I think this is one of the best Nelson Reports I've yet read:

SUMMARY: it may be that a cease-fire now being negotiated by France's Sarkozy will provide Moscow, Tbilisi and Washington with face-saving ways out of the mess in Georgia.

Stay tuned.

But certain to remain a work in progress is how the US and Europe move to address the legitimate great power concerns...and behavior...of Russia. Ten years of not doing so fed directly the current crisis.

Remember..."legitimate" does not have to mean "good"...we're talking about power here, not morality. Morgenthau rules, post Soviet collapse, something the Bush Administration had to learn the hard way, and McCain may not yet grasp.

McCain's statements today apparently seek to "beat" Russia, and recreate the simple, happy days of the Cold War. Obama's statements continue to be unemotional. Whether US voters think "tough" is "smart" could be a decisive question this November.

"Perspective" tonight is from the Nixon Center's Demetri Simes, who knows a thing or two about Soviet brutality. We use it not necessarily because he is 100% right about Georgian provocation, but because if HE sees it this way, so does Russia, and it's Russia we have to deal with here.

"Payback" for Kosovo, NATO expansion, missiles in Poland? Why? If you don't work it out now, will it be easier after a disaster in Ukraine? Lithuania?

More after the jump

GEORGIA...it's still not clear whether French President Sarkozy has brokered a cease-fire, or more correctly, a cease-fire which will hold, in the Georgia/Russia conflict.

What will take the rest of the week to find out is whether a real peace deal, and what borders...guaranteed by an international agreement...can be accomplished.

That depends on whether Putin has what he needs...including his calculation of how this week may impede other goals.

Specifically, what Georgia wants is to internationalize the dispute, with international peace keepers. Russia wants to supply the peace keepers, and no foreign troops in the disputed areas...as formalized in the 1992 and 1994 agreements.

PLEASE note...the Russian troops through which Georgia attacked on Friday were in place by international agreement?

At this point, Moscow sees no reason to backtrack...including no Georgian peace keepers, and it will demand a "no use of future force" agreement from Georgia (as noted, it was Georgia which gave the Russians the excuse for this week's lesson in reality. Life is not fair.)

What Russia demands and will likely get boils down to de-facto independence for the two provinces, but not de-jure independence from Georgia, our experts feel.

Is Ukraine "next"? Most of our experts think not. But watch to see if the Crimea and the Russian naval base at Sevastapol find their way into polemical fights between Moscow and Kiev.

Some here are calling for "immediate" NATO membership for Ukraine to "restrain" Russia. Are they ready to fight a nuclear war for the near abroad? Fortunately, this is cheap rhetoric, and academic, really, since France and Germany have more sense, both have "pro-American" leadership, and so will provide adult supervision.

Still, cheap rhetoric coarsens the discussion and makes rational analysis and action even more difficult.

See, unfortunately, McCain's increasingly inflated rhetoric (his full statement today will be parsed in detail) which may shift the "conflict" to the US presidential campaign.

Here's what we opened with last night: the crisis in Georgia puts everyone in a bind, since the "good guys", aka Georgia, brought much of this on themselves, and the "bad guys", aka Russia, have been warning us since Kosovo what the Kremlin's limits are.

What has not been seriously addressed are the limits of US power, especially given Iraq and Afghanistan, and how much those limits influenced (and will continue to influence) the events in Georgia.

A friend from the defense side of the shop sees things this way today:

"Chris, lot's of analysis about Russia, Georgia etc; but what does this say about the U.S. and the limits of U.S. power -- certainly our friends and allies -- not only in Europe -- will be watching both what we say and what we do. Believe CBS news last night ran a clip of W in full democracy flight in Tblisi 'we will stand with you as a democracy" or something like that.

NOTE: 'with you/not behind you.'

I think this shows the limits of values based diplomacy and new age multilateralism. Values are great but in the real world it's interests (Palmerston) and power (Bismarck --Morgenthau) that counts when push comes to shove. Of course we'll broker a ceasefire etc. But the Russians have effectively sent a message to the Balts/Ukranians and Poles, not to mention on NATO expansion.

I also wonder how the progressive thinkers on the left, Council of Democracies, and right, League of Democracies, will explain how such institutions will work when faced with a Georgia-like contingency. Lots of rhetoric, I'm sure, but beyond that -- what?"

As this Loyal Reader notes, the task facing diplomats and politicians alike is how to deal with reality...power reality...in Europe. Russia is a great power in Europe, it is nuclear armed, it is paranoid, touchy, aggressive, and it has legitimate great power interests.

