every meeting ended with a promise to get on with it but more and more time passed. When, in mid-June, the French insisted on another month’s delay, the President was furious. At an NSC meeting the next week, I found myself defending the allies’ desire for more time, despite my own reservations. The President called Putin, who told him what Lavrov had told me: “We can accept anything that the Serbs accept.”

That, of course, wasn’t helpful. At the G8 summit in Heiligendamm, Germany, Nicolas Sarkozy proposed another 120 days of negotiations at the conclusion of which, if an agreement had not been reached, the Security Council would endorse the Ahtisaari Plan. After the Heiligendamm Summit, on June 9, the President called for Kosovo’s independence at a press conference in Rome. He repeated his support for independence and the Ahtisaari Plan in Albania the following day. “One more month,” the President told me. “And then we recognize them if we have to do it alone. I’ve promised them, and we have to carry through.” The President would eventually agree, however, to the Sarkozy proposal extending negotiations another 120 days only with the understanding that it would be the final delay.

On February 18, 2008, we officially recognized Kosovo, as did many other European states. By the end of the year, fifty-three states would recognize Kosovo: most of the European countries, the United States, Canada, Australia, and several countries in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. Tadić survived, helped by a decision that the United States made to secure a place for Belgrade within NATO’s Partnership for Peace. The Serbs had been blocked from joining because they hadn’t yet hunted down and handed over the Balkan war criminals Ratko Mladić and Radovan Karadžić. I felt strongly that we couldn’t wait for that to happen. Serbia needed some evidence that there would be a place for it in Europe and NATO if the wound of Kosovo were ever to heal.

Today Kosovo is independent (though Moscow does not recognize it) and Serbia is moving closer to Europe, despite continued bitterness. On the day we recognized Kosovo, Brian Gunderson asked if I felt comfortable creating yet another weak state that might be unsustainable. “What choice did we have?” I asked. And added, “But in time Kosovo will be alright. It was the right thing to do.”

THE KOSOVO PROBLEM paled in comparison to the brush fires igniting in Georgia. Over the previous year tensions had been growing in the already unstable regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, much of it fueled by Moscow. In the spring of 2008, every week seemed to bring some new provocation to South Ossetia, from increases in the number of Russian troops (ostensibly to engage in railroad construction) to plans to issue Russian passports to the citizens living in what was Georgian territory. Lavrov had sent me a long memo detailing Russia’s grievances with Saakashvili and the Georgians—some of it legitimate, some of it concocted. It was, nonetheless, a warning sign. It was only a matter of time until a spark ignited open conflict in the area.

During a visit to Germany on June 23 for a conference on Palestinian state building, Frank-Walter Steinmeier and I developed a diplomatic plan to respond to the deteriorating situation in three phases: the first phase would include assurances that force would not be used by any party (one of Moscow’s demands of the Georgians); the second phase would involve the return of refugees and practical cooperation on the development of institutions; the third phase would be the final settlement of Abkhazia’s political status. Frank left for Tbilisi, Abkhazia, and Moscow shortly after. He told our diplomats a few days later to say that he was making progress.

I went to Tbilisi a few weeks later, on July 10, on the heels of a trip to the Czech Republic to sign the missile defense agreement that the Russians had tried to prevent. The press tried to link the two: was this a trip intended to poke a stick in Moscow’s eye? It was not, though I am sure the Kremlin read it that way.

Saakashvili met me on the terrace of Kopala Restaurant, which featured breathtaking views of the city. The Georgian president, who is big and demonstrative, pointed out the beautiful restoration work that was under way on monasteries, churches, and other historic buildings. He was very proud of his leadership of the country and rightly so: Georgia’s corruption levels (according to the Corruption Perception Index) had declined dramatically beginning with Saakashvili’s police reform initiatives in which thousands of corrupt officers had been fired and the department completely rebranded. The country was also trying to shield itself from Russia’s pressure, by attempting to use gas from Azerbaijan instead of Russia. And despite Moscow’s embargo of Georgian goods, the economy continued to grow even though large segments of the population still lived in dire poverty.

It was, nonetheless, hard to get Saakashvili to see that all of his gains were at risk because of the worsening situation in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. He’s proud and can be impulsive, and we all worried that he might allow Moscow to provoke him to use force. In fact, he himself successfully provoked conflict in another breakaway part of the country, Adjara, and benefited when it had been reintegrated into Georgia through domestic and international pressure. The precedent, we feared, might make him think that he could get away with a repeat performance in the territories located closer to Putin’s beloved Sochi.

“Mr. President,” I said, trying to shift his attention away from the rooftop tour of the city, “you need to sign a no-use-of-force pledge.”

