Here’s something that must be confusing to officials in Tblisi. Georgia has been trying to get into NATO for some time now, thinking that a small country next to Russia could really use the kind of security guarantees that NATO membership provides. At the Bucharest Summit earlier this year, NATO decided not to offer Georgia a Membership Action Plan that would have fast-tracked Georgian NATO membership. But that was primarily because of French and German opposition, the United States favored fast-tracking Georgian NATO membership.

So if I’m in the Georgian government and I see that by far the largest and most powerful NATO country wants us to be a member — wants to extend an Article V security guarantee to us even though they are well aware that this will infuriate Russia and that we have ongoing disputes with Russia over Abkhazia and South Ossetia — then maybe I reason that if our ongoing disputes with Russia over Abkhazia or South Ossetia heat up, that the U.S. will be willing to intervene. After all, if the U.S. isn’t willing to intervene on our behalf in case of a heated up conflict with Russia, then why is the U.S. eager to support our bid for NATO membership?

Now of course it turns out that the U.S. — quite properly — has no particular desire to intervene on Georgia’s behalf in their quest to regain control over their breakaway provinces. But given that we don’t want to back Georgia in these situations, then why were we so eager to support Georgia’s bid for NATO membership? John McCain’s top campaign officials on national security issues, Randy Scheunemann, actually worked as a lobbyist for the Georgian government so that’s his excuse for not thinking this through more thoroughly. But how about everyone else?

At the beginning of the US-China game, it looked like the Chinese might beat us, prompting any number of posts about the declining power of the world’s erstwhile hegemonic power. But in the end we beat them badly, thus sparing us that.

One of the weirdest things about political punditry is that “the status quo should remain the same!” or “I’m taking the side of the powerful and wealthy interests who currently control American public policy!” can be packaged as bold and contrarian. Thus, Terry Box’s Washington Post column about how he likes to drive:

I know that my days as an unrepentant gearhead may be numbered. Sky-high gas prices, global warming, urban sprawl, maybe even the “oil war” in Iraq, are all being piled on cars. Yet despite the growing drumbeat against them, the allegations that they’re melting glaciers and maiming thousands, the claim that we’re choking on them, the fear that they’re our worst national addiction, I love them dearly.

They are my “carma.” And I refuse to go on the national guilt trip about them.

And, look, fine. If Terry Box wants to drive a gas-guzzling car, he should be free to do so. But what he shouldn’t be free to do is to expect large explicit and implicit subsidies. If we prices carbon emissions correctly, balanced funding between highways and transit, and regulated land use sensibly I bet people would drive a bunch less than they currently do. But I also bet people would still drive a lot. People drive much more on average in 2008 than they did in 1978, but it’s hardly as if the United States was a car-free zone thirty years ago. Nor should it become one! But while I’ve never actually heard anyone on the urbanist or green side of the debate argue that we should become a country without cars (as opposed to a country with somewhat fewer, somewhat more rarely used cars) I feel like every week I read a column about how Americans will never abandon their cars.

I was glad to be not blogging when the John Edwards story broke, but sorry not to have had the chance to comment on the outbreak of war between Russia and Georgia. To me, the beginning of wisdom here is with Porfirio Diaz‘s lament — “poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States of America.” Diaz’s insight is perfectly general: A small and poor country located close to one great power and far away from other great powers is in a bad situation (of course ask Poland about being located between two great powers …) and that’s the situation Georgia is in. Perhaps a closer analogy in the present-day context would be to Cuba, like Georgia a former favorite vacation destination for the great power’s elite, a country we’ve been horribly mistreating for decades for no real reason. And when you think about Cuba, you see that the vast majority of the world’s countries basically support the Cuban position vis-à-vis the American one. And yet absolutely none of them are prepared to do anything about it.

In a broader sense Steve Clemons raises the good point that the government of Russia made it pretty clear that if the United States recognized Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia over Russian objections that Russia would retaliate by stepping up support for separatists in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. This doesn’t seem to have given any of Georgia’s outspoken friends in the United States any pause. Indeed, strong pro-Georgian views in the U.S. media and foreign policy community correlate heavily with strong pro-Kosovo views. This highlights the fact that the underlying issue here is simply a disposition to take a dim view of Moscow and to favor aggressive policies to roll back Russian influence rather than some kind of deep and sincerely felt desire to help Georgia.

Except Georgia’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili, perhaps seems to have been confused by the fact that he gets great press in the U.S. and Vladimir Putin gets terrible press. Thus, he made the puzzling decision last week to escalate the “frozen conflict” by launching an attack aimed at retaking South Ossetia. Russia, predictably, is now retaliating with results that look set to be disastrous for Georgia. I thought James Traub’s backgrounder on the Georgia-Russia conflict had a few problems, but this was a great summary of the basic irrealism of the Georgian outlook on the problem:

When I asked Temuri Yacobashvili, a cultivated man who is one of the country’s leading art patrons, why Georgia couldn’t focus on the threat from Russia and let the Abkhaz have their de facto state, he said, “These are not two different things, because it’s not amputating hand, it’s amputating head, or heart. No Georgian president could survive if he gave up on Abkhazia.” And, he added, “if the international community by its inaction will not leave any other option for Georgia, then we have to make decision.”

If the West, that is, won’t induce Russia to stop using the border region as a pawn, Georgia will be left with no choice save war. And how will the West do that? Mr. Saakashvili suggests sanctions, like travel bans, on individual Russian leaders. When I posed the same question to Giga Bokeria, another confidante who is deputy minister for foreign affairs, he said, “If Russia ceases to be an empire.” These are not serious answers.

By the same token, Washington Post columns and editorials fulminating against Russia’s counterattack are not serious. I think that if Russia were to recognize its enlightened self-interest it would realize that it should abandon its imperial posture in the “near abroad.” But if Russian officials don’t see things that way, there’s nothing we can really do to make them see it that way.

Meanwhile, Americans would do well to abandon some of the moralism that infuses commentary on this. Fundamentally, Russia is supporting the claims of Ossetians and Abkhazians for reasons of cynical power politics. But the American perspective on this is also mostly driven by reasons of cynical power politics. And there’s nothing really wrong with that. Georgia wants to cultivate American friendship so it makes sense to reciprocate. In the current moment of crisis, we should try to back our ally up. But we should also remember that in the scheme of things, Georgian territorial integrity is not the most important item on the US-Russian docket — getting Russia to do what we want vis-à-vis the Iranian nuclear program is way more important than getting Russia to do what we want vis-à-vis Georgia. Is that fair to the Georgians? Of course not. But they have the misfortune of being far from God and close to Russia.