All the "it's 1938 and we just blinked...again" nonsense implies the Red Army is heading back across Poland and into the Fulda Gap, and the more this kind of "analysis" is trumpeted, the more difficult it will be for the US voters to make any kind of rational guess as to who is more competent to lead...there's always the deadly temptation to presume that "tough" is "safer" than sensible.

So come this Fall, an intelligent McCain/Obama debate would be important, to sound out how the US will work to integrate Russia into the strategic fabric of Europe, instead of marginalizing and hedging against it with NATO expansion, missiles in Poland, et al.

Maybe that WILL turn out to be the rational response. But let's work through the issues first, OK?

McCain sounds like he has already decided to return to the Cold War and "win"...again.

His statement on Georgia today needs to be parsed, almost line by line, for built-in assumptions and misstatements of fact which should cause anyone, on either side of this controversy, to think damn seriously about what it means, on many levels including in the voting booth.

Obama's statements continue to be bland, certainly by comparison, but they do seem to reflect a world in which most of us live.

On the possible implications for the Baltic States, and Ukraine, of the Georgia disaster, here's a second-day analytical note from the Russian (Soviet) expert we quoted last night who must remain anonymous, due to professional affiliation:

"I believe clearly that the linkage here is South Ossetia/Abkhazia vs.
Kosovo. I think the Baltic issue is more clearly linked to the missile
defense systems in Poland/Czechoslovakia. If you are a Morgenthau
realist, which I believe Putin clearly is, then you believe strongly in
proportional response which is what the Russian reaction in Georgia, at
least from their point of view, constitutes.

Also, let us not make the Russians ten feet tall again. Their ability to
project power is limited to the Near Abroad, and involves border areas
which they feel they have a right to defend and even roll back in some
instances. But as for taking over sovereign countries, I am not prepared
to say they have any interest in territorial expansion. They would
rather make money by making it clear they are a player economically as
well as militarily.

Finally, it is worth pointing out, again from a Morgenthau realist
predicament, that the reason we are in this predicament is the very
unrealistic occupation of Iraq, which emboldened the Russians about
Georgia because of American overcommitment and made it very clear that
we could do nothing but huff and puff and blow nothing down. The
Europeans are not ready for Georgia or Ukraine in NATO, but perhaps this
will change."

A Loyal Reader on the more strategic planning side of the shop offers these thoughts:

"I have at least a little sympathy for McCain's approach here. As Russians are fond of saying, 'Ne sluchaino.' It was more than a decade in the making, and it was no accident. The Russians have been pushing Georgia around since independence, not the other way around.

Gorbachev's account of the outbreak of war [in this morning's Washington Post] is very difficult to swallow, and further diminishes him. Would that the people of Grozny-Russian citizens themselves, the last time I checked-aroused similar concern.

On one hand, there's no use in insisting that unlimited NATO expansion could never have provoked the Russians to do things they otherwise might not have done, and one could consider Russian revanchism as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.

On the other hand, Russians leaders, like other human beings, do have agency, and their decisions cannot be regarded as mere extensions of our solipsistic selves, directing the entire world with either spiked clubs or olive branches.

If the recognition of Kosovo provoked them, for example, you have to ask what it is they have at stake in Kosovo to begin with. And so on.

The question now is what constitutes a realistic-with-a-small-r and constructive response."

On that, for "Perspective" tonight, we re-print the Nixon Center's Demetri Simes...a refugee from Soviet Russia...very frankly applying some tough-love analysis to Georgia. A world which McCain and his advisors seem to meet at a tangent, at best.

Against or parallel to all of the above, here's McCain today, and you need to read it all. First, he repeats yesterday's apparently vital theme of "Christianity", which as used, seems intended to draw invidious comparison to memories of the Godless Soviet Beast.

(A millennium of the Russian Orthodox Church does not count?)

And he ends with the emotional statement "we are all Georgians"...a repeat of the sort of "support" offered by President Bush which seems to have fed President Saakashvili's sense that he could use military force against Russian "peacekeepers", and not provoke a militant response.

In between, he draws a picture of a totally unprovoked Russian attack on a peacefully supine Georgia which is misleading, at best. Yes, of course Moscow was looking for an excuse to "teach Georgia a lesson", but in McCain World, no Georgian attack preceded Russia's retaliation, the only motive here is to crush freedom and democracy.

So in McCain World, it's all explained by Russia as Evil...if there is no reason or justification for Russian action, why bother to understand it? Shades of Bush/Rummy/Cheney Iraq 2003, and like their claims, and have we not seen the costs of this mindset?

NONE of this is to say the Saddams and Putins are good guys, or doing good things, or that they should be indulged and encouraged without concern or action...so please spare us the indignant emails on those points.

The question here is what to do to make things better, not worse.

