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This reads well:

Imagine what modern Europe would look like now if Poland had the political status of Georgia, lying in some sort of political-moral twilight zone with former Soviet interests linked to the KGB having a far freer time to penetrate into that society and play games with Polish assets.

As does this:

Foreign Secretary David Miliband spells out the UK position on Georgia:

The Georgian crisis is about more than vital issues of humanitarian need and rule of law over rule of force. It raises a fundamental issue of whether, and if so how, Russia can play a full and legitimate part in a rules-based international political system, exercising its rights but respecting those of others...

... Russian mind games on withdrawal do them no credit...

... International law must be obeyed. This goes to the heart of the question of how Russia comes to terms with its past, and how it sees its future; above all, whether it recognises that the old frontiers of the Soviet Union are now history, and whether Russia sees its future as part of a rules-based international system.

That sort of analysis rests on certain ... psychological assumptions.

One of them is that the reply will not be something like this:

The only sensible way to live in this world is without rules.

Do we really look like a country with a plan? We don't have a plan.

The EU has plans, the World Bank has plans. You know what we are, West? We're a dog chasing cars. We wouldn't know what to do if we caught one. 

We just do things. We're a wrench in the gears. We hate plans. Yours, theirs, everyone's.

Schemers trying to control their worlds. We are not a schemer. We show schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are.

So when I say that what happened to Georgia, your girlfriend, wasn't personal, you know I'm telling the truth.

You guys in the West were schemers. You had plans. Look where it got you.

I just did what I do best. I took your Kosovo plan and turned it on itself. Look what I have done to this small country with a few tanks and a couple of bullets.

Nobody panics when the expected people get killed. Nobody panics when things go according to plan, even if the plans are horrifying. If I tell the Western media that tomorrow a gangbanger in Nagorno-Karabakh will get shot or a truckload of soldiers in Chechnya will get blown up, nobody panics.

But when I say one little country will get a small invasion, everyone loses their minds!

Introduce a little anarchy, you upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. We are an agent of chaos.

And you know the thing about chaos, West? It's fair.

Hmm. Doesn't this sound ... familiar?

More on Russia, always a rich seam for foreign policy First Principles.

Thus Max Hastings gives us a striking Russia metaphor:

The Russians yearn for respect, in the same fashion as any inner-city street kid with a knife. They will become willing to play with the west by western rules only if or when they no longer perceive those rules as disadvantaging themselves. Today they cannot compete on the EU's terms, still less those of the US, so they make up their own.

It is unnecessary for the west silently to acquiesce in the Russians' excesses, but it must tread cautiously in the face of their sensitivities.

Maybe the fact that we in the UK tread cautiously in the face of the sensitivities of street kids with knives accounts for this?

More from Max:

America must stop pretending that democracy is, of itself, the answer to all the world's ills ... US policy towards Moscow for almost two decades has been based upon the assumption that since the Russians were losers, their wishes could be ignored or defied on every front. No useful business could result from such a posture.

Blimey.

Democracy may not deal with the world's ills but it makes a good step in that direction. Indeed, the problem in Georgia is that the Russian leadership want to send a profound anti-democratic signal that Might is Right - that what Russia wants or needs is the uber-value in that part of the world. See this latest outburst from the reportedly mild-mannered President Medvedev.

Plus the USA in fact has spent large sums of money in and with Russia on all sorts of common projects, aimed at building a new sense of partnership. The problem is not that the Americans treat the Russians as losers. It is that the Russians behave like losers, unable to make do with their sprawling eleven time zones of territory and hankering after regaining former imperial lands elsewhere.

One recurring theme in Russian and some Western analysis is the deterministic but weird idea that Russia has to behave differently (ie badly) because it is 'surrounded by enemies'.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin once said that the fall of the Soviet Union was a geopolitical disaster. This didn't mean that he wanted to retain the Soviet state; rather, it meant that the disintegration of the Soviet Union had created a situation in which Russian national security was threatened by Western interests.

As an example, consider that during the Cold War, St. Petersburg was about 1,200 miles away from a NATO country. Today it is about 60 miles away from Estonia, a NATO member. The disintegration of the Soviet Union had left Russia surrounded by a group of countries hostile to Russian interests in various degrees and heavily influenced by the United States, Europe and, in some cases, China.

If a country occupies such a vast land mass as Russia does, it necessarily has plenty of neighbours and all sorts of complex questions to deal with. The Russian problem is that it tends to see anything it does not like as 'hostile'. And that attitude extends even to the Bambi-ish spread of EU values and processes into eg Ukraine.

