Seumas Milne makes excellent points about the vital need for counterbalance and rules in international relations (Georgia is the graveyard of America's unipolar world, August 28) but unfortunately loses his own sense of balance in doing so. He omits or forgets that only four years ago Putin's Russia was still engaged in a brutal, far more deadly war against its own secessionists in Chechnya. To compound the hypocrisy, it employed military overflights and border incidents to threaten its southern neighbour with dire consequences if it meddled in Russian internal affairs. Double standards, anyone?
So if Moscow accepted his point about counterbalance then it would pull back its own troops to allow a truly impartial international peacekeeping force for South Ossetia, drawn from countries in the OSCE or beyond, rather than deploy an expeditionary force to demonstrate Russian regional hegemony. And yes, Milne is also right that all states behave better faced with a rules-based system and counterbalancing interests, even global superpowers (though when exactly did the US demand a 20km buffer zone around Kosovo or distribute US passports in Grozny?). Well, his wish is half-granted: when Bush is finally history, at least some hope exists that an Obama administration, while still defending US interests, could act differently in a new rules-based, multipolar world.
But then Milne draws the wrong conclusion: the "real gripe" surely is not with "economic rivalry", which is always with us. It's the cynical behaviour of the Medvedev-Putin twins in this new multipolar world and the example it is setting for other regional powers - that international relations is a game where the rules can be torn up when the balance looks to be in your favour.
Keith Jinks
Korneuburg, Austria
