World War III: Which is it going to be?

The events in Georgia over the last week seem to have triggered a major paradigm shift among Republican politicians and conservative pundits. If you listen to John McCain's statements about the conflict or read Charles Krauthammer's op-eds, you get the distinct impression that our chief foreign policy objective should be checking Russia's territorial ambitions and limiting its over all sphere of influence.

Commenting on this new Russo-centric foreign policy, Josh Marshall asks:

[W]hat happened to the long twilight struggle against radical Islam? So yesterday, I guess. Or can we do both simultaneously, even though the Russians are themselves up against hostile Islamic groups on their southern periphery?

Good question. For the last seven years, Republican politicians like John McCain and conservative pundits like Charles Krauthammer have been reminding us at every opportunity that we are engaged in an epic, generation-long struggle with "Islamofascism." We've been told that this is, far and away, the chief threat to U.S. interests and that combating the terrorist threat should be the primary focus of U.S. foreign policy.

But now, faster than you can say "domino theory," we seem to be back in a Cold War stance, and I haven't heard so much as a mention of the "War on Terror" all week. So, to repeat Josh's question: can we do both simultaneously?

The short answer seems to be "no," at least not effectively. In the 2004 presidential debate, both John Kerry and George Bush were asked what the biggest threat to the U.S. was. Both immediately answered "loose nukes." They explained that their worst fear was that a nuclear weapon would find its way into the hands of a terrorist organization like al Qaeda.

If that is indeed the biggest threat we face--and that certainly seems like a reasonable proposition--than it's probably worth considering how our policy towards Russia affects our ability to contain that threat. After all, virtually all of the "loose nukes" we're concerned about are in Russia's possession and securing them requires their cooperation. Not only that, but we desperately need Russia's assistance in disrupting terrorist networks and helping stem nuclear proliferation (remember Iran?).

It's not hard to see that pursuing a policy of incorporating every former Soviet republic into NATO--including those that have disputed borders with Russia and ethnically Russian minority populations--is a somewhat provocative thing to do. That doesn't mean it's necessarily the wrong thing to do, but it's certainly a policy that has obvious trade offs, one of them being that it threatens our ability to secure Russian cooperation in the fight against terrorism.

Hawks like John McCain really need to be pressed on this point. Which World War III are we really fighting here? What are our strategic priorities? Simply adopting a knee-jerk bellicose response to everything is not a rationale foreign policy. We need to decide which threats are really the most pressing and act accordingly.