Vladimir Putin is not a nice man, nor is the KGB Russia's answer to the Rotary Club. Consequently, Russian tradition of democracy
is very thin, and fails to conceal thuggery, rigged votes, oligarchic mafias, corruption, and the corpses of journalists.
Russia's identity meanwhile is composed of a mixture of nationalism and paranoia. Its rulers think that their country exists under permanent threat of encirclement by its enemies. Here is the tricky part: nothing suggests that they are mistaken.
Of course that's not the story we've heard. When the US bribes Poland to house rockets pointed at the Russians, it's just a "shield". When Georgia launches smaller rockets at a South Ossetian town, we hear that a freedom-loving but "provoked" Georgian leader has stepped into a Russian trap.
It may be that Georgia's President Saakashvili committed just such an act of folly. North Ossetia, ethnic and cultural twin to its neighbour in the south, is part of the Russian Federation. Putin and a clear majority of Russians and Ossetians meanwhile have difficulty understanding the concept of Georgian independence.
When Saakashvili offered the gift of a direct military challenge by shelling Tskhinvali, how was Russia supposed to react?
The US, with military advisers on site in Georgia equipping and training its army, claims that they tried and failed to dissuade Saakashvili from launching a war. Does America have so little influence over Georgia? Or did Saakashvili get the wrong idea about the likely US support and US responses? Nothing else makes any sense.
Much of the West's media have accepted the script as written. The proportionate response to a five-day war in a tiny region of the Caucasus is the placing of missiles in Poland.
Let's say that Saakashvili did indeed make an error. It's still either/or. Either Saakashvili was misled, or he is dumb. Does that qualify him to be able to call the nuclear arsenals of Nato should he have another rush of blood to the head?
David Miliband, our Foreign Secretary, thinks it does. He argues that, because Georgia took a kicking from the Russians, its memebership of Nato should be nodded through forthwith. This was precisely what the US sought at a Nato meeting in Bucharest in the spring, long before anyone had heard of
South Ossetia.
You can see how that one would run in State Department strategic gaming. So the Russians get a little war, they would say, and the chance to flaunt their cojones. If this plays, we get to overcome the objections of Germans, French and Italians and plant another Nato flag in Russia's back yard. This is known as a price worth paying.
Does a leader with Saakashvili's credentials really become entitled to have another crack at the Russians with full nato backing? Miliband says we should.
As an economically embattled US flails after former glories, it fashions Nato into a blunt instrument. Nato stands currently revealed as an expeditionary force on behalf of Washington's interests. That is not a useful development for Nato, Europe, America or the world.
Georgia should be proof enough. We know that Putin's Russia is not to be trusted. But we also know a simple fact: in South Ossetia, Saakashvili started the shooting. Had the United Nations been allowed to function we might have been talking about faults on both sides. Instead, we are offered a new
Cold War as though no other alternative is possible.
The disastrous challenge and counter-challenge with Russia meanwhile has a very creaky and disreputable sort of plot line. Nato, amid it all, has become America's proxy.
It was always that, in most senses. You suspect, however, that an expiring Bush administration has found its gimmick, finally. How to draw the sceptical and under-achieving Europeans back in to the great global cause without deferring to their doubts and finer feelings?
Forget threats, insults, or expressions of undying friendship: binding treaties will do. Treaties, that is, and a couple of decent scripts. Wag the dog. Do it all with a crisis in a place with a name that might just have been invented. Do it with an unending war on the authors of permanent, inchoate, indefinable alien threat.
Putin, Saakashvili, and some Afghan warlords will be happy to oblige. David Miliband will not even hesitate. And the matinee crowds will be none the wiser.