Even worse, it is based on the false premise of equality between an aggressive, lawless régime, and a Western-aligned democracy. Russia has shown that it can support separatism, and then invade one of its neighbours and get away with it.

All of the former Soviet republics that have moved towards the West will have taken notice of this, and of the failure of Georgia and the West to offer any effective resistance.

Indeed, the most discouraging feature of the Russian war on Georgia is the inability of the West to devise any solid means of putting pressure on Russia. The firm-minded Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, writing under the headline "How to Stop Putin", advanced only symbolic proposals, including a boycott of the 2014 Winter Olympics at Sochi. That may be a necessary measure of moral hygiene, but it will do nothing to stop Putin now.

The British response, while admirably stout in tone, has been similarly weak in practice. Foreign Secretary David Miliband has called for a "common European energy policy" to reduce Russia's power as an energy supplier. But energy markets are global: as long as Europe is an energy importer, it is vulnerable. Miliband's proposal is simply another effort to use a crisis to transfer more power to the EU by asserting that integration is the only viable response.

Europe will not be able to escape by integrating into isolation. That did not work during the Cold War, and it will not work now. Then, Russia, as a military superpower with a Third World economy and political system, was often described as "Upper Volta with missiles". With the vital exception of its petroleum, and after the democratic interlude of the 1990s, that is true again today: Russia has more in common with the dictatorial régimes of Africa than it does with its neighbours. And, because of Russia's seat on the Security Council, it can block any response by the UN's system of collective security.

But it is through collective security that the West must respond. And the means are at hand: Nato. The Russian assault is not about the disputed provinces, or the government of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili: it is an attack on the sovereignty of Georgia, and on Georgia's right to govern itself.

Titles matter. It is revealing that the Russian Foreign Ministry never calls President Saakashvili by his rightful title, while awarding honorifics to the so-called Presidents of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

When Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Grigory Karasin stated in an interview on Thursday that President Saakashvili had "undermined the viability of Georgia as a state", he confirmed that Russia is challenging Georgia's very existence. And that is a threat not just to Georgia, but also to the ability of Nato to select its members without interference from third powers. This is a collective threat. It deserves a collective response.

The West must not be distracted by the fatuous assertion that there are faults on both sides. The war is the result of Russian-inspired ethnic cleansing in the 1990s – which was acknowledged by the UN
in May – of Russian-backed separatism since then; and of Russian-instigated attacks on Georgia. No EU member would tolerate any of this if the lives of their own citizens were at risk, and Russia's aggression is no more tolerable because it is happening in the Caucasus.

Throughout the 1990s, Nato sought a mission. Now it has two. There is the war on terror, to which many Nato members are too weakly dedicated. And there is the cause of supporting democracy in countries where it is threatened by foreign forces, especially when those countries are close to Europe, have worked in tandem with Nato forces, and publicly proclaim their desire to align with the West.

That mission will have many facets. It must include re-armament in Europe, and a European re-commitment to close co-operation with the
US and Britain, who have been throughout Georgia's firmest supporters.

As in the early Cold War, what Russia wants is not a major
war, but the fruits of a major war without having to fight one. The West must work through diplomacy, but diplomacy cannot succeed unless it is backed by strength, and as the Western responses reveal, right now that is what it lacks.

The West must also emphasise closer ties with the nations
under threat, including all the states of Central Asia, the Caucasus, and, especially, Ukraine, which is for Russia the great prize.

The inclusion must begin with Georgia: it must be a cardinal principle of Western diplomacy that no negotiations with Russia will proceed without the presence of an authorised representative of Georgia. If Russia will not thereby acknowledge Georgia's sovereignty, there is nothing to discuss.

France's bilateral negotiation of a ceasefire sets the worst possible precedent, because it establishes the claim that Russia is entitled to discuss Georgian affairs with a third party, and need not deal
directly with Georgia itself. That is precisely the kind of disrespect for the principles of sovereign self-government of which Russia is so fond, and which demonstrates the true stakes in this crisis.

Nor does the fact that Russia and Georgia are neighbours give Russia any special right to trample upon these principles.

Geography is Georgia's curse, but that cannot lead the West to abandon it. If it does, it is betraying its own cause.


Ted Bromund is director of International Security Studies at Yale University. The views expressed are his own.