There are laws of political inertia. Below is a quote from Buchanan’s 1992 speech to the republican convention.

“Under the Reagan Doctrine, one by one, the communist dominos began to fall. First, Grenada was liberated, by US troops. Then, the Red Army was run out of Afghanistan, by US weapons. In Nicaragua, the Marxist regime was forced to hold free elections–by Ronald Reagan’s contra army–and the communists were thrown out of power.

Have they forgotten? It was under our party that the Berlin Wall came down, and Europe was reunited. It was under our party that the Soviet Empire collapsed, and the captive nations broke free.

It is said that each president will be recalled by posterity–with but a single sentence. George Washington was the father of our country. Abraham Lincoln preserved the Union. And Ronald Reagan won the Cold War. And it is time my old colleagues, the columnists and commentators, looking down on us tonight from their anchor booths and sky boxes, gave Ronald Reagan the credit he deserves–for leading America to victory in the Cold War.”
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The current business in Ossetia is not about the cold war.

But rather something akin to the Suez crises of 1956 in the sense that England and France (but not israel)were declining powers looking to reassert their power over sections of their old empires and were overruled by the USA.

That intervention by the USA in the Suez Crises made decades long enemies of the USA of conservatives in both the French and English establishments. Not just that–imho but loss of confidence accelerated the decline of France and England after WWII.

For those two reasons I have wondered about the wisdom of that USA intervention in the Suez crises.

I wonder if this Ossetia biz will not do the same to the Russia–tie up the conservatives in Russia and accelerate that country’s decline.