“How can I do that when Putin is doing the things he’s doing?” he answered, suggesting that he’d sign only if the Russian gave him something in return.

“I’ll talk to the Russians, but you don’t have a choice,” I told him. “You can’t use force, and so the threat to do so doesn’t do you any good. Sign the pledge now while you have international support.”

We went back and forth for more than an hour, Saakashvili stubbornly refusing to yield. Finally, I thought I’d better get tougher. “Mr. President, whatever you do, don’t let the Russians provoke you. You remember when President Bush said that Moscow would try to get you to do something stupid. And don’t engage Russian military forces. No one will come to your aid, and you will lose,” I said sternly.

He got the point, looking as if he’d just lost his last friend. I tried to soften what I’d said by repeating our pledge to defend Georgia’s territorial integrity—with words. He asked if I’d say so publicly. I did, avoiding any language that might be misinterpreted as committing us to Georgia’s defense with arms.

THE END OF JULY had been brutal with travel to Europe, the Middle East, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, and Samoa—all in the space of two weeks. If I can just get to August 8! I’ll play golf and visit with friends at the Greenbrier, I promised myself. And then in two weeks, I’ll be off to Beijing for the close of the Olympics. Just get to August 8!

There had been some violence in and around South Ossetia during the first days of August. Yet diplomatic activities were continuing, and there had been a relatively good report from a meeting between the European envoy and his Russian counterpart. I was a little unnerved when Dan Fried and Kurt Volker, his principle deputy, dropped by on the evening of the sixth to say that Matthew Bryza, a deputy assistant secretary for the region, was on the ground in Georgia and reported that the fighting was increasing. I was quite alarmed when I learned that Russia had evacuated more than eight hundred people from the area.

On the night of August 7, the dam broke. Despite Georgia’s unilateral ceasefire earlier in the day, South Ossetian rebel forces continued shelling ethnic Georgian villages in and around the capital, Tskhinvali. In response, the Georgian military commenced a heavy military offensive against the rebels after a senior Georgian military official declared that Tbilisi had decided to restore “constitutional order” in South Ossetia. Only thirty minutes after Georgia began its offensive, Russia came to the aid of the South Ossetian rebels, moving its 58th Army tanks through the Roki Tunnel into Georgian territory.

Dan Fried updated me throughout the night. I waited anxiously at my apartment on the morning of the eighth, trying to decide whether to go ahead to the Greenbrier. My family and friends had gathered for the trip by car to West Virginia and I was their ride, since my security detail could go only if they were taking me. The stranded vacationers sat in my living room eating turkey sandwiches while I tried to sort out the problem. After a little while, I decided to set out for the Greenbrier. I could always come back if I needed to.

Or … I could just stay on the telephone in my cabin. It was August, and, as Steve Hadley often put it, we were maldeployed. The President was attending the Olympic Games in Beijing, and Bob Gates was in Munich. The time difference with China made it difficult to conduct conference calls, but at least twice a day I talked with the President. He had found himself sitting next to Putin at the Olympic opening ceremonies, engaging in awkward conversations in which the Russian alternately accused the Georgians of genocide and feigned ignorance of what Russia’s troops were doing.

We decided that we didn’t want the conflict to become a U.S.-Russia row and that the European Union and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) should be actively involved in the diplomacy. I talked repeatedly to Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister, and Alexander Stubb, the Finnish foreign minister and head of the OSCE, trying to guide the two of them toward a common message. I issued a statement calling on Russia to “cease attacks on Georgia by aircraft and missiles, respect Georgia’s territorial integrity and withdraw its ground combat forces from Georgian soil.”

By August 11 the Georgians claimed that they’d withdrawn their forces from South Ossetia. Frankly, the remoteness of the area made it hard to tell, and the information that we were receiving was mixed. We continued to pressure the Georgians to stop any military activities, hoping to remove any pretext for Moscow’s continued assault.

Then, that afternoon, Sergei Lavrov called me for the second time during the crisis. The first call had been largely a stream of invectives against the leadership in Tbilisi. But this time he was very calm. “We have three demands,” he said.

“What are they?” I asked.

“The first two are that the Georgians sign the no-use-of-force pledge and that their troops return to barracks,” he told me.

“Done,” I answered.

Saakashvili would have to swallow hard, but I was sure we could insist that he accept the Russian terms. But then Sergei said, “The other demand is just between us. Misha Saakashvili has to go.” I couldn’t believe my ears and I reacted out of instinct, not analysis.

“Sergei, the secretary of state of the United States does not have a conversation with the Russian foreign minister about overthrowing a democratically elected president,” I said. “The third condition has just become public because I’m going to call everyone I can and tell them that Russia is demanding the overthrow of the Georgian president.”