Power is brutal, mean, unfair and deadly real...hard enough to grasp and act upon at the best of times.

Here's McCain World:

York, PA
August 12, 2008

John McCain: "As you know, over the past several days, we have seen that international aggression is, tragically, not a thing of the past. We thought we'd put a lot of that behind us at the end of the twentieth-century. But now we find it's rearing its ugly head in the twenty-first. The small nation of Georgia has been subject to Russian attacks that threaten its very existence.

"Some Americans, when they read this news, may wonder where Georgia is or why we should care about the conflict between Georgians and the Russian army. It's after all a small, remote and obscure place. But history is often made in remote, obscure places. And it's being made in Georgia today.

"Georgia itself, my friends, has a long and remarkable history. It was a fourth-century convert to Christianity, one of the first nations on Earth to convert to Christianity -- if you go to Georgia, as I have several times, you'll see churches that go back to the fourth- and fifth-century -- and it's been a part of the grand sweep that comprises Western civilization. But because of their location, their history hasn't been easy. Through the centuries, they have seen invasions and attacks from Mongols, Russians, Turks and Persians. And through it all, they maintain their language, their cultural identity, and their national pride. And as you know, they were part of the Soviet Union and were able to achieve their independence when the Soviet Union disintegrated. And they're facing terrible trials today, but they'll get through this, too.

"And, my friends, and I'll talk about this more in a minute -- but they're at a strategic crossroads. There's a pipeline, an oil pipeline, Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan, which brings oil from the Caspian to points west and traverses Georgia -- that's the very pipeline that the Russians tried to bomb. And I don't have to tell you about the price of oil and disruption of oil supplies.

"In this country -- it's that little country, a country whose territorial integrity, independence and sovereignty NATO countries reaffirmed at their summit in April -- terrible violence has occurred. Now let me just remind you exactly what has taken place here.

"On Friday, Russian tanks and troops moved through the Roki Tunnel, across an internationally-recognized border, and into the Georgian province of South Ossetia. Two years ago, I traveled to South Ossetia, my friends, and we went through this barricade, and as soon as we got into this place, which the Russians are maintaining hundreds and now thousands of troops, there's this huge billboard and it said, 'Vladimir Putin, Our President.' Have no doubt about Russian ambitions in this area.

"The Russian government stated it was acting only to protect Ossetians, and yet, on Saturday, its bombing campaign encompassed the whole of Georgia. Hundreds of innocent civilians have been wounded and killed -- possibly thousands. Military bases, apartment buildings, and other infrastructure all came under Russian fire. And the Russian Black Sea Fleet began concentrating off of the Georgian coast.

"Before the weekend ended, Russian troops drove the Georgians out of South Ossetia and stepped up their offensive in the region of Abkhazia -- Abkhazia is another area that the Russians have controlled in violation of Georgian territorial integrity. And Georgia asked for a ceasefire, and Russia responded by bombing the Tbilisi Airport.

"Yesterday, Russian troops advanced on one city after another. Gori, Senaki, Poti, and other cities were attacked. In 2006, I visited Senaki and reviewed the Georgian troops who had served with honor beside American soldiers in Iraq -- 2,000 of them served beside American soldiers in Iraq, and we're proud of that.

"President Medvedev stated that he has halted the offensive, but reports indicate that Russian military forces have continued attacks in some areas and the situation remains fluid and dangerous. Foreign Minister Flavor announced that Russia seeks regime change in Georgia, and that it's democratically-elected president 'better go.'

"In the face of this threat, the leaders of Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Ukraine and Latvia -- you know there's a common thread there amongst them, they all suffered under Soviet domination -- they've all announced that they'll travel to the region, and the French president is in Moscow in an attempt to help resolve the crisis. They understand that it's a responsibility of the leading nations of the world to ensure that history continues to record reform and make progress toward respecting the values and security of all free people.

"This is the situation in Georgia as we meet here this morning. The impact of Russian actions goes beyond their threat to a democratic Georgia. Russia has used violence against Georgia to send a signal to any country that chooses to associate with the West and aspire to our shared political and economic values.

"My friends, we learned at great cost the price of allowing aggression against free nations to go unchecked. With our allies, we must stand in united purpose to persuade the Russian government to withdraw its troops from Georgia. There must be an independent, international peacekeeping force in the separatist regions. And we should ensure that humanitarian aid can be airlifted to Georgia's capital, and stand ready to help our Georgian partners put their country back together. And we must make clear to Russia's leaders that the benefits they enjoy from being part of the civilized world require their respect for the values, stability, and piece of that world.

"My friends, today the killing goes on and aggression goes on. Yet, I know from speaking this morning to the President of Georgia, Misha Saakashvili, who I've known for many years, that he knows that the thoughts and the prayers and support of the American people are with that brave little nation as they struggle today for their freedom and independence. And he wanted me to say thank you to you, to give you his heartfelt thanks for the support of the American people for this tiny little democracy far away from the United States of America. And I told him that I know I speak for every American when I say to him, today, we are all Georgians."

-0-

"PERSPECTIVE"...the Nixon Center's Demetri Simes, as a Soviet Jew driven from his country, is not naive on any aspect of the Georgia situation. His description of reality needs to be studied in Camp McCain and Obama Land equally:

"It is remarkable, but probably inevitable, that so many in Washington have reacted with surprise and outrage to Russia's response to President Mikheil Saakashvili's attempt to reestablish Georgian control over South Ossetia by force.

Some of the angriest statements come from those inside and outside the Bush administration who contributed, I assume unwittingly, to making this crisis happen. And like post-WMD justifications for the invasion of Iraq, the people demanding the toughest action against Russia are focused on Russia's lack of democracy and heavy-handed conduct, particularly in its own neighborhood, and away from how the confrontation actually unfolded. Likewise, just as in the case of Saddam Hussein, these same people accuse anyone who points out that things are not exactly black and white, and that the U.S. government may have its own share of responsibility for the crisis, of siding with aggressive tyrants - in this case, in the Kremlin.

Yet many both outside and even inside the Bush administration predicted that the U.S. decision to champion Kosovo independence without Serbian consent would lead Moscow to become more assertive in establishing its presence in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

The Kremlin made abundantly clear that it would view Kosovo's independence without Serbian consent and a U.N. Security Council mandate as a precedent for the two Georgian de facto independent enclaves. Furthermore, while President Saakashvili was making obvious his ambition to reconquer Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Moscow was both publicly and privately warning that Georgia's use of force to reestablish control of the two regions would meet a tough Russian reaction, including, if needed, air strikes against Georgia proper.

So it would be interesting to know what President Saakashvili was thinking when, on Thursday night, after days of relatively low-level shelling around the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali (which both South Ossetians and Georgians blamed on each other), and literally hours after he announced on state-controlled TV the cessation of hostilities, he ordered a full-scale assault on Tskhinvali. And mind you, the assault could only succeed if the Georgian units went right through the battalion of Russian troops serving as international peacekeepers according to agreements signed by Tbilisi itself in the 1990s.

Under the circumstances, the Russian forces had three choices: to surrender, to run away, or to fight. And fight they did - particularly because many of the Russian soldiers were in fact South Ossetians with families and friends in Tskhinvali under Georgian air, tank, and artillery attacks. Saakashvili was reckless to count on proceeding with a blitzkrieg in South Ossetia without a Russian counterattack.

Now the Bush administration and outside commentators are appalled by Russia's disproportionate response. But proportionality is in the eye of the beholder. In July 2006, after Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers and killed three others--smaller losses than those inflicted on the Russian troops in Tskhinvali--the Israelis launched a massive bombardment of Lebanon, including Beirut, killing more than a thousand Lebanese, many of them civilians.

When some in the U.N. Security Council sought to condemn Israel's "disproportionate response," the United States acted as Israel's staunchest defender and prevented any resolution critical of Israel.

Notwithstanding this background, the United States has no good choices in dealing with the crisis. There is no realistic way to remove Russian forces from Abkhazia and South Ossetia short of a major war with Russia, which no responsible American political leader would advocate at this point. But whatever Saakashvili's responsibility is for the confrontation, America cannot allow an ally to be soundly defeated or especially overthrown by an insurgent Russia.

Accordingly, the first priority for the United States should be to make abundantly clear to Moscow that any attempt at forceful regime change in Georgia will have severe consequences for the U.S.-Russian relationship and that the United States would help Georgia to resist on the ground.

Though the U.S. will not send troops--and Moscow knows it--we can provide significant military assistance to Tbilisi and greatly complicate a Russian military advance. Bringing Georgian troops back to their country from Iraq is one step on this path.

While the Georgian army is no match for the much larger Russian forces, it is potent after years of double-digit budget increases and American equipment and training. Also, unlike in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, where most of the population is friendly to the Russians, any Russian attempts to occupy Georgia would likely encounter massive popular resistance.

Moscow disavows any plan to conquer Georgia, and the Bush administration should hold them to their word, both through diplomacy to the extent possible, and a display of resolve if necessary. When this has been accomplished, however, we should look for ways to work with Russia in the name of essential American interests. We should also disregard the hysterical diatribes of Saakashvili's American champions, who protest too much--perhaps because their irresponsible encouragement of the Georgian president was a contributing factor on the road to the war.

Enough said at this point.