Some shrewd analysis of the Georgia crisis from Greg Djerejian.
I would really recommend Greg’s post to everyone. This whole crisis, both in what has aptly been called the feckless policy-making that went into it and the aftermath, puts McCain’s shaky grasp of foreign policy in really sharp relief.
What pretty much everyone who’s paying attention can see is that the US casually made a bunch of promises and representations to the Georgians which we were obviously neither prepared to or interested in backing up. As Fred Kaplan noted in his piece in Slate yesterday, what’s both tragic and almost comical is that a lot of Georgians actually expected that we’d come to their defense militarily if got themselves into a real shooting war with the Russians. They’ve clearly paid a steep price for that cheap talk. Meanwhile, McCain’s response is to up the ante with more bluster and nonsense, apparently not getting what happened in the first place.
