You guys are are some crazy drugs if you think US aggressiveness will be anything but diplomatic in nature. Further, there’s no way in hell that Georgia, or any nation on Russia’s border, gets into NATO now. For those of you who doubt this, I’d like to refer you to the history of mobilization and hair-trigger alliances. Yes, surrounding Russia with NATO tripwires would make the Bear deliberate more before doing this kind of thing. However, if you think that’s a net benefit, when these tripwires are tied to the world’s largest powder keg, you need to stay off the sauce. If Georgia were, right now, a NATO ally, we’d be looking at a catastrophic global war, or, if we chose rationally, an immediate and irreversible loss of power and credibility.

And, since I was the first person in the English language to predict Russia’s strategic objective as “regime change” (here, Trouble in the Caucasus, Aug 9, 2008 – 8:43 am), let me double down by saying Russia has nothing to gain by stopping before Saakashvili’s government is dissolved. Let me repeat: Russia has Nothing To Gain by stopping before Saakashvili’s government is dissolved.

As I said in that thread, we’ve seen this play before, back when it was called “America Goes To Baghdad.”