“I said it was between us,” he repeated.

“No, it’s not between us. Everyone is going to know.” The conversation ended. I called Steve Hadley to tell him about the Russian demand. Then I called the British, the French, and several others. That afternoon the UN Security Council was meeting. I asked our representative to inform the Council as well. Lavrov was furious, saying that he’d never had a colleague divulge the contents of a diplomatic conversation. I felt I had no choice. If the Georgians wanted to punish Saakashvili for the war, they would have a chance to do it through their own constitutional processes. But the Russians had no right to insist on his removal. The whole thing had an air of the Soviet period, when Moscow had controlled the fate of leaders throughout Eastern Europe. I was certainly not going to be party to a return to those days.

The next morning I gave up on any notion of a vacation and returned to Washington. The President was back from Beijing, and Steve was able to gather the NSC for a meeting. The session was a bit unruly, with a fair amount of chest beating about the Russians. At one point Steve Hadley intervened, something he rarely did. There was all kind of loose talk about what threats the United States might make. “I want to ask a question,” he said in his low-key way. “Are we prepared to go to war with Russia over Georgia?” That quieted the room, and we settled into a more productive conversation of what we could do.

Our sources of information were not very good, often filtered through the panicked Georgian political and military officials. Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had established a link with the Russian chief of staff, largely to prevent any miscalculation between our forces. It was also a very useful channel to take the pulse of the Russians. French President Sarkozy had succeeded in negotiating a ceasefire, but the Russian forces seemed to be ignoring it. The confusion was exacerbated by the fact that Medvedev kept insisting that his forces had withdrawn when they hadn’t. The new Russian president didn’t seem to be on top of the situation. That was a problem too.

As we sat in the Situation Room, dark reports were coming from the Georgians that the Russian army was headed for Tbilisi, having forced the Georgian army out of Gori, a small town only forty miles west of the capital. Saakashvili kept calling the White House to say that his government was about to be overthrown. After the second desperate call, we decided that our friends needed visible help. We sent humanitarian supplies by military transport—a visible statement of support that might at least back Moscow off. And we decided that I’d go to Georgia.

Since the French were now leading the diplomacy, the President called Sarkozy and offered to send me to Paris too. The French president was in the south of the country and did not want to go back to the capital. So, on August 14, we met on the veranda of the magnificent presidential vacation home, Le Fort de Brégançon, in Bormes-les-Mimosas on the Mediterranean.

I asked Sarkozy how I could help. He explained that he needed the Georgians to sign the document that he’d negotiated, but that Saakashvili was hesitant. That was surprising since the Georgian had told President Bush that he just wanted the war stopped. Then I looked at the document and immediately saw the problem. The French had negotiated a “15 km security exclusion zone,” in which Russian troops would be permitted to stay for an unspecified period of time. Georgia isn’t very big, and the zone seemed to permit the invaders to occupy key roads in the country as well as the town of Gori, located only about sixty-four kilometers from Tbilisi.

I asked whether anyone had looked at a map to see what the zone covered. Much to the astonishment of our delegation, they hadn’t. Jean-David Levitte, who was Sarkozy’s advisor on foreign policy and a terrific diplomat, protested that the agreement could not possibly have that effect. “I will call our ambassador in Tbilisi and ask him about the geographic limitations,” he said. The chagrined Levitte came back to say that the consequences of the exclusion zone were exactly as we’d feared.

Now the question was how to save French diplomacy from its own mistake and end the war. We agreed that Sarkozy would write a letter to both Saakashvili and Medvedev that was specific this time about what the exclusion zone meant and how long the Russian forces could stay. I’d take that letter to the Georgians and get their agreement. We took advantage of Chancellor Merkel’s meeting in Sochi with the Russian president to secure Moscow’s final consent.

When I arrived in Tbilisi, it was easy to see the stress on the faces of the Georgian leaders. They looked so young—indeed, the oldest was about forty—and they were really tired, having failed to sleep for several days. We met in Saakashvili’s office, the television blaring in the background. When I handed him the letter, he asked if they could have a moment to look it over. “Take as much time as you want,” I said. There was an audible sigh of relief.

“The French just gave us the paper and said sign it,” Eka Tkeshelashvili, the foreign minister, said. Though I doubted that it had been exactly like that, I was determined to take some of the pressure off of them.

“We’ll work through it together, but get your lawyers to look it over carefully,” I said.

Finally we had an agreement. I asked Dan Fried to call Jean-David Levitte to see how it was going in Moscow. The two went back and forth on the phone as I was talking with Saakashvili and his senior advisors. After intense work on both sides, the agreement was signed, though it would be several more days before their forces complied with the terms and Russian forces never completely withdrew to their pre-conflict positions. And even then, two weeks after we announced the agreement, Moscow would declare Abkhazia and South Ossetia independent, further exacerbating the hostility between Georgia and Russia.

