NATO, Russia and realism

I've been juuuust a bit slow to comment on the Russian-Georgian war.  This was because: After six years as a blogger, it's slowly dawning on me that it's good every once and a while to pause before blogging.  That gosh-darn day "job" has been occupying my time.    But now I see that international relations theory is being wielded, so it's time to step in. Benjamin Friedman has a post in which he argues that events in the Caucasus vindicate realism.  Some highlights:  George Kenann calls NATO expansion a “strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions” here, a position most realists share. Obama calls for NATO expansion to Georgia here, despite the fact that an alliance with Georgia offers little benefit to Americans but is likely to the drag the US into conflict with a nuclear armed state. Obama, if it wasn’t clear already, is no realist. That is a perhaps a result of running for President of a country that wants idealist presidents, but the fact remains. OK, first of all, could realists please spare everyone the lament about how hard their lot is in the United States?  I know realists like to believe that this country is hostile to realism, but it just ain't so.  Second of all, I'm not sure that realist opposition to NATO expansion is vindicated by the Georgia invasion. I presume their argument is that NATO expansion somehow triggered the security dilemma, which led to Russia's current revanchism.  The thing is, I wrote half a book about how Russia treated its near abroad during the nineties, when it was supposedly so weak.  It coerced the living hell out of them (sanctions, supporting irredentists, etc.) back then too -- and this was long before NATO was expanded.  So the idea that Russia wouldn't have done anything in the Caucasus if the West had kept its nose clean strikes me as pretty absurd.  Russia was going to do this as soon as it had the power and saw an opportunity.  If you want to blame this on past United States actions, Iraq matters a lot more than anything else. Indeed, Friedman seems to make this exact point later on:  Commentators of all stripes seem to assume that Russia’s move into Georgia was driven by its increasingly autocratic nature. (This is reminiscent of Kennan’s argument back in the X article that Communism made the Soviet Union prone to aggression, which he later regretted.) It is worth considering whether this is a misperception. A powerful body of political science argues that states’ foreign policy actions are driven mostly by their circumstance and interests, not their regime type or the personality of the leaders. Regime type and personality affect how states interpret their circumstances, but maybe not as much as we tend to think. The United States is not particularly tolerant of seemingly hostile states in its near abroad either, whether they are democracies or not.   UPDATE:  Friedman responds in comments:  I... argue that the war demonstrates the idiocy of expanding NATO to Russia's doorstep, which for the US is all costs, no benefits. That is because it demonstrates that Georgia has showed itself to be the kind of ally you don't want to have - reckless, carrying a territorial and ethnic conflict with a nuclear armed state, and devoid of benefit for us. He's got a point here, but I'm not sure how generalizable the point is.  All of the Baltic states could have met Friedman's definition of a "reckless" state in the nineties.  They all bordered Russia, two of them (Estonia and Latvia) treated their Russian minorities pretty shabbily, and the third (Lithuania) had some fun border disputes too.  NATO membership for those countries, however, has not resulted in more recklessness -- if anything, it (plus EU membership) moderated their behavior.  This might be where institutionalists have a point.  Friedman (and other realists) presume that alliances can encourage small states like Georgia to behave more recklessly.  It is equally possible, however, that joining an institution moderates behavior.  And, it should be noted, institutionalists find their greatest empirical support for this argument in the behavior of Eastern Europe since 1989.  For the record, I think I'm with Hilzoy on this question -- extending NATO membership to the Baltics makes sense, but extending it to Georgia is a country too far.  My point in this post is that I'm very leery of either all-in arguments (neocons) or all-out arguments (realists).  Neither group has really distinguished themselves in this debate.