(CNSNews.com) – The Obama administration wants Georgia to exercise “strategic patience” in the face of Russia’s regional policies, a senior State Department official said Monday. But that official insisted the concept was not a new doctrine and should not be read as counseling acquiescence or “doing nothing.”
Philip Gordon, assistant secretary in the department’s Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, was briefing journalists in New York on a meeting between Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili. Both are in the city for U.N. General Assembly meetings.
Russia briefly invaded Georgia last summer in support of pro-Moscow separatists whom Saakashvili was trying to rein in. Moscow now deploys armed forces in the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia and recognizes them as independent states.
Gordon said Clinton had made clear to Saakashvili “our view that there’s not a short-term fix to the problems of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, as much as we want Russian troops to leave those territories as soon as possible.”
Instead, she had told the Georgian leader that “the best way forward would be one of strategic patience” – for Georgia to show itself to be a strong, prosperous, democratic, “attractive place,” he said.
Gordon then faced a stream of questions about what one reporter called “this rather novel concept of strategic patience.”
“It seems to me to be shorthand for doing absolutely nothing, trying to make the Russians happy, just as many people saw the missile defense decision, rightly or wrongly,” the reporter commented, referring to the administration’s shift last week on deploying a shield against long-range Iranian missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic.
“[Clinton] didn’t say the idea is to do nothing,” Gordon replied. “Let’s be absolutely clear about that.”
Gordon was then asked whether “strategic patience” could be regarded essentially as “acquiescence in a reality that is clearly most unpleasant to the Georgians.”
Again, he disputed that interpretation, saying the administration had certainly not acquiesced to the idea that South Ossetia and Abkhazia were independent.
Not only had the U.S. not recognized them as such, but it was also actively working to ensure that other countries do not, he said. Apart from Russia, only its allies Nicaragua and Venezuela have endorsed the two small regions’ purported independent.
Asked whether “strategic patience” was a new Obama administration concept, Gordon said it was not, adding, “by the way, it’s a small ‘s’ and a small ‘p’ … this is not a doctrine or anything.”
Searches of the State Department briefing archives through the course of this year and the Bush administration years do not bring up any previous use of the phrase.
“Strategic patience” is, however, a term used quite widely by political analysts and military experts. It has been employed, for instance, in describing China’s approach to building up its military might in a slow but steady, low-profile way, and Iran’s view that its ideology and morale will, over time, tilt the balance in its favor over its better resourced but less resolute foes.
The term has also been used in the context of how the West could or should respond to policy challenges such as those arising in post-Soviet Russia during the 1990s; in Iraq following the toppling of Saddam Hussein; and more recently those posed by Iran and its suspect nuclear activities and by the security crisis in Afghanistan-Pakistan.
It has been used in recent months by, among others, Britain’s chief of defense staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup (in relation to Afghanistan); former U.S. ambassador in Baghdad Ryan Crocker (Iraq and Afghanistan); retired U.S. Army Gen. Montgomery Meigs (Afghan-Pakistan); former assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt (Afghanistan); and Center for Strategic & International Studies scholar Anthony Cordesman (Iran, Iraq).
In an article in The Nation in July about the turmoil in Iran following the disputed presidential election, contributing editor Robert Dreyfuss expressed concern about what he called “the drumbeat of U.S. and Israeli confrontation with Iran” and said President Obama “needs to develop a strategic patience with Iran.”
And writing in the New Yorker about al-Qaeda’s durability after a bombing in Jakarta the same month, journalist Steve Coll said the U.S. should develop “a posture of strategic patience about terrorism that is durable, vigilant, and proportional to the actual threat.”