Because, of course, the point is not that 'Russia' has a problem with that. Rather the Russian post-KGB elite have the problem, since the spread of Western democratic values brings with it new transparency and reliance on open rules rather than shadowy power-plays. And that threatens both their biznes interests and their world-view.

Above all, the Western democracy which is sneered at so much in the West brings with it a sense that political behaviour has (and depends on) Limits - limits of law, of convention, of personal self-restraint..

Here is the profound cultural/philosophical difference between Russia and the West.

'The West' sees Limits as a source of strength. 'Russia' sees Limits as a form of weakness.

Max does not seem to get this:

... the west (sic) will find it easier to coexist with this tormented, intransigent, melancholy and oil-rich neighbour when Russia feels comfortable with itself, not when its nose is rubbed in its long history of failure.

This has to be mainly wrong. No serious community policy can be based round the idea that we all wait for the inner city street kid with knife to 'feel comfortable with himself', if his idea of being comfortable is to slash away at smaller kids who disagree with him.

If we are not brave enough to take away his knife and haul him off to therapy, we at least need to limit his room for slashing, and do a lot more to help those he threatens to defend themselves? 

A lively piece of US-style political analysis:

Sure, Hillary’s fat and waddly and screechy and gives pantsuits a bad name. Sure, she’s the kind of gal my dad’s generation knew back in college in the Sixties, the one who wore granny dresses and never shaved her legs and slept with the poetry professor and had a “War is Harmful to Children and Other Living Things” poster on her dorm room wall and gave the Black Power salute to the other white kids and worshipped Saul Alinsky and Herbert Marcuse and always argued in class that communism had never really been given a proper try, so why not here and why not now?

But that generation was pretty tough. O.K., they lost Vietnam to a bunch of guys in pajamas but they took to the streets in Hillary’s hometown of Chicago and bloodied the pigs pretty good. They blew up buildings — Bambi’s mentor, Bill Ayers, comes to mind — and even killed some people. Charlie Manson gave the whole movement a bad name and the Rolling Stones didn’t help when that black guy got murdered at Altamont, but you see what I’m driving at: Hillary’s minions know how to party.

As if the EU's ambiguous response to the Georgia crisis was not depressing enough, life is getting tougher on the economic side too in Europe:

The eurozone as a whole shrank by 0.2pc, the first contraction since the launch of the single currency a decade ago. Germany led the slide with a fall of 0.5pc. France and Italy fell 0.3pc. The delayed effects of the strong euro, tight credit, and slowing exports have now kicked in with a vengeance.

Problems for my own British-based budget as we sit in muggy Orlando:

The pound could soon dive to barely more than a dollar and a half while gold prices plunge to $650, experts predicted yesterday amid fresh evidence that the commodity boom is ending and the dollar's resurgence is under way.

But whereas the UK can hope to use its currency as a set of buffers, the Eurozone faces much more searching internal strains:

... the euro is nothing like the dollar. It has no European government, tax, or social security system to back it up. Each member country is sovereign, each fiercely proud, answering to its own ancient rythms.

It lacks the mechanism of "fiscal transfers" to switch money to depressed regions. The Babel of languages keeps workers pinned down in their own country. The escape valve of labour mobility is half-blocked. We are about to find out whether EMU really has the levels of political solidarity of a nation, the kind that holds America's currency union together through storms.

My guess is that political protest will mark the next phase of this drama. Almost half a million people have lost their jobs in Spain alone over the last year. At some point, the feeling of national impotence in the face of monetary rule from Frankfurt will erupt into popular fury. The ECB will swallow its pride and opt for a weak euro policy, or face its own destruction.

Gulp. 

Michael Binyon deploys chess metaphors to describe Russia' s military push into Georgia:

Vladimir Putin lost several pawns on the chessboard - Kosovo, Iraq, Nato membership for the Baltic states, US renunciation of the ABM treaty, US missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic. But he waited.

The trap was set in Georgia. When President Saakashvili blundered into South Ossetia, sending in an army to shell, kill and maim on a vicious scale (against US advice and his promised word), Russia was waiting ...

... Moscow can also counter Georgian PR, the last weapon left to Tbilisi. Human rights? Look at what Georgia has done in South Ossetia (and also in Abkhazia). National sovereignty? Look at the detachment of Kosovo from Serbia. False pretexts? Look at Ronald Reagan's invasion of Grenada to “rescue” US medical students. Western outrage? Look at the confused cacophony.