Saakashvili and I walked outside to meet the press. It was unbearably hot in Tbilisi, and I was anticipating a short encounter. I was also worried about the capricious, emotional, and exhausted Georgian president and what he might say. “Mr. President, just thank the Europeans and the Americans for standing with you. Say something encouraging to your people about ending the war. Leave any comment about the Russians to me,” I said.

The press conference began smoothly, but as he kept speaking, I could see that the Georgian’s blood pressure was starting to rise. With halting speech he continued, as if trying to decide what to say next. Saakashvili speaks wonderful English, so I knew that wasn’t the problem. All of a sudden his language became aggressive. He started calling the Russians barbarians and claimed their tanks were “on a roll” and would not stop. Okay, I thought, I expected some tough words to the Russians. We’re still all right. Then he started in on the Europeans, referencing Munich and appeasement. Oh no! What is he doing?

After he finished his twenty-minute tirade I tried to repair the damage by explaining the French participation in the ceasefire and exhorting the Russians to end the conflict. Time to get out of here, I decided. The press conference ended. I was so mad at Saakashvili that I couldn’t even speak. I shook his hand and got into the car with Eka, the foreign minister, for the short ride to a hospital to visit victims of the war. “He’s blown it,” I told her. Eka arranged for us to give a last-minute press statement at the airport, where we both thanked the Europeans before I left.

We held a NATO foreign ministers meeting in Brussels a few days after the agreement was signed. I found the allies surprisingly charitable toward Saakashvili, but a few did say that he had demonstrated why MAP for Georgia was not a good idea. I tried to keep the focus on the Russian transgressions, and indeed the NATO-Russia Council was suspended indefinitely for their incursion into Georgia. The Alliance issued a declaration of its support for Georgia and called on Russia to remove its troops from the area. Most important, NATO reiterated its intention to “support the territorial integrity, independence and sovereignty of Georgia and to support its democratically elected government and to deny Russia the strategic objective of undermining that democracy.” The next day, I went to Poland to sign a missile defense agreement. I didn’t intend to send a message to Russia; the time had simply come. But it was, of course, taken that way. Partially that was due to the Poles’ perception of the situation, not ours. The Russo-Georgian conflict had a huge effect on Poland—the Polish public was alarmed and worried about Russian aggression as a result of what had happened to Georgia. So while we went to Poland to sign the missile defense agreement regardless of the conflict, the Polish public shifted public perception of the intention of the agreement to defense against Russian aggression.

Moscow paid a price for its invasion of Georgia, largely because the Kremlin overreached. There was a lot of anger at Saakashvili, whom many Europeans accused of provoking the crisis. But Lavrov’s insistence that the Georgian president must be removed was a bridge too far. Moscow could still invade a small neighbor and defeat its army as in the old days. But it could no longer march to the capital and overthrow the government. And the integration of Russia’s economy into the international system turned out to be a constraint as well. The Russian stock market appeared to have been punished viciously for the instability the Kremlin had caused, necessitating the suspension of trading on the exchange for two days.

At the UNGA a month later, Sergei Lavrov and I met for the first time since the war. “Sergei,” I told him in private, “you did what I could never have done. You made Misha Saakashvili the darling of the international community. Now the Georgians have more reconstruction money than they can spend [$1 billion], and your troops are stuck in South Ossetia with the resounding diplomatic support of Hamas and Nicaragua.” The press was all over us, wondering if our relationship had survived the events in Georgia. At our meeting we agreed to pass a Security Council resolution on Iran simply reaffirming past resolutions. The reason was to send a signal to Iran that the Georgian war had not caused us to abandon our joint efforts toward Tehran. It was never quite the same, but we managed to work together for the rest of our term. Nonetheless, I’m sure Lavrov looked forward to the arrival of another team in Washington.

It was a rather bitter end to what had been a hopeful start for U.S.-Russia relations at that first meeting in Slovenia. I gave a speech at the German Marshall Fund in Washington that September to put it all in perspective. Essentially I reminded the world of all we’d done to reach out to Moscow and some of our cooperative efforts. But the problem, I told my audience, lay in Russia’s inability to come to terms with the post–Cold War order. The relationship hadn’t fallen apart around Iran, North Korea, or arms control. We had achieved good cooperation in the Middle East and excellent collaboration in the fight against terrorism and nuclear proliferation. The problem had to do with the Russian periphery and former sphere of influence. Moscow believed that it still had special privileges on the territory of the former Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. We believed that the newly independent states had the right to choose their friends and their alliances. That had turned out to be an irreconcilable difference.