Georgia: a return to superpower misbehaviour

Great powers do not always have territorial empires but at least they always do have 'spheres of influence', and Georgia - population four million - can never escape being in Russia's. So it was crazily unrealistic of the US to encourage Georgia to believe it could become part of Nato - almost as crazy as Mr Khrushchev's belief that Cuba could become part of the Soviet bloc.

For a time, of course - after the break-up the Soviet Union - the Russian bear had no choice but to accept any kind of humiliation. But for the West to have supposed that such impotence was permanent demonstrated a disrespect for the realities of power, and a disregard for the lessons of history, the like of which has not been seen since another American president, Woodrow Wilson's disastrous miscalculation about defeated Germany's powers of recovery after the First World War.

In any case, now we

know. Unless the West, led by the United States, wants to launch a new Cold War, it must urgently renegotiate a new 'Findlandized' sphere of Russian influence; much smaller than the satellite one pertaining during the Cold War, but no less clearly understood.

The idea that Russia's incursion into Georgia makes her an international pariah - comparable to Nazi Germany - is just ludicrous. The US, for its part, would have acted no less imperiously, as indeed it did in Chile, in living memory. What we are witnessing is not so much Russia breaking the rules as Russia returning to normal great power misbehaviour; which China will soon do too.

Unlike the Cold War, this is not an ideological struggle between good and evil, but rather a classical clash of national interests which will require a realpolitik solution. So why not bring back Henry Kissinger