U.S. Out of Georgia

Editor,

The problem with Georgia is that Russia has abundant oil and gas resources within its borders while the U.S., which has effectively none, has spent billions building oil pipelines that traverse Georgia, half a world away, and is securing those facilities with an arms buildup on Russia's Caucasian flank that poses by any definition an unacceptable threat to Russia.

Anti-Russia propaganda in the U.S. is meant to obfuscate this simple fact: the U.S. is not entitled to threaten any country, especially a major power this way.

The correct solution to the U.S.'s lack of adequate domestic fossil fuels is to apply its capital and ingenuity to developing technological alternatives. Dabbling in failed 19th Century geostrategic power politics is dangerous in the first place and inherently doomed to fail as a consequence of geography.

re: "Stuck in Georgia" (8/26/2008)