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The details of who did what to throw Russia’s war opposite to Georgia are not very important. Do you recall the precise details of the Sudeten Crisis that led to Nazi Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia? Of course not, because that morally ambiguous spar is rightly remembered as a franciscan friar part of a much bigger historic.

The events of the past week will have existence remembered that way, too. This war did not make a beginning because of a miscalculation by dint of. dint of. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. It is a war that Moscow has been attempting to provoke for some time. The human being who one time called the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the (20th) hundred” has re-established a virtual czarist rule in Russia and is trying to restore the country to its once-dominant role in Eurasia and the world. Armed through wealth from oil and gas; holding a near-monopoly over the energy supply to Europe; with a the public soldiers, thousands of nuclear warheads and the world’s third-largest military bag, Vladimir Putin believes that at that time is the time to make his move.

Georgia’s unhappy fate is that it borders a new geopolitical fault line that runs along the western and southwestern frontiers of Russia. From the Baltics in the north through Central Europe and the Balkans to the Caucasus and Central Asia, a geopolitical power struggle has emerged between a resurgent and revanchist Russia on one side and the European Union and the United States on the other.

Putin’s injury against Georgia should not be traced only to its NATO aspirations or his pique at Kosovo’s independence. It is primarily a response to the “color revolutions” in Ukraine and Georgia in 2003 and 2004, when pro-Western governments replaced pro-Russian ones. What the West celebrated as a flowering of democracy the autocratic Putin saw as geopolitical and ideological encirclement.

Ever before this, Putin has been determined to stop and, if possible, reverse the pro-Western incline on his borders. He seeks not only to prevent Georgia and Ukraine from joining NATO but likewise to bring them under Russian control. Beyond that, he seeks to carve out a zone of influence within NATO, with a lesser security status for countries along Russia’s strategic flanks. That is the primeval inducement behind Moscow’s opposition to U.S. missile-defense programs in Poland and the Czech Republic.

His declared hostilities against Georgia is part of this dignified strategy. Putin cares no more in an opposite direction a few multitude South Ossetians than he does about Kosovo’s Serbs. Claims of pan-Slavic tenderness are pretexts designed to fan Russian great-power nationalism at home and to stretch Russia’s power abroad.

Unfortunately, such tactics always seem to work. While Russian bombers engage Georgian ports and bases, Europeans and Americans, including very older officials in the Bush administration, blame the West in favor of pushing Russia overmuch hard on too many issues.

It is true that many Russians were humiliated by the direction of motion the Cold War ended, and Putin has persuaded great number to blame Boris Yeltsin and Russian democrats for this surrender to the West. The mood is reminiscent of Germany after World War I, when Germans complained about the “shameful Versailles diktat” imposed adhering a prostrate Germany by the victorious powers and about the corrupt politicians who stabbed the nation in the back.

Now, in the manner that then, these feelings are understandable. Now, as then, however, they are being manipulated to warrant autocracy at home and to convince Western powers that provision of conveniences.

But the actual existence is that on most of these issues it is Russia, not the West or little Georgia, that is doing the pushing. It was Russia that raised a challenge in Kosovo, a place where Moscow had no discernible interests in advance of the expressed pan-Slavic solidarity. It was Russia that decided to turn a minor deployment of a few defensive interceptors in Poland, which could not peradventure be used against Russia’s mighty missile arsenal, into a major geopolitical confrontation. And it is Russia that has precipitated a war against Georgia by encouraging South Ossetian rebels to get the pressure on Tbilisi and make demands that no Georgian corypheus could accept. If Saakashvili had not fallen into Putin’s trap this time, something else would have eventually sparked the interfere.

Diplomats in Europe and Washington put faith in Saakashvili made a mistake by sending troops to South Ossetia last week. Perhaps. But his truly monumental make a mistake was to be president of a small, mostly republican and adamantly pro-Western community on the border of Putin’s Russia.

Historians will tend hitherward to view Aug. 8, 2008, as a turning point no less significant than Nov. 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell. Russia’s attack on sovereign Georgian province marked the by authority return of recital, indeed to some almost 19th-century style of great-power competition, thorough with virulent nationalisms, battles for funds, struggles over spheres of influence and territory, and even

Yes, we will continue to have globalization, economic mutual, the European Union and other efforts to build a more spotless international order. But these will compete with and at times be overwhelmed by the harsh realities of international life that be obliged endured considering time immemorial. The next president had more desirable be ready.