There are lessons everywhere. To the former Soviet republics - remember your geography. To Nato - do you still want to incorporate Caucasian vendettas into your alliance? To Tbilisi - do you want to keep a President who brought this on you? To Washington - does Russia's voice still count for nothing? Like it or not, it counts for a lot.

Let's dwell on that chess metaphor a while.

Aron Nimzowitsch was a great chess Grandmaster. One of his famous reputed chess aphorisms is "the threat is stronger than the execution".

The sense is that one can wait for some time to play a strong chess move, letting the threat that it might happen create new advantages. However, once the move is played the threat is gone and the move stands on its own merits. And, of course, the move is 'committal' - once played it can not be taken back.

In this case the Russians have been watching the Kosovo precedent and waiting to move.

One possible move was to stand firm on rejecting Kosovo independence. Another was to say that if Kosovo gets what it wants, why should not some others do the same?

The Georgian episode opens the way for Moscow to play the second move, as looks to be happening: "Georgia's territorial integrity is a dead issue".

However, Russia is a UN Security Council Permanent Member so such moves have to be wrapped in some sort of credible international law ribbon.

By parking on unbending opposition to the Kosovo precedent, Russia claimed to rule out ad hoc exceptions to a key precept of international practice in Europe in recent decades, namely that borders can not be changed without general consent.

What exactly is Russia now saying?

That if a country behaves badly enough towards minority territories, those territories can break away?

That any territory can break away if it has a strong supportive neighbour?

Or is there a new realpolitik doctrine emerging, that a new twilight zone category of small pseudo-states might emerge whose 'independence' is recognised by a core of supporters but not the international community as a whole? See also Transdnistria.

These questions have mind-boggling political and diplomatic ramifications rippling on down the decades to come. What looks like a strong move now may (or may not) come to look like a mistake.

For now Russia has all sorts of operational options in Georgia, using the presence of Russian official and unofficial forces on the ground to play for time and create (as we chess-players say) unfathomable complications.

For a famous example of such complications, see Game 14 of the World Championship match between Garry Kasparov and Vishy Anand. At the height of the battle (and the Championship struggle as a whole) with both players short of time, Kasparov on move 27 made a dramatic speculative knight sacrifice throwing the position wide open. He outplayed his opponent in the ensuing dog-fight.

Putin maybe has in mind a famous American example:

I don’t believe in psychology. I believe in good moves.

The commentaries on Georgia pour out.

This one by John Bolton is sharp and good. Try this:

The European Union took the lead in diplomacy, with results approaching Neville Chamberlain’s moment in the spotlight at Munich: a ceasefire that failed to mention Georgia’s territorial integrity, and that all but gave Russia permission to continue its military operations as a “peacekeeping” force anywhere in Georgia. More troubling, over the long term, was that the EU saw its task as being mediator – its favourite role in the world – between Georgia and Russia, rather than an advocate for the victim of aggression.

And this:

The West, collectively, failed in this crisis. Georgia wasted its dime making that famous 3am telephone call to the White House, the one Hillary Clinton referred to in a campaign ad questioning Barack Obama’s fitness for the Presidency.

The point being:

 ... we are facing the much larger issue of how Russia plans to behave in international affairs for decades to come. Whether Mikhail Saakashvili “provoked” the Russians on August 8, or September 8, or whenever, this rape was well-planned and clearly coming, given Georgia’s manifest unwillingness to be “Finlandized” – the Cold War term for effectively losing your foreign-policy independence.

Hence:

 ... we should have a foreign-minister-level meeting of Nato to reverse the spring capitulation at Bucharest, and to decide that Georgia and Ukraine will be Nato’s next members. By drawing the line clearly, we are not provoking Russia, but doing just the opposite: letting them know that aggressive behaviour will result in costs that they will not want to bear, thus stabilising a critical seam between Russia and the West.

 ... Russia did not invade Georgia with diplomats or roubles, but with tanks. This is a security threat, and the proper forum for discussing security threats on the border of a Nato member – yes, Europe, this means Turkey – is Nato.

Saying this may cause angst in Europe’s capitals, but now is the time to find out if Nato can withstand a potential renewed confrontation with Moscow, or whether Europe will cause Nato to wilt. Far better to discover this sooner rather than later, when the stakes may be considerably higher.

What is interesting about Issues is that they do not go away even when we do not want to look at them.

'Europe' (in this case the EU) finds some things Just Too Difficult.

One example. Which countries are in Europe? This simple question is highly unsimple and (worse) uncomfortable, since to answer it clearly opens the prospect of EU membership to those countries who qualify.

Those EU members who (a) do not want much further enlargement and (b) see the EU above all as some sort of balance to the USA do not want to think about bringing any more of the former Soviet republics into the European fold. To do so opens questions about Russia's role which (they think) are best left unopened.

Alas for them the Russian intervention in Georgia does open that question.

So, EU. Are we going to stand nervously inside our fence listening to the cries for help of people looking remarkably like Europeans hammering at the gate as they get savaged by bears?

Back in the West, there is a health and safety policy I have not seen before here at Aquatica, the new water-park next to SeaWorld in Orlando.

As one waits in line for a good splashy ride, a tape-recording in a prissy male Australian voice tells us all that:

Your security is our number one concern. Therefore, lifeguards may not make eye-contact when speaking to you. Nothing personal, mates. No worries!

Huh?

Does eye-contact with lifeguards make some people feel insecure? Or is it that the lifeguards' beady eyes must be roving ceaselessly to spot potential trouble and so they may not have time to alight on you, so please do not feel offended? Something else?

I have sent a message to Customer Relations to ask. Always nice to know what is going on.

Update: almost instantaneous and friendly replies from Aquatica saying that indeed the point is that the lifeguards need to be looking everywhere so may not have eyes for you when talking. I have pointed out that that is not clear from the way the warning is phrased. Over to senior management.

Here is Nobel Peace Prize Winner Mikhail Gorbachev piously enjoining people in the Caucasus to live together nicely:

The roots of this tragedy lie in the decision of Georgia's separatist leaders in 1991 to abolish South Ossetian autonomy. Each time successive Georgian leaders tried to impose their will by force - both in South Ossetia and in Abkhazia, where the issues of autonomy are similar - it only made the situation worse...

What happened on the night of August 7 is beyond comprehension. The Georgian military attacked the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali with multiple rocket launchers designed to devastate large areas. Russia had to respond. To accuse it of aggression against "small, defenceless Georgia" is not just hypocritical but shows a lack of humanity...

... Georgian armed forces were trained by hundreds of US instructors, and its sophisticated military equipment was bought in a number of countries. This, coupled with the promise of Nato membership, emboldened Georgian leaders.

... Small nations of the Caucasus do have a history of living together. It has been demonstrated that a lasting peace is possible, that tolerance and cooperation can create conditions for normal life and development...

The international community's long-term aim could be to create a sub-regional system of security and cooperation that would make any provocation, and the very possibility of crises such as this one, impossible...

What a superb performance. These Russian communists sure have staying-power.

A couple of the more obvious points:

1)     The roots of this problem are not to be found in 1991, but rather in the preceding decades of Soviet brutalisation of Georgia which continued while said Gorbachev was still in power. Eg this example of the Gorbachev communists tackling the National Question in Georgia in 1989:

At the dawn, the Soviet special task forces attacked the demonstration with sharpened spades and poisonous gases, killing twenty-two demonstrators, mostly women and teens. Some two thousands were left sick for weeks and months, in hospitals and at home, from the toxic gases. The brutality of the Soviet forces against the peaceful demonstrators was recorded on the tape and shocked entire Soviet Union. A number of cases of ethnic hatred by the Soviet soldiers was attested. As witnesses recalled, some soldiers, while battering victims with trenching spades, were yelling "This is what you get for Stalin."

2)     Gorbachev insinuates that Georgia is to blame for the current violence, egged on by the USA. No mention of the dismal Russian record in South Ossetia over the past decade or so.

3)     Most impressively, Gorbachev calls for a "sub-regional system of security and cooperation". That is Communist for "just give us back the Soviet empire and leave us Russians alone and all will be well". The whole problem is that parts of the former Soviet Union and indeed parts of Russia itself do not want to be in Russia's 'sub-regional security system'. Why should they be, when Russia is giving them only insecurity and lumpen corruption?

Gorbachev deservedly crashed from power because he believed in replacing discredited Soviet Imperialism with a fizzy and brightly packaged new product, Soviet Imperialism Lite.

Seems he is still selling it. And that the Guardian is still buying it.

Welcome Instapundit readers.

While we Crawfs have been travelling the Georgia story has moved on, to the point where French President Sarkozy has been helping broker some sort of truce and possible peace plan.

No end of commentaries too, of course, many dwelling on what this episode tells us all about Russia's apparently resurgent power and equivalent 'Western weakness.

Here is the mordant Spengler saying that Putin should be the President of the USA, not Russia.

Or try the hopeless divisions in the EU, as described by the Guardian.

This rapier-like analysis by Victor Davis Hanson nails most of the right wider points:

We talk endlessly about “soft” and “hard” power as if humanitarian jawboning, energized by economic incentives or sanctions, is the antithesis to mindless military power. In truth, there is soft power, hard power, and power-power — the latter being the enormous advantages held by energy rich, oil-exporting states. Take away oil and Saudi Arabia would be the world’s rogue state, with its medieval practice of gender apartheid. Take away oil and Ahmadinejad is analogous to a run-of-the-mill central African thug. Take away oil, and Chavez is one of Ronald Reagan’s proverbial tinhorn dictators.

... When one factors in Russian oil and gas reserves, a pipeline through Georgia, the oil dependency of potential critics of Putin, and the cash garnered by oil exports, then we understand once again that power-power is beginning to trump both its hard and soft alternatives.

When the Soviet Union collapsed a new implicit Deal emerged. It had various elements, some more obvious and robust than others:

• the 'West' would not reorganise its economic and security arrangements developed during the Cold War (primarily EU and NATO) to accommodate a totally new situation.
• Russia was invited to cooperate with the 'West' but effectively from an objectively weak position, and therefore on Western terms albeit with significant Russian involvement (see the pretty good Contact Group period in former Yugoslavia)
• but Russia insisted on and somehow retained the idea that its 'near abroad' (ie the former Soviet Union republics) were more Russia's then the West's.
• The three tiny Baltic republics dashed from the Russian camp and formally joined the Western camp, but while the new 'Commonwealth of Independent States' led by Russia was an institutional flop it achieved its main purpose in Moscow's eyes, ie keeping the other new states involved in a Russian psychological space.
• For some years this seemed like a good enough outcome for the West. Involvement in these deeply Sovietised territories was hard work. Russia was arguably the most democratic state in the CIS and looked to be exporting modest pluralism or at least modernisation to them.
• Latterly we have seen two rival tendencies. The CIS states moving to some sort of open market relationships beyond former Soviet borders and therefore opening up to Western processes (and wealth); in short, having different and rather attractive new options. And Russia gaining a windfall of wealth from soaring energy prices while itself adapting to a strategic transformation.
• This gives Moscow impressive new ways to exert influence across the CIS - buying key assets, 'persuading' CIS leaders that cooperation is in their best interests and so on. Why strap these countries down in close and boring neo-imperial ties with Moscow when it is so much easier to buy or control indirectly the best bits?
• That goes only so far. Moscow has to be especially tough with the (few) parts of the CIS which are still making the greatest formal efforts to join the Western camp. Hence intense Russian efforts in Ukraine while keeping CIS frozen conflicts well chilled, to create local imbalance/uncertainty which Moscow can nudge as and when necessary.
• And, now, Moscow pouncing on Georgian miscalculation to up the ante by overt military intervention.
• This Georgia crisis therefore represents the formal end of the original West/Russia Deal, which was already dead in the water as evidenced in part over Balkan policy in general and Kosovo in particular.
• Russia instead is proclaiming a New Arrangement: that if there are to be Westernising processes in the CIS area they will take place on Russia's terms, and that Russia is ready to use force to defend its self-proclaimed interests.
• Russia could press on and topple the Georgian leadership, and maybe still will.
• But the Russian Mind also will relish the idea of leaving Saakashvili twisting forlornly in the wind, humilated both by having failed to recapture South Ossetia and by having been left standing alone as the USA and all Georgia's European friends watched aghast but did significant nothing to help.
• And the likely Russian tighter grip on South Ossetia also creates a handy pseudo-precedent for Serbia gripping the Serb-controlled territories in northern Kosovo.

Will the West sign up to Russia's New Arrangement for the CIS space? If so, what? And if not, what?

More generally, are we moving to a new, darker and unpredictable international situation?

In which Rules will matter less, Willingness to Prevail a lot more?

Does the objective correlation of forces favour those leaders who in a pre-modern way have a clear sense of what they want - and are ready to take risks to achieve it? Leaders who will think they have the upper hand against other leaders who rely on little more than post-modern flannel and uneasy hopes?