I'm honestly wondering why we even pursued this strategy we started doing at all - perhaps we should have simply let the Europeans struggle to handle it, and focused on humanitarian issues elsewhere where it could have mattered more (like Rwanda in 1994).

Do torture and gulags jibe with your vision of the American Way? Cause I kind of equate them with Fascism and Communism. Or do you feel that we don't actually have to practice our principals, just wear flag pins?

I don't think American is evil, but we are a nation of human beings, creatures who are quite capable of doing evil from time to time. This has been one of those times. All that is required for the triumph of evil is for good men to stand by and do nothing...

Surely you jest. Anyone with even a knowledge of the 20th Century obtained from comic books can surely answer that question.

You don't have an interest in your safe, only the contents of your safe. If for whatever reason you felt that your safe was either ineffective, or unnecessary, you wouldn't so much care about its integrity.

DC Loser, you're right: The Franco-Prussian War was 1870-1871, I misremembered.

To start with, you bring moral clarity and consistency

I think McCain abandoned any claim to those things when he backed Bush's torture policies... Actually, our entire country has pretty much abandoned any moral high ground in the last 8 years.

France, having been overrun by the Germans in 1884

You sure about that??? I think it was 1870.

What real incentive do France and Germany have for defending South Ossetia?

Surely you jest. Anyone with even a knowledge of the 20th Century obtained from comic books can surely answer that question.

One-third of Germany, including its once and present capital, Berlin, was effectively a province of the Soviet Union only two decades ago, and it had been in that condition for over four decades.

France, having been overrun by the Germans in 1884 and then nearly again in 1914-1918, was overrun by and a client state of the Nazis for half a decade in the middle of the century.

The Russian concept of the "near-abroad" includes client states that they control entirely, adjacent to which are states that they merely terrorize. The fundamental founding purpose of NATO was to push back against that looming presence, to create a deterrent sufficient to keep the Bear and its tanks on their side of the borders.

As recently as the early 1990s, the relevant borders within which the Bear would hereafter be kept were believed to include Georgia's. The European NATO allies backed off from formalizing that through treaty, which the Bear interpreted as them bathing Georgia with A-1 Steak Sauce.

Anthony wrote,

I don't think they feel humiliated, so much as relieved that Georgia didn't get in in the first place. Because if Georgia had got in, it would have been even more likely to go on the offensive and then if the Russians had called our bluff, we'd have been stuffed up the backside.

Yes, precisely, but that's not inconsistent at all with what I said, which was that they ought to have (but lack) the good sense to be humiliated. They should simply go ahead and move the capital of the EU to Vichy.

anjin-san wrote,

And what exactly is McCain's plan for dealing with the situation? Run commericals?

The same as Harry Truman's and Ronald Reagan's. To start with, you bring moral clarity and consistency to your statements about the situation, and you damn sure don't condemn the invaded along with the invaders, which was Obama's first response.

But while that's a prerequisite, it's not sufficient. Diplomacy is never about just words, or even mostly about words, but about interests. You make it in Western Europe's interests to get on board. Again, the fundamental premise of NATO has always been that America would stay involved in preventing war in Europe if, but only if, the Europeans stepped up to their own responsibilities in a genuine partnership. We're not going to make war on France or Germany to make them make war on Russia or, more realistically, to make them station significant trip-wire forces in, say, the Ukraine. Ultimately, our only way to induce their cooperation is to threaten, credibly, to take our football and go home across the Atlantic. In the mid-1980s, that threat was sufficient, ultimately, to persuade reluctant and cowed European states to go along with Reagan in countering Soviet intermediate range ballistic missiles, which was one of the final strategic showdowns of the Cold War.

Talk-talk and "building strong relationships" and diplomacy didn't get McCain out of the Hanoi Hilton. American B-52s and the mining of Haiphong harbor did, or more precisely, they made the North Vietnamese realize it was in their interest to take the deal then being dangled by Nixon. They weren't counting on the particular Watergate-induced windfall that would result in a gutless, spineless Democratic Congress as early as 1974 that would break our support commitments to South Vietnam so quickly, but they certainly knew how to exploit that accident of history, just as the Russians are now exploiting the Western Europeans' failure to grant Georgia full NATO membership.

Obama makes Neville Chamberlin look positively prescient.

If I had my way the U. S. would be doing considerably less. Given the lack of action on the part of the Europeans, would that be prudent? That's not a rhetorical question, it's a genuine one.

You must either think that the Europeans want (or should want) the same things as the U.S., or you don't care what they want. Because that sounds an awful lot like you want them to do what the we want done, so that we doesn't have to do it ourselves.

NATO and the UN are useful, but we can't forget that the only people that want us to be happy with foreign events is us. And even with the UN and NATO, it's always going to be that way. What real incentive do France and Germany have for defending South Ossetia?

I think your position, framed in that way, is a perfectly consistent one. The only thing is that, as we stand, that isn't how things have turned out.

I think if we're looking at the big picture, neither side is particularly blameless. On the one hand, the EU doesn't shoulder its share of the burden. On the other, it's not very sustainable for the USA to go steaming ahead on a string of issues against the wishes of its European partners and then when it goes wrong, complain that the Europeans aren't prepared to go to the wall over something that they never wanted to buy into in the first place.

Actually, on a string of issues - Bosnia, Afghanistan, etc. - I'm far more sympathetic to the US position vs the European one. Far more sympathetic. On this particular one, not